1984 is a powerful and thought-provoking novel that explores the dangers of totalitarianism and the effects of government control on the individual. The story follows the struggles of Winston Smith, a man who is aware of the horrors of the dystopian world he lives in. We see him struggle to conceal his unorthodox and unacceptable manners. We see him fall in love with another rebelled. We see him find his secret place in this horrible, pressuring world. We see him trying to understand this world to the best of his efforts. But most importantly, we see him captured by the forces that control this world. We see him, tortured, humiliated, and stripped of all humanity and dignity. We see him destroyed. We see his mind rebuilt into the form and shape that the ruling party desire. We see him lose himself, his morals and his spirit, to the subservience of the party. We see them take all that he holds dear, leaving him a hollow husk of a man.
And we see it today. We see the world we are turning to, big tech companies collecting all the data they can to gain power over the human mind. We see them censoring us, manipulating us, and exercising their power. Oh, the raw lust for power. For control over the middle and lower class who don’t know better or want to know better. Mass manipulation of the masses through media. We give it all to them. We relinquish our power to these unavoidable forces. We let them do this to us. Tiktok, Instagram, Meta, brainwashing the minds of malleable children, inexorably building a future of more manipulable masses and taking them even deeper down the data trench. The introduction of the metaverse. VR is sugarcoated in lies and fancies and cool features only as semblances for collecting even more data and exercising more control.
But where does this lead? Will the reality be as stark and sordid as that in this book? They are merely exercising power over only our minds. They are only feeding us information. Can they go to the depths of the three phrases?
WAR IS PEACE\ FREEDOM IS SLAVERY\ IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Can they manipulate us to that extent? Do they really want to?
The biggest, unanswered question from this book is why? Why have power for the sake of power? Why plot a plan so intricate and elegant, just for collective power? What is the purpose? There can’t not be a deeper meaning. Is it only a primal thing to want to exercise power for the sake of it? Why go to such lengths? Where is the joy in that?
But as we can see it all starts from the mind. It starts with feeding us ideas and manipulating the norm. Changing our beliefs. Telling us what is favourable and what isn’t. Slowly building up, over years, over decades, over generations, what our idea of life should be like. What we should accept and shouldn’t accept. Till we only see what the party wants. Till we can’t see anything but that. But of course the entire Upper Class have to be in on it. They have to know what they’re doing. They have to have a purpose.
I don’t know the point of this endless rambling. It doesn’t seem plausible. But at the same time, it does. We don’t know what goes on in the upper echelons of society. We don’t know why they are so keen on gathering enormous amounts of data from us apart from advertising and building mental models of us to manipulate. We don’t know their true dark secrets.
But what can we do? Nothing. One person can’t make a difference. The party always wins. We can’t convince the orthodox. They don’t see anything wrong with it. We have lost this battle.