1984/2024 – the Hidden Hope in Orwell’s Warning
Forty years have now passed since the year in which George Orwell situated his imaginary dystopian society.
Forty years have now passed since the year in which George Orwell situated his imaginary dystopian society.
The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was never meant to be a literal prophecy, of course, but, for the first three-and-a-half decades after its publication in 1949, it held a powerful hold on the public imagination, at least in Britain.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, the four figures “1984” were a terrifying byword for the totalitarian future that we all somehow knew was just round the corner, if we didn’t remain vigilant.
I think that Orwell’s book, along with Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World, helped stave off the advent of the kind of world they were both warning us against, by making it abundantly clear that nobody, regardless of political affiliation, welcomed such a future.
The date lost much of its power, of course, when the year came and went. Suddenly 1984 was just part of everyday life – it was the year that your girlfriend left you, that you passed your driving test or that Everton beat Watford in the FA Cup Final.
And although many of us still remained concerned about the prospect of a Big Brother state strengthening its grip, there was no longer the sense of counting grimly down to that fateful year – instead people started looking forward to the bright new future heralded by The Year Two Thousand.
Now, however, the date 1984 has passed back into a semi-abstract condition, especially for all those born after that date, and the title of the book seems much less important than the content, which is all too relevant today.
Some of the outer form of the story is admittedly now rather dated. Re-reading it for the purposes of this article, I was struck by the way in which Orwell is very much describing a bomb-damaged post-war London that had already disappeared by the time I was born and which he imagines being inhabited by a white working class (the “proles”) that has now been largely displaced.
The idea that “one literally never saw” foreigners walking the streets of London [1] would already have sounded a little strange in real-life 1984, let alone today!
I also noticed a bit of a plausibility flaw in the plot, in that Winston Smith, having taken such painstaking care never to be seen talking to his lover Julia in public, merrily brings her with him to meet O’Brien, whom he merely hopes is on his side.
He then blurts out, within seconds of arriving at the official’s home: “We are enemies of the Party”! [2] and goes on to agree to “corrupt the minds of children”, “disseminate venereal diseases” and “throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face” [3] if asked to do so by the underground resistance known as the Brotherhood.
Would anyone really do that?
But these are small quibbles in comparison with the uncanny way in which Orwell foresaw so much of the psychological control and manipulation we are enduring today.
For instance, we can immediately recognise, in the pages of the novel, those who are currently imposing the Great Reset and its United
“What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.
“These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government”. [4]
Likewise with the extent to which their control is exerted: “Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance…
“With the development of television, and the technological advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.
“Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda…
“The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time”. [5]
The globalist agenda of the current criminocracy is also clearly depicted: “The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought”. [6]
The three warring zone of Orwell’s multipolar world have ideologies that are only superficially different: “In Oceania, the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship… Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all”. [7]
Orwell’s fictional tyrants even indulge in the same long-term date-related planning for their ramping up of control, declaring that by 2050: “The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is
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