I recently picked up George Orwell’s 1984 (yeah, pretty late to the party, I know.) which was set aside for a long thinking it would be a story of a tragic dystopian future, and some ‘chosen one’ would overthrow the current system to implement the right order. Boy, was I wrong!!!
It was really really terrifying, not because the condition of their society, but how philosophical the whole book was. I found the reasonings of The Party to be compelling! They have sound arguments for what they do. And they are Right. If we don’t consider individuals and their thoughts relevant, then it is the perfect paradise, the ideal state.
The thought about reality being the collective imagination of indiaviduals and if we control one’s thoughts we could completely alter reality as we know it was traumatising to me! Who said there was a history before us, who said science is real, do we know anything for sure except for those things that our people told us? Do I look insane asking these questions? What do we know about reality. Who can we trust? We accept a fact to be true if some study from a faraway land says so, but what if it isn’t? What if we really live in a similar world as The Oceania now! And why does it bother me so much if I am happy not thinking about it?
The thing about there being three classes throughout history and its revolutions made my hope bleak. What if the current system is wrong? Can someone actually revolt against it and create a new and better system? Maybe that new world will be better for them. But will it be better for the others? Is an idea of equality even feasible? Then what are we even doing. Are we, like anyone else, trying to get to the higher class creating a revolt? And those who are at the top, no matter whoever they are does not care about anything other than power and maintenance of it?
Are we in the middle class? Or are we the proles? Indifferent to the world and its machinery, living the insignificant life even if we are the majority.
The theme of proles having anything they liked, and living their life undisturbed by the thought police and the like, doesn’t it seem too familiar. Here we caught up in a world of consumption, where a minority of people really sees the world as it is and manipulating us as they fsee fit for them, without realising it themselves, or with a delusion of helping us!
That thought kills me.
Are we all irrelevant, is life irrelevant, and only thing transcends us is the idea, idea of power?
The part where the song comes up in the telescreen ‘under the spreading oakwood tree, I sold you, you sold me’ was devastating. Winston became another pawn of society when he gave up Julia. Is that the message of the story? That we should trust people, not an idea? If we rat out other people for our sake we are insignificant?
But overall, does it matter what the reality actually is? I am dying please help.
Sorry for the long wall of text. I just wanted to rant. It was a heartbreaking read!
by davidmason007