Orwell's Warning: 1984 George Orwell Research Paper

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In 1984, this idea is demonstrated with Thought Police. It is certainly bad enough to never feel alone in one's own community but it even worse to never feel alone in one's own head. This idea is maddening, as Orwell illustrates through Winston. He says, "At home and in bed in the darkness you were safe from the telescreen so long as you kept silent" (96-7). Here we see that Winston can only find time to think his own thoughts when the Party believes he is asleep. There is nothing more controlling than making people think they have no time to themselves and anything they think outside the permission of the Party is evil and wrong. This keeps people obeying the law because it is safe and comfortable there. If people do not make any trouble, they will not get any trouble. Malcolm Pittock agrees adding the Party does not want anyone to be more than average. He writes:

Any would-be rebel is disabled from the start. Formed by an inhuman society, he will already be infected by it because he is serving its purposes. Winston grasps the significance of the systematic falsification of the past by the regime, but he is not only actively engaged in it but actually enjoys it. (Pittock)

Pittock identifies how the Party controls the people through a system of modification. It takes serious thought for Winston to realize something is amiss. His ability to begin to think on his own the effort it takes for him to reach that point is what Orwell wants us to remember. Thinking is difficult and most people would rather not think about things that are difficult or troubling. This is how people can be taken over: make them just comfortable enough to keep them marginally happy and they will not speak out because things are tolerable.

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Orwell warms of technology, plain and simple. This drives all action in 1984. Technology is a wonderful thing as we sit around with our wireless connections, working on our laptops in the park on a sunny spring day. It is also amazing that we can communicate with people on the other side of the globe in real time. However, these are things the government can use for whatever reason they deem reasonable. We like posting videos to the Internet but do we want to be like Winston and live in a society where an "Improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense" (55). We laugh at the notion of Thought Police and facecrimes but there were generations before ours who scoffed at the idea of cameras on every street corner.

1984 warns against the dangers of big governments that want to squash the essence of man. Freedom and individuality are stripped from the people slowly and usually under the radar. It happens slowly, one small compromise at a time. Rafael McGovern put it succinctly when he says, "only by preserving our humanity and individuality can we avoid the same failure" (McGiveron). Orwell had the imagination to put his fear into fiction; he had a grasp of the human mind and its ability to accept mediocrity as long as things are not too uncomfortable and he understood the capacity of the government. Power and control corrupt and seek to destroy anything that attempt to question it.

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