1984 Responsibility Of Government Essay

Aria Ramos
Kennedy
ERWC 4
May 20, 2023
The Power and Responsibility of Government When it comes to themes of human history, the word “power” need only be seen by any one individual to conclude the age-old adage with “corrupts”. Crossing all timelines and civilizations, human beings have fought for fairness and equality for themselves and for each other; in maintaining and establishing these freedoms, governments have emerged to protect these rights. Government is itself a legal and political construct to defend the rights of the people who constitute the group that creates it; as told infamously by former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, government “is by the people, for the people”. While this is directly applicable to peoples who lived within

Orwell wrote this novel as a political statement, standing against the dictators of the 30’s and 40’s that he saw in his lifetime. The novel was written in 1948, and Orwell drew inspiration from the significant totalitarian regime leaders he saw around him that were gaining power and subjugating their citizens; leaders like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin were the prime inspiration for the main villain in the novel known only as “Big Brother”. Big Brother is the leader of the party, the political leadership of the country of Oceania, that creates the dystopian world the main character, Winston, and his love interest, Julia, live in. 1984 is a dystopian novel, meaning it depicts an exaggeratedly horrifying world for anyone to exist in to make a statement about some inherent flaw within our own society. In a dystopian society, an aspect or element of our own society that the author wants to critique or present as a danger to us is amplified to demonstrate how ridiculous or threatening it is to us if we do not change. Orwell uses this to criticize the growing power of government specifically found in totalitarian governments within our own world, but also to bring awareness to the issue of control and how governments exercise control over their citizens in ways that

The aim of this is to prevent, stop, and change how people think based on the words they use. American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf is well known for his work with the study of different languages and his theory of linguistic relativity that in the earlier years existed under the idea that the language that one has and uses determines their thoughts (linguistic determinism). Though it was later relaxed to the idea where it is hypothesized that language shapes worldview or cognition (modern version of the theory), it is possible that Orwell took inspiration from this work, the theory having been proposed prior to World War II, and either believed it or showed that the party believed it by making this the goal of their work in reshaping the English language. Called Newspeak, as opposed to Oldspeak which is English, the new language shortens and abbreviates many names, titles, and ideas by replacing them or squishing them together to create what resembles morphemes, the “smallest units of speech that convey meaning” (alleydog), rather than what feels like real words, for example “Minitrue” for the Ministry of Truth and the word for “bad” which is “ungood”. But despite the way