George Orwell’s 1984 in 2014, Essay Example

In what is perhaps the most well-known dystopian novel in the history of literature, George Orwell paints an incredibly bleak portrait of the future in 1984. In his imagined world, the government has taken total control of every aspect of its citizens’ lives, monitoring their every activity every moment of the day. The citizens of Oceania are required to show total obedience to Big Brother –a figure so familiar that “Big Brother” has become a common term ascribed to any examples of powerful government- and anyone who appears to lack the proper devotion to this leader is accused of “throughcrime.” In order to establish and maintain this control, the government has stripped the people of most personal possessions, forced everyone into whatever occupations best suit the needs of the government, and even chipped away at the language in order to chip away at the possibility of dissent. While it is possible to find numerous parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision and the contemporary world, the author missed one fundamental point: people have not been forced to give up their privacy, their autonomy, or even their capacity for nuanced through; they have, instead, been abdicating these things quite willingly.

To be fair to Orwell, there are notable aspects of life in 1984 that are mirrored in the real world of 2014. In the opening scene of the book, Winston Smith arrives in his flat and is greeted by the sound of the enormous telescreeen that takes up most of one wall. In the novel this telescreen is always on, regardless of whether the viewer wishes it or not. While real televisions can be switched off by viewers, it is impossible to read Orwell’s description of the telescreen without considering the popularity and ubiquity of modern flatscreen TVs. Not only are such televisions found in nearly every home, office, and other private and public spaces, but acquiring the largest and clearest television has become a symbol of status and success. No government is forcing people to mount the telescreen on their wall and allow information to be fed through it constantly; in fact, people pay handsomely for the privilege.

Orwell offers the following description of the telescreen and its use by the government:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. 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 movement scrutinized. 

The revelations about the National Security Agency that came to light in 2013 demonstrate that “the government” –meaning, in effect, all governments- have the capacity to plug in on any individual wire as they see fit. Data about online activity, the contents of private emails, and all manner of other personal information is readily available to the government. What differentiates this information from the information gathered by Big Brother is that in the real world, we have all willingly placed our personal information online. The advent of social media has fostered an environment where people compete with each other to see how much personal information they can make available online, while even that information which many people might wish to be private is accessed just as easily. Big Brother does not have to demand that citizens lay their lives bare; instead, people do so happily.

One of the underlying themes of 1984 is that the control of information allows the government to control its citizens. This is something Orwell got right; if anything, he simply missed the mark in predicting the mechanisms of such control. Perhaps if he had written the novel just a few years later, as the influence of capitalism was taking hold around the globe, he would have predicted that commercialism and consumerism would become the driving force behind the expansive growth of government power in much of the world. Why force people to install telescreens in their homes or subject every aspect of their lives to public scrutiny when you can make them compete for, and pay for, the privilege to do so? As prescient as Orwell was about some aspects of the future, even he could not have predicted the ways that technology would evolve over the remainder of the 20^th century and beyond, not of how the desire to share in the riches of the latest technological marvel would save governments the trouble of eradicating the notion of privacy.

In terms of human nature and psychology, however, Orwell is entirely on target. In 1984 he describes in excruciating detail how the government manipulates the emotions of its citizens to channel their anger towards a perceived enemy (and thus way from the government). In the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003 the American people were practically bombarded with images of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The message was constantly reinforced that Hussein was an enemy of the United States, that he possessed weaponry that could devastate the country, and that he posed an imminent threat. History has proven that most, if not all of these claims were specious, and there are many people who question the decision to go to war in Iraq. The campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein as America’s preeminent existential threat may not have exactly been the “two minutes hate,” but on a psychological level the processes and the outcome are the same.

What Orwell got wrong –or, to be fairer, what he could not have predicted- is the ascension of corporations to the global nexus of power.  Privacy is now another commodity to be bought and sold, and billions of people are clamoring to profit from it in any way they can. This is, however, not e refutation of Orwell’s views on the danger of totalitarian power; he may have missed some of the details, but his core premise has been borne out in many ways. Orwell presumed that privacy, and the power that can be derived from it, would have to be wrested away from the people. As it turns out, the people have willingly, even eagerly, handed it over to anyone and everyone who wants it. What Orwell got right is that with the power to control private and public information comes the power to control the people. The lessons of 1984 are alive and well in 2014.