George Orwell's 1984

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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

A while ago I read the George Orwell dystopic novel 1984. Much ink has run analyzing this book. In my case I do not intend to add anything new to the thoughtful analyzes that have already been written about this work, but I do want to leave some thoughts about the impressions that it produced on me.

First is the stifling, suffocating atmosphere produced by the loss of individuality, intimacy and critical thinking of the inhabitants of this dystopian society politically divided into three great blocks or empires: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, permanently at war between they and all ruled by iron tyrannies.

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The protagonist, Winston Smith bureaucrat of the Ministry of the Truth of Oceania, begins to have glimpses of a reality so atrocious that it cannot be accepted at first. Winston begins to believe that the One Party, led by the omnipresent and omnipotent Big Brother actually controls the masses through a manipulation of reality so radical, so implausible that one can come to think that such a thing is not possible.

One is witness for example of how people who were once considered heroes of the Party, the next day fall as traitors. It seems common, even familiar. But it is only a first stage. These traitors are, in fact, missing from reality, from memory. That is, these people never existed, because their records or mention in any electronic or printed media are completely erased.

But what about the memory of those who knew these people? This is where the thing gets creepy. The indoctrination of the masses has resulted in something that is known as double thinking. That is, to hold an idea with absolute conviction and faith even knowing that it is totally false. It is not about lying, it is a total eradication of the critical thinking process to perverse forms that lead to a total submission of the individual to the Party.

For example, as today, Oceania has been at war with Eurasia and has always been an ally of Eastasia. But the news of the war between the allies Oceania and Eurasia against Eastasia is published in the next day's newspapers, as it has always been. But the unusual thing is that to any habitual reader of newspaper to whom it is asked and that until yesterday maintained the absolute truth of the conflict Eurasia-Oceania, today he will say that, as always he has maintained, the war is and has always been between Oceania and East Asia. And he would not be lying, at least not for himself, because this is what the party says, this is what the Big Brother says and he will be convinced without a shadow of a doubt that this is the case.

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One of the ways to carry out this destruction of critical thinking is through the successive editions of the Newspeak Dictionary. This is the dictionary that collects the words of the Newspeak, the language spoken in Oceania. The successive editions are less and less extensive, accusing the disappearance of words, therefore of ideas. In a confirmation of the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis: as long as there is no word in a language that designates a concept, thay concept does not exist and could not be understood for the speakers of that language. And words disappear from the Newspeak without ever having existed, as well as people.

A society directed and carried to extremes of control in which the individual freedom, the objectification of man and his extreme alienation are carried out with surgical precision. Even the famous beginning of this book, which is the epigraph that opens this post, when you finish reading the novel, is when you realize the spooky idea that holds: … and the clocks were striking thirteen. All the clocks, all synchronized, none deviated even for a second.

This book is a ruthless denunciation of the fascist and communist totalitarian regimes that faced each other in the last century 40s, when the book was written. But it has not lost a bit of its value in this 21st century, which makes it, from my point of view, not only a milestone of the Science Fiction Literature, but of the Universal Literature.

Thank you for reading.