George Orwell's Nineteen-Nighty Four Still Speaks To Us Today

Does Nineteen-nighty four still speaks to us today?

George Orwell was born in the early twentieth century, in a family that he describes as “lower-upper-middle class”. Since its youngest age, he experienced prestigious boarding schools where he felt scandalized and oppressed by the control the school had on him and other students. This life experience probably inspired Orwell to write “Nineteen eighty-four”, a dystopian novel where he gives his opinion on what would be the world without the freedom to think. In this -not so- fictive world, the population lives in a place where individual thinking is forbidden but where following the rules and the reasoning of Big Brother is mandatory. Perhaps Orwell was describing a prophecy of what he thought

The censorship of information and the divulgation of others perpetrated by medias lobbyists is impairing the population’s freedom of thinking. While honest medias could enlarge the population’s vision and its ability to think objectively about the world, it is currently only dehumanizing people and making them more similar, exactly like in Orwell’s society. Indeed, in the novel the character that thinks, or “doublethinks” are accused of having “criminal tendencies” (page 59). In the novel, propaganda from the medias is unavoidable and intrusive in citizens lives through the use of telescreens. Indeed, “the giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes “the telescreen, it was called could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it completely.” (page 4). Since it cannot be shut down, people are forced to be the victims of the Party’s propaganda. However, even if the modern world is able to control information through its medias, it could not control history as well as it is done in Orwell’s society, because history has been known for generations by most citizens as fact through public books and movies. For instance, a government could not make the second world war disappear from its citizens’ mind, or even “unperson” a criminal like in

In this dystopia of the modern world, Orwell highlights the constant surveillance of the population and contrasts that is this even more drastic than the Catholic Church’s practices of the Middle Ages, which was known for watching its believers closely. He stated that “part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.” (page 259). In Orwell’s society, telescreens are also used to control citizens in addition to the propaganda they broadcast. Without doubts, this could be compared with the modern world intelligence services. For instance, the government of the United States owns information about its citizens that they are not even aware about, thanks to its extremely powerful agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the National Security Agency (NSA). These agencies easily predict when someone is about to commit a crime, such as a terrorist attack since they are able to record every calls, messages, Internet searches and credit cards expenses. This practices are similar to nineteen eighty-four since the Party knows when a citizen is transgressing the rules, such as loving someone, which is forbidden. One of the Party’s moto is “war is peace” (page 6). In addition to other continents, the Party is also making war to its citizens to maintain peace and contain revolution ideas in the society. This war is