One of the best known dystopia’s is George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984. Like Animal Farm, it reflects Stalinist Russian, but the themes it looks at remain very relevant to us today. Those are totalitarianism, mass surveillance, using truth and media for manipulation and control, and through all of this, the repression of people and their behavior. For fun, we will explore these in quotes.
Surveillance
“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”
“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”
Control
“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
Totalitarianism
The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face.”
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
Truth
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
The cost to this system in which Big Brother was everywhere and defined every element of life — our humanity, our ability to connect and relate. Orwell’s talent was in his ability to make the connection between the systems in which we live and its impact on how we behave toward each other, and our ability to bond to others. That isolation marks all dystopias, and is the hardest burden to bear in many ways.
Read all the other bloggers participating in the A to Z Challenge.
It has come to exist as a cultural reference beyond a simple work of fiction, and was of course, a bit of an influence on my own dystopian trilogy. Good choice.
https://iainkellywriting.com/2021/04/16/the-state-trilogy-a-z-guide-n/