What would a world without freedom look like? A world where we have no agency over our lives, a world where you must always operate under the assumption that you are being watched, a world where reality itself seems to bend to the will of tyrants playing God on earth. For some, this harrowing scenario is all too real, an existence typified more by surviving than living, where each day is a struggle to be endured, not an exciting new opportunity to chase. For those of us who have only known freedom and prosperity, it can be hard to even comprehend what such an existence would entail, but for those who wish to understand this plight, there is scarcely a more harrowing road to turn to than George Orwell’s 1984.
From the opening lines of the book, “It was a bright and cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”, you instantly get a sense that the world we are being presented with is wrong on some fundamental level. For as long as humanity has had a concept of time, we have treated it as something unchangeable, something outside of our control, something that we can only hope to work around, yet this first sentence makes very clear that whoever, or whomever, is in charge sees time simply as another element to be controlled and manipulated, and if this be the case, there is no telling what other seemingly immutable elements of the world have also been brought under the control of a person or persons who see themselves as gods. This idea of absolute power, not just in the traditional political context, but also power over the minds and souls of people, whose worldview can be melded like clay and fashioned into whatever those in power wish it to be, lies at the central core of the book.
The main character, Winston Smith, is not a heroic man, he is simply another cog in the machine that serves at the behest of “Big Brother,” the figurehead everyone recognizes as being the undisputed ruler of his territory. The powerlessness and impotence of Winston Smith is laid bare throughout the novel, for though he harbors a deep hatred of Big Brother, there is absolutely nothing he can do to express his resentments, much less put them into action. Everyone he interacts with throughout the book is either an unthinking stooge for Big Brother, or completely unaware of the workings of Big Brother. Even when he finally finds someone who shares in his dislike for Big Brother, that persons dislike is formed from only the most basic, superficial assumptions, which fall far short of Winston’s deep ideological dislike of Big Brother.
An overwhelming sense of hopelessness pervades almost the entirety of the novel. No matter where Winston turns to, tries to accomplish, or even attempt to understand the world he lives in, he just runs into wall after wall after wall. He knows that the government, which is referred to in book as “The Party”, is manipulating and distorting reality and the past in order to maintain its grip over the populace. One of the stand out quotes of the book, one that informs so much about how The Party operates, is, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” You see this line of thinking in everything The Party does through its deliberate falsification of the past in order to justify its control in the present. Past military defeats are turned into victories, alliances with certain countries are broken and never acknowledged. The country that Winston lives in, Oceania, is in a permanent state of war with one of two countries, Eurasia and Eastasia, and whichever of these two countries Oceania is at war with, The Party will say that Oceania has always been at war with that country since the beginning of time, even if, in reality, Oceania was in an alliance with that very country no more than two months ago against the other country.
Overt distortion of the past is central to the legitimacy of The Party and its right to rule, up to and including vaporizing suspected enemies from existence, not just killing them, but removing every and any trace that that person ever existed, condemning them to the fate of Damnatio Memoriae. In this world, the past, as we know it, does not exist, it exists only to serve the needs of The Party, and when the past becomes malleable, how can one trust one’s own memories? How can we be sure that what we perceive in the present won’t become altered or changed once the present becomes the past? These questions and more are extrapolated upon with such force of intellect and assurance that it can be hard to comprehend that Orwell was born and raised in the U.K., one of the freest societies’ in the world at the time, yet he writes with the perspective of one deeply scarred by the bootheel of totalitarianism.
In the end, what 1984 serves to do is pose as a warning for what can happen if we give ourselves in to the inherent impulse to submit to a higher authority that promises to keep us “safe.” For freedom, in the modern context of which we understand it, is not the natural condition that mankind finds himself in; it has only come about now because man had to struggle and die for it, and if we don’t constantly nurture that flame of freedom, it will be snuffed out by the darkness of totalitarianism. Let this book serve as both a warning for what could happen, and as a point of thankfulness that this is not the condition that we find ourselves in now, at least those of us lucky enough to come from a free society, and let us not forget our fellow man who, even now, finds himself trapped in the darkness, longing for the light that we possess. Let us grant him a torch so that he may see, and no longer be blinded by the totalitarian institutions that seek to forever keep him in the dark.
Grant’s Insights 