ORWELL’S WARNING: DYSTOPIA IS HERE (1984 Explained)

Everyone quotes George Orwell. Politicians, news anchors, your friends on Twitter. They all claim 1984 is a warning about the other side. But almost no one has actually read the manual. It is in fact the book most people claim to have read when they haven’t. People think 1984 is a book about surveillance.
They think the danger is the camera on the wall, or the microphone in the bushes, the thought police coming and arresting you for expressing the wrong ideas, Big Brother is watching you. They’re wrong. Whilst those things are the visceral terrors which capture our attention, the real threat in 1984 is much more dangerous and subtle.
Orwell didn’t fear the cameras. He feared linguistic atrophy. In 1984, he predicted a world where the government didn’t need to ban problematic books, because no one would have the vocabulary to understand them anyway. The only books people would read was simplistic pulp trash that harmonised with the proper way of seeing the world.
Books with such basic vocabulary and easy plots that would cater to a world incapable of thinking anything original. The Big Brother government of 1984 understood this one monstrous truth. A truth that Orwell realised the majority of us just do not understand. That if you cannot speak the word, you cannot hold the idea.
If you cannot say rebellion, you cannot ever rebel. Now this is the Newspeak Protocol in 1984, and it is by far and away the most sinister, tyrannous construction in the whole book. And yet, if you look at how we communicate today, using buzzwords that are so broad as to encapsulate anything you want them to, or the use of emojis, or five-second soundbites to convey a thought, then you’ll realise that Big Brother isn’t on its way.
It’s already a reality, according to George Orwell. To understand the weapon, we must understand the blacksmith. Eric Blair, who we know as George Orwell, didn’t write this book in a comfortable library. He wrote it after watching reality dissolve in the Spanish Civil War. Speaking of that time, Orwell wrote this.
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, history stopped in 1936, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. Early in life, I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. But in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.
I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. In the novel 1984, the party’s ultimate weapon is newspeak. The goal of newspeak is not to invent new words, but to destroy them.
Syne, the philologist in the book, says it best. It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Now let that sink in for a minute. The destruction of words. Why is it such a powerful idea according to Orwell? It’s because every word you lose is an idea you cannot process correctly. If you had no word for honour, you may occasionally feel this vague sense of something in you, but you certainly wouldn’t know when honour is not in a situation, when it is lacking. If you don’t have a word for tyranny, you are going to confuse
that situation for safety. Now, consider our discourse digitally. The standard of good faith debate, of steel manning your opponent’s argument, of carefully listening to a logically developed line of thought is rapidly vanishing. You only have to look around YouTube to see it. What’s happening is we are voluntarily lobotomising ourselves.
And that is the newspeak that Orwell was talking about in 1984. We’re being convinced that our own thoughts are oppressive and unsafe, and it would be much more preferable that we don’t have to put up with the hard work of thinking, but just let some others tell us what to think, so that we don’t succumb to the very dangerous idea of misinformation.
But controlling the language wasn’t enough. Orwell knew that to truly enslave a population, you have to break their trust in their own eyes. You have to make them dependent on the expert for their reality. We mentioned misinformation. Who determines that? The experts? But what if experts are incentivised or wrong? What if we are not capable of thinking through what the experts say? While not all things can be true, can you see how misinformation is a word that can be weaponized? That is exactly what happens in the book. The ministry of truth has one job. It’s to
rewrite the past so that it fits whatever the present narrative is. So imagine if the ministry says chocolate rations have increased,but you in your memory can remember that they decreased. Well, the ministry of truth will ensure that all the records say they’ve increased.
And because they’ve limited people’s ability to think that other people will say you’re wrong and you’re cause to doubt your very own lying eyes, to doubt your own internal construction of facts and reality. If your memory contradicts the official narrative, you assume you are insane, not the state. We see this today. 1984’s rewriters of history actually have a counterpart today.
We have outsourced our critical thinking to the fact checkers and the consensuses, and both sides have their own groups. We don’t ask, is this true? We ask, is this approved? Is this true? We ask, is this approved? And once you doubt your own reality, the final lock snaps into place. The thought, please.
Orwell based this idea on the panopticon. That’s the idea of a circular prison where all the cells face inward towards like a central well so that every prisoner can be observed all the time, 24 hours a day. And that’s the thought police. It’s not that the thought police are everywhere, it’s that they could be at any given time.
This creates a state of preventative stupidity. You don’t need a guard in the room if you are terrified of your own mind. This is the ultimate goal of the system. Self-censorship. In 1984, they call it Crime Stop. It is the faculty of stopping short as though by instinct at the threshold of any dangerous thought.
It is the willingness to be stupid to stay safe. If you have ever stayed silent in a meeting, or deleted a post, or nodded along to a lie because you were afraid of losing your job or your status, you’ve already been visited by the Thought Police. This brings us to the conflict. Winston Smith, the protagonist, is not a hero.
He’s weak. He is physically deteriorating, but he possesses the one thing the system hates, memory. He tries to maintain an internal model that correlates to reality. And then there is O’Brien. O’Brien’s not a villain. O’Brien is the algorithm. He doesn’t want to kill Winston. He wants to convert him.
There is a terrifying moment in the book where O’Brien tells Winston the protagonist, we’re not interested in the good of people, we’re interested solely in power. You see, most authoritarians and dictators think they’re the good guy, they at least think they’re doing something right, but O’Brien represents one of the most sinister characters in all of literature and life.
The one that knows what they are doing is evil as the cost of keeping order. And not order for the good but 100% conformity and belief in whatever you are told so that you uphold the state ideals. O’Brien says he wants to tear minds apart and then reassemble them in the image of himself and the State.
So how do you fight against Big Brother? According to Orwell, you don’t pick up a gun, you pick up a dictionary. You investigate the great works which you were told are worthless because they don’t fit the narrative. You learn to think properly and independently. Orwell’s argument is essentially that we fight back by developing the ability to think clearly, to perceive correctly, to speak fluently and logically.
We don’t read classics, for instance, in order to be cultured. We read them to develop a vocabulary of thought which creates a mind too sensible for others to control, by simply saying, the news says, or they’re bad they’re good or the experts say we learn to think correctly for ourselves as Orwell phrases it in the book freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make four if you grant that all else follows Don’t let them delete your words, or they will delete your mind.