Book Overview #14: 1984

The setting of the book takes place in a fictional 1984 England where everyone lives in poverty, everything is run-down, and there are posters of the leader, the Big Brother, being everywhere as a constant reminder of the population being constantly watched.

Most houses have a television of sorts, constantly feeding them with propaganda, and they do not have the right to turn it off. Said television is also a transmitter, meaning the government could spy on you whenever it felt like it, and you could do nothing about it.

The reason the protagonist knows all that, and is so easily infodumping them to us, is because he is working in the ministry of truth. Which is anything but that, since its function is to feed the population with lies, many times contradictory with each other. Yet the people are so ignorant and afraid of the authorities to the point they accept everything as true.

Part of what prevents the population from realizing it, is the constant images of war. They are made to throw all the blame to other countries and reach a point where they cease to see them as people. They even take pleasure in seeing foreign children being blown to bits, as if they are monsters getting what they deserve.

There is even a sinister organization constantly sabotaging their country. Although it is failing all the time, it is never completely dissolved and keeps causing trouble for everyone. This is why everyone is suspicious of his fellow man, constantly spying on each other and doesn’t think much when reporting unusual activities to the authorities. Little children in particular have been indoctrinated to the point they are the first to call out their own parents.

People who are reported, get arrested during the nights and are never heard of again. Their names are even erased from all documents, so it’s like they never existed. The same things happen to anything the government doesn’t like, so the people hear and know only what those in power want them to hear and know.

With restricted access to information and the constant altering of available facts, nobody was sure of what was going on before thirty years or more. History and technology became a blur, the majority had to simply accept what it was told, with the rest who learned more than they should, ending up disappearing soon afterwards.

Even the language is constantly simplified, so the population will have fewer ways to express something, and thus no means to be sure if something is right or wrong, since there is no room for alternative opinions.

No privileges or luxuries is allowed, since everything besides the bare minimum is sent to the war effort. Even sex is treated as a duty to produce more workers, instead of being simply pleasure.

The protagonist eventually gets fed up with his society and gets into an illegal sexual relationship, simply for going against the rules. He wants to finally have some fun.

The two of them gain access to the goods of those in charge, revealing that they are privileged far beyond what is supposed to be allowed. They no longer want to just have some fun, so they find a rebel and join the organization that is supposed to be sabotaging the government.

The protagonist is given a book that reveals all the big secrets through a very long infodump. In a technologically advanced society, where machines can be doing most of the work, everyone will have more time to be educated and think for themselves, thus making those in charge not to be needed. The only way for the privileged to remain in power in a non capitalistic or democratic society, is to keep everyone poor and stupid.

In order to do this, there must always be a war going on, so it can constantly consume everything beyond the bare minimum needs of the population. This way the commoners will never be powerful or educated enough to make a stand.

Big Brother is just a representation of everything the people must constantly be afraid and worship, something that is not possible towards a faceless government of millions of privileged officials. It’s essentially like a god, existing for maintaining control.

It is also revealed that there is no resistance against the government. It is a fabrication invented by the authorities, so they can lure in and capture anyone who disagrees with the status quo. Which is exactly what happens with the protagonist. He is taken to a place where he is constantly tortured until he confesses to crimes he never committed.

He thinks that he will at least die as a martyr for the greater good, but his torturer reveals that he cannot become a martyr because nobody will remember him after they delete all the documents about his life. With no control over information, whatever he does is a lost cause.

He is also not allowed to die until he submits to Big Brother completely. It doesn’t matter what he realized about the society he lives in, because reality is not objective, it’s all in his mind. He will not have been fully broken until he accepts what he is told instead of what he thinks is the truth.

So they keep torturing him until he is a husk of his former self, an empty shell that just like everyone else in there, can be filled with whatever Big Brother wants them to believe.

The book ends with the ideal society the authority plans to create. A world where everybody hates his fellow man and loves only Big Brother. A humanity that will be constantly spending all its energy in destroying each other, and then seek salvation by those in power, only to never achieve a victory in either case.

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And now for my thoughts about the book. As fundamental as it was for all following dystopias, its worldview just doesn’t feel plausible. We are selfish by default and do most things for our personal satisfaction. There can never be a society of hundreds of millions living in complete pauperization, while selflessly obeying an unseen figure without some sort of short term rewards.

We seek instant gratification as often as we can, and are willing to bend the rules whenever we can in order to get it. The protagonist is not the exception, he is the rule. Most people would turn to illegal activities, exactly like he did, and eradicating the pleasure of sex would not change that.

We are also social creatures, who live in communities. No matter how much they try to make us act misanthropic, we still need each other to form a society, something that can never happen if we do not trust each other. How can this ideal society exist when people are constantly backstabbing each other?

Putting that aside, how can any technologically advanced society function when its population is not allowed to have standards in education (because they are constantly changing them) and is even given faulty equipment to work with? Accidents will be happening all the time because the workers will be constantly confused on what they supposed to do, or because the technology they are using is not working properly. Meaning there is no stability and without stability the society will crumple.

Furthermore, this eternal war scheme will also not work. As much as they will try to maintain it, it will eventually use up all the raw materials, one side will win, only to also crumble because it will no longer have an enemy to fight where it can waste its surplus production.

In fact, you don’t even need for the resources to run out. I have heard many people saying that the closest thing the book describes can be found today in the form of North Korea. It’s doing the exact same shit, and as you can see it’s far from a society with stability. Having a single year of bad weather, or a bad harvest, or an epidemic is more than enough to devastate any country with poor infrastructure. They will have no means to recover because the population is starving and ignorant.

I’m much more in favor of the image Brave New World had for the future (which I will also review very soon), since it’s based on controlling people through pleasure instead of pauperization. 1984 is an ok read with cool ideas, but its concept is not practical, and there is hardly any plot or characters to care about. Just like so many sci-fi, the cast is just mouthpieces and almost everything is spent on infodumps instead of plot.

The whole book is closer to a what-it documentary, instead of a story where things happen and change. There is no change because nothing happens besides the presentation of a hypothetical future that never came to be. The 80s were an amazing decade to be alive, by the way. For these reasons, I cannot give it more than the base score.