Social Control In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Social control allows very little personal freedom and expression. The novel , Nineteen Eighty-four, written by George Orwell is very similar to todays society in the way that social control is used on citizens to ensure and increase power and status. Ways that the novel and todays society ensure social control are surveillance cameras, fear through the media, and music and sounds created for social conformity. In the novel, Nineteen Eighty-four, the tele-screen is an object that is used to create fear within the society of Oceania, just like how surveillance cameras were created to bring fourth fear in todays society all around the world. Surveillance is happening with or without our knowledge of it, like in the novel Julia and Winston were …show more content…

The main character, Winston, is an example that emotional fear and anger caused him to pursue his gut feeling, and leave his reasoning behind to follow Big Brother. The party than used his and other citizens fear to create a false enemy in their eyes, “power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing”(). In todays society fear is used as our top motivation and controls the human brain very easily to make us do irrational things,like in the novel Obrien uses Winston’s fear to corrupt his humanity into believing that the party’s way is the only way. The people in charge of running the society know exactly how to make the citizens react through manipulation of the media and radio stations. A big issue ,in the world today, related to this kind of manipulation is terms and how the government wants all the americans to react. Tourists themselves use the media to create fear in the eyes of their enemy. But in our country media is used to brainwash peoples minds to portray all muslims to be hated and treated poorly by all ages. This type of behavior promotes a widespread of xenophobia. Unfortunately both the novel and the society today show that when a human being is scared they will not pursue the life they believed to be right but follow the life a authority figure has shown to be a safer way of