The Dystopian Society

1984 – The Dystopian Society

The novel ‘Nineteen Eighty- Four’ is dystopian novel, written by George Orwell, published in 1949. A powerless person can try all that is in their hands to take control and make their way to the top, but the people with power in their hands will not let anyone reach to the top. More than anything in the current society, people are more fearful about losing their power and position. This novel being the mirror to our society, reflects its better truth. The novel and our society have many similarities such as – identical leadership styles, physical control and commonly followed norms and behaviours.

To start off, it seems as if the novel was written based on the author’s experience from WWI and WWII. The novel starts off with the main character Winston being really annoyed with the oppression and the strict control of the ‘Party’. The leader of ‘the Party’ was a well-known person, often referred as Big Brother. Big Brother and his party share many resemblances with Hitler and his supporters. The three slogans of Big Brothers’ parties were – “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength (Orwell 3.3).” Though, Hitler did not agree with these exact statements but his beliefs were the same as Big Brothers. They both also followed the similar techniques to get more supporters; which was by making the people watch “Two Minute of Hate” and get the citizens to be furious and hate on the enemy party. By using various technique like this, Hitler and Big Brother both were able to achieve all they wanted but along with the title of the influential dictator.

Next, with all the technology in this era, it is very hard to identify the right person to trust. Some of us have to live in a constant fear, of being watched over due to the advancement of technology. “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 (Orwell 3.1).” Winston used to be scared to do even simple things as writing diaries because he knew that the party people can turn on their cameras any time and spy on him.

Lastly, we are often told that we have the freedom of right, freedom of speech and live in a free country where we can do whatever we want, but this is only true until some extent. Say for instance, at the age of 14 I take my dad’s car to go to a club, two things would happen – one I would get arrested if I got caught driving and two I would not be allowed to go in the club. This would be because for both of these things I would