I have read the George Orwell book called 1984 recently. It is really ahead of it time and it examines very well where the humanity is inevitably headed. I strongly recommend you to read it in order to understand the reality of today's world. In this post, i will write my own deductions from this book and my own thoughts on how it reflects our world from my perspective. There are spoilers towards the end of the post.
There is a governing system in the book. This system is like a mixture of monarchy and autocracy. There is a big brother on top of the system who is not exactly known whether is real or not. But the whole system is managed by the people who obey the big brother like they are worshipping him. This structure is called the inner party. There are absurd ministries like ministry of truth or ministry of love in this party. The agenda of the system is to manage the people who don't question anything and don't have any humane feelings other than the system allows. Naturally there appears some rebellion and the book explains the system first and then the story of this rebellion.
Some of the events and descriptions in the book caught my attention because of their relation to reality and i noted them. First i want to explain these.
At some point in the book, it tells us that the inner party is always on alert. Meaning, the system wants to know instantly if someone who works for the government starts drifting away from the system. It doesn't wait for an act or a proof. It invents a crime called "thought crime" and keeps people under constant observation. In order to impose it, it constantly giving the "big brother is watching" message and people are observed through screens in their homes and workspaces. They are suspected by a simple look or an act of people. Now this is called fear. Since these types of systems are hanging on a thread, they have to be utmost paranoid and oppressive. And they have a lot of reasons to be afraid. Sounds familiar?
The inner party is putting together some rage sessions towards the rebellious people to oppose the system. And they are naturally called anarchists. This is probably the selected motive since rage is the most easily provoked emotion. It is easy to motivate people to hate something or someone rather than love it. Also, rage can blind a person and leave no room for sanity in the mind. We call this polarization these days i think. This way, people would not think of committing thought crime and keep on worshipping the big brother.
The system in the book is expecting a constant monotony and compliance devoid of will. This i believe is close to truth. The system is even assimilating the overly attached party followers. Because it is afraid that these people might acquire power or influence more than they are allowed to. The only person whose has a safe position in the autocratic systems is usually is the one on the top.
The system is basically forbids you to be a human. Since you can't control thoughts, they are trying to suppress the actions and fabricate new thoughts. Because in the end, a human being is almost certainly would question something. Even if you are raised to worship the big brother from childhood, there would be something to strike your mind somewhere. Of course even that happens, you may chose to deny what you see and believe what you know. But you can never run away from the questions coming to your mind.
Actually, even if you want to broaden your horizons, it is prevented. How? They forbid you to learn foreign languages. Thus you are left with no chance to get to know what happens around the world. You can't do anything but accepting what the party tells you.
Actually the book mostly describes North Korea. It seems like allegiance to one person is easier than allegiance to a party. That is why there is a big brother on top of the system and it is constantly imposed that his system is the best and most right. Sometimes i wonder, are there happy people in North Korea with the mindset of blissful ignorance? Because maybe mortgaging your mind and believing what you are presented unquestionably is taking away the difficulty of thoughts and giving one an empty kind of peace. Maybe these people are not only in North Korea...
I think the book is actually explaining the nirvana that the capitalism is trying to achieve. It just doesn't much focus on the economical side. It is rather philosophical. Be it capitalism, imperialism or colonialism, the biggest common ground of these are not getting rich. It is rather pushing the rest to the bottom of the hierarchy of needs and being able to keep them there. Those systems want everything and all control to be under some people's management and the rest shall have nothing. This is the point the world is trying to reach. And these people are about 1% of the humans. I call this 99 to 1 rule.
Capitalism comes with 2 pillars. One of them is responsible to push you to bottom and the other is responsible to keep you there. We need some form of mindlessness to achieve this. Otherwise people would inevitably try to climb up. So you need to establish capitalism in such a way that people shall live like they can climb up but never can. Or they never get the power to climb up. Or they shall have no time or power left to climb up or question or change the system, because of constant fighting. Material capitalism on one hand and intellectual capitalism on the other hand..
When you look at the world, you see imperialist countries constantly igniting wars or acting like ther are wars. Because staying alive is one of the most influential urge for a human to comply with the system. The other one was rage. Thus, on one hand people in underdeveloped countries are pushed towards 99 to 1 rule and on the other hand people in the developed countries are likely to trust the system.
There is a ministry of truth in the book. Its purpose is to revise every bit of wrong data in the past around the country, so that it looks like the party is always right and spot on. In today's world, we don't even need this sort of ministry. Politicians are able to change their opinions from black and white frequently. Without any reasonable explanation, without any shame or any hesitation.. I have a post called The Agenda and i said our agendas are constantly subjected to change with new agendas push on us. This enables politicians to make those U turns. But what terrifies me more is that there are people who are following their 180 degree turns. Because we can find those people, who the party in the book is trying to create, in today's world, even though the internet and information is almost everywhere. This is horrifying.
It seems illogical to constantly observe people with screens everywhere like in the book in this world. But if you ask me, we have our smartphones and laptops for that purpose. I also don't think our online presence is much private these days. I believe there is a hidden intention behind the data science being so much popular in the world suddenly. I always ask how and where our data is being collected and processed. I am sure one day, the AI is going to be used to pin people :)
China is the next closest government to this system in the book, after North Korea. And then some countries with one man governing like Russia, Belarus, Hungary and Turkey is on their way to there. And probably the biggest dream of USA is to have that kind of system. This doesn't mean other developed countries are all democrats and civilized.
I have asked in my blog post, Metaverse, which pill did we take. Are we willing to be satisfied with what we are presented or to question and open new horizons? And in other post, Algorithms, i have mentioned that the algorithms are driving our actions and we are living under their reign. We see in the book, the ministry of truth invents a new language. This way they are able to keep the words that they want people to think and get rid of the others. After reading this, i have questioned if it is necessary to invent a new language. I asked this question to myself: If you want to get rid of a concept in the world, would you first remove the word that describes it, or directly target the concept itself and diminish it and wait for it to be forgotten in time?
It would be rather hard to remove a word from the world i think. This is one surreal part of the book. For example we don't actually think of unbiased neutrality. We are taught it is a system which can be bought with money and managed by personal pleasings. They imposed this over and over on us and now we started to think like them, like it is a normal thing. What did i say, which pill did we take and which algorithms are governing us?
In the later chapters of the book, the events are rising. This part contains spoilers. Our protagonist is caught and the system is forcing him to obey the system. This is also not close to our reality. Because one might question this: Who is benefitted from this system and how? Are the owners living in prosperity? There is no such scene available in the book. The system is only suppressing and maintains itself. There is no point of forcing our protagonist to persuade. The systems we have these days know pretty well how to eliminate these rebellious people. They don't try to convince you or anything nor they are interested in what you think. If you raise your head, there is a mower ready cut your head off.
So i have finished a book which is very suitable for investigating. Our world is not much different than of the abnormal world that the writer fictioned with maximum imagination. You question how this happened. I can see our world from this perspective perfectly. And i said our future raises on remembering today and the past in my older post called The Agenda. See you at the next post with the hopes of a better world.
Leave a comment