Skip to content
Published on

1984 — Reading the Prophetic Book of the Surveillance Society

🇰🇷KO🇺🇸EN🇯🇵JA
Split View필사 모드
Authors

Opening — A Clock Striking Thirteen

The novel begins with a strange sentence.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

The clocks we know only go up to twelve.

From its very first line, Orwell quietly signals something.

This is not our world but a world where something has gone wrong.

George Orwell 1984 is a dystopian novel published in 1949.

Yet it is no mere piece of futurology.

More than seventy years after its publication, the same holds.

Its terms, Big Brother, Newspeak, doublethink, the Thought Police, have become everyday language.

They are still alive in our conversations.

When we point out a politician lie, we think of this book.

When we speak of surveillance cameras, the same is true.

When we face a situation where truth is being distorted, we naturally think of it.

In this piece we look at the writer George Orwell and his era.

Then we examine the novel core concepts of Big Brother, Newspeak, and doublethink.

We also treat its critique of totalitarianism and its theme of controlling language and thought.

And we look at its connection to today debates over surveillance and privacy.

At the end we discuss how to read this powerful novel in a balanced way.

1. George Orwell and His Times

A Writer Shaped by Experience

George Orwell is a pen name.

His real name was Eric Arthur Blair.

He was not a writer who sketched a dystopia from imagination alone at his desk.

In his youth he served as a police officer in Burma, then a British colony.

There he witnessed the reality of imperialism firsthand.

Later he experienced life at the bottom in Paris and London.

He also fought in person in the Spanish Civil War.

The experience of the Spanish Civil War in particular left him with deep wounds and insight.

Even within the side he had believed to be his own, power struggles and betrayal took place.

And he witnessed the distortion of history.

A person who had been a hero yesterday was branded a traitor today.

Newspaper articles were rewritten overnight.

This experience later comes back to life in 1984.

It is the Ministry of Truth, which endlessly rewrites the past.

The Century of Totalitarianism

The first half of the twentieth century, when Orwell lived, was an era in which totalitarian regimes actually existed.

He did not aim at one particular system alone.

He sought to lay bare the mechanism shared by all forms of totalitarianism, regardless of ideology.

That structure of suppressing individual freedom, monopolizing truth, and ruling people through fear.

Orwell himself supported democratic socialism.

But he wanted to warn of something.

That any ideal from which freedom has vanished can end up a hell.

1984 is the novelistic crystallization of that concern.

2. Big Brother — The Eye That Watches You

In the novel state of Oceania, everything is ruled by the Party.

At its apex stands the symbolic figure of Big Brother.

Huge posters of Big Brother are plastered everywhere on the streets.

Beneath them runs the famous slogan.

Big Brother is watching you.

What is intriguing is that it is uncertain whether Big Brother even really exists as a person.

He is a face and a symbol.

He is a device by which power mystifies and absolutizes itself.

People are conditioned to love a being whose reality they cannot know.

At the same time they are conditioned to fear it.

The core instrument of surveillance is the telescreen.

This device broadcasts images while simultaneously peering into the room and eavesdropping.

The problem is that one can never know when one is being watched.

So people assume they are always under surveillance.

They censor their own behaviour.

Whether the watcher is actually looking or not does not matter.

Control operates through the mere possibility of being seen.

This principle is often discussed in connection with the panopticon, a circular prison, examined by philosophers.

3. Newspeak — Shrink the Language, Shrink the Thought

The most original and chilling invention in 1984 is a language called Newspeak.

The Party is building a new official language to replace the existing one.

Its goal is astonishing.

Most languages expand their vocabulary to enrich expression.

But Newspeak, on the contrary, keeps reducing its vocabulary.

You Cannot Think What Has No Word

The design principle of Newspeak is simple and terrifying.

If the word to express a concept disappears, the concept itself becomes hard to think.

For instance, the word freedom is shrunk so it can no longer be used in a political sense.

Then people find it hard even to conceive the thought of demanding freedom.

If there is no vocabulary for dissent, the act of dissent too becomes hard to imagine.

The Party ultimate aim is to make thought opposed to the system linguistically impossible.

It is to make so-called thoughtcrime impossible even to conceive.

This idea touches on what linguistics calls the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

It is often known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

This hypothesis holds that the structure of the language we use influences the way we think.

The strong form of the claim is that language determines thought.

This strong claim is generally not supported among linguists today.

The weak form, that language exerts a certain influence on thought, is still seriously discussed.

Orwell pushed this idea to its extreme.

He experimented in fiction with the terrifying assumption that controlling language allows one to control thought as well.

4. Doublethink — Believing Two Contradictions at Once

Doublethink refers to the capacity to hold two contradictory beliefs in the mind at once.

And yet to accept both of them.

It is, for example, the ability to know one is telling a lie.

And yet to sincerely believe it to be the truth.

The Party three official slogans reveal the essence of doublethink.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

People must accept these logically self-contradictory sentences without any resistance.

Doublethink differs from a simple lie.

A lie conceals a truth one knows.

But doublethink erases the truth itself and revives it as needed.

It is a far deeper mental self-deception.

The reason this concept is frightening is that it does not feel like pure fiction.

In daily life we tend to look away from uncomfortable truths.

We also tend to reinterpret facts in a direction favourable to ourselves.

Orwell shows what happens when this human weakness is organized on the scale of a state.

5. A Critique of Totalitarianism — What Power Wants

The Party Orwell depicts did not seize power for the usual ends.

In the latter part of the novel, a key figure of the Party confesses a shocking truth.

The Party does not pursue power for the sake of wealth or prosperity.

Not even for the realization of some ideology.

The Party wants power purely for its own sake.

This is the darkest insight Orwell offers.

Some totalitarianism may begin from a good cause.

But in the end domination itself can become the goal.

The attempt to render the individual completely powerless follows.

It destroys even private bonds such as love and friendship.

It seeks to remake human beings into creatures loyal only to the Party.

Orwell traces this process with cold precision.

The protagonist Winston Smith stands against this vast system.

He tries to preserve his inner freedom.

He keeps a diary, engages in forbidden love, and strives to remember the truth.

These small acts of resistance drive the tension of the novel.

But Orwell does not easily depict a romantic triumph of resistance.

Rather, he makes us confront how vulnerable the individual is before enormous power.

This coldness is precisely why the novel reads as a warning rather than a consolation.

6. The Theme of Controlling Language and Thought

Among the many elements of 1984, one is most frequently cited today.

It is its insight into language and truth.

The Party believes that who controls the past controls the future.

And who controls the present controls the past.

So the Ministry of Truth ceaselessly rewrites the records of the past.

Yesterday newspaper article is rewritten to suit today needs.

Inconvenient facts have their very existence erased.

Objective truth vanishes.

It is a world where only what the Party says becomes true.

Here Orwell was on guard against something.

A situation in which the boundary between verifiable fact and manufactured narrative collapses.

What happens when people lose the grounds to judge what is real?

Power can make anything true.

The concern Orwell emphasized transcends its era.

Even today, in a time overflowing with information, the same holds.

Or perhaps all the more for that reason, the importance of discerning what is fact only grows.

[Structure of the Party Worldview]

Control the past -- rewrite the records (Ministry of Truth)
Control the present -- surveillance and fear (telescreen, Thought Police)
Control the future -- limit thought by shrinking language (Newspeak)
       and the result
The extinction of objective truth, and absolute power

7. Toward Modern Debates on Surveillance and Privacy

There is a reason 1984 is summoned so often today.

It is the advance of surveillance technology.

Orwell telescreen was imagined as flowing in only one direction.

But we now live amid a far more sophisticated data-gathering environment.

Smartphones, surveillance cameras, location tracking, and records of online activity make it up.

Here a balanced perspective is needed.

Modern surveillance is often different in character from the oppressive state surveillance Orwell depicted.

We sometimes provide information about ourselves voluntarily for convenience.

We welcome surveillance cameras for safety.

That is, today data collection is not only a matter of coercion.

It carries voluntariness and exchange at the same time.

For this reason, some make an intriguing point.

Another dystopian vision, in which people give away their freedom while enjoying it, may be closer to reality than Orwell world.

Even so, Orwell insight remains valid.

Sometimes it is not transparent who collects what information and why.

Sometimes it is unclear how that information is used.

And sometimes the individual has no means to control that process.

At such times, surveillance can become a tool of power.

Today debate over privacy is largely a question of balance.

Where to place the balance between safety and convenience, and freedom and self-determination.

This is not a question with a single settled answer.

It is a matter society must keep debating and adjusting.

Orwell novel reminds us of the worst-case scenario we must not forget in that debate.

8. Within the Lineage of Dystopias

1984 does not stand alone.

It sits within the larger stream of dystopian literature.

Knowing this lineage makes the work appear more three-dimensional.

Dystopian fiction usually begins from the opposite of utopia, which means an ideal place.

The heart of the genre is to expose the oppression and the price hidden behind a seemingly perfect society.

Works are often mentioned alongside 1984.

One is a novel depicting a society that conditions people through pleasure rather than fear.

Another is an early dystopia depicting a total control society that has erased individuality.

There is one intriguing contrast.

Some dystopias depict a world that rules us through what we hate.

Others depict a world that rules us through what we love.

1984 is the former, a dystopia of fear and oppression.

The two visions complement each other.

Each offers us a warning from a different angle.

The very debate over which is closer to reality is proof that this genre is alive.

9. A Balanced Reading — What to Learn

As powerful as 1984 is, it is also easy to misread.

A few points are worth noting.

First, this novel is not a political pamphlet attacking a particular camp.

Orwell was wary of every power structure that suppresses freedom, whether of the left or the right.

What if one uses the book terms only as weapons to corner the other side?

One easily misses what Orwell really meant to say.

Second, this novel is not a prophecy but a warning.

Orwell did not predict that exactly such a world would arrive in the year 1984.

He showed what could happen when a particular tendency is pushed to its extreme.

By doing so he sought to awaken us so that we would not go in that direction.

The novel purpose is not despair but vigilance.

Third, the real lesson is the importance of critical thinking.

An attitude of trying to verify for oneself what is fact is needed.

So is a habit of watching how power handles language and information.

The courage to face the truth even when it is uncomfortable is the same.

These are the spiritual legacy Orwell wished to leave to his readers.

Closing — Two Plus Two

There is one of the most famous scenes in the novel.

Power forces Winston to believe that two plus two makes five.

Here the proposition that two plus two makes four is not mere arithmetic.

It is a symbol of an objective truth that no power, however strong, should be able to change.

The question Orwell leaves us is this.

When everyone says otherwise, can you still say that two plus two makes four?

What kind of world comes when the individual courage to hold on to truth disappears?

There is this novel, which began with a clock striking thirteen.

It quietly asks each of us something.

To judge for ourselves what time it really is.

Questions to Ponder

  1. How far does the Newspeak assumption hold, that when language disappears thought disappears too? How does your mother tongue shape your thinking?
  2. How similar to and different from Orwell coerced surveillance is the information we voluntarily give away today for convenience?
  3. In an age where truth has splintered into many, how can an individual discern what is fact?
  4. When everyone calls the wrong thing right, why is it so hard to hold on to the truth alone?

References

Discuss on Twitter • View on GitHub