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Comparing George Orwell's 1984, Cults, And Mind Control

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1984, Cults, and Mind Control Some people may not believe in mind control, but this is a very serious threat to the current society. Looking to the past, in the cases of Jim Jones and Charles Manson, mind control has been a serious threat to the public’s safety. Full mind control may not have happened yet, but distortion of thoughts, dark influences, and drugs are enough to make a person do almost anything they normally would not. Between the incidents at Jonestown involving the Peoples Temple and The Manson Family murders, the past’s use of mind control if horrifyingly dangerous. The past events involving mind control within the cults are very eerily similar to George Orwell's depiction of the future in 1984, but they also have some drastic …show more content…

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable…what then? (Orwell book 1 chapter …show more content…

To explain exactly what he did briefly, “They had been manipulated by Jones, exploited and confused. But to the end, the congregation of Peoples Temple believed in the promise of progressive social changes that seemed just out of reach of a flawed, cynical world” (“WGBH American Experience). No matter what Jones did his people believed in his lies, just as in 1984 the people diligently believed in what ever the telescreens said even if the day before the screens had said the complete opposite. A contrast between Jonestown and Oceania is the deaths of their people. In Oceania the people who died were either completely unnoticed or easily forgotten, but in Jonestown one thousand people died in one day. The horrors of Jonestown are still not forgotten or

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