1984 by George Orwell

War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. These are the beliefs that the citizens of Oceania, in the novel titled 1984, written by George Orwell, live by. In this novel, Oceania, one of the three remaining world super powers, is a totalitarian, a society headed by “Big Brother” and his regime, known as the ministries of Truth, Love, and Peace. A totalitarian government is defined as a government characterized by a political authority which exercises absolute and centralized control, and in which the state regulates every realm of life. This is the type of world that the citizens of Oceania must live in, ruled by fear and under force every day. The names of the different ministries for example, are quite ironic because the are actually the exact opposite of what they profess to be, the Ministry of Love torturing members of the party and so on. Historically, no such type of totalitarian society has ever been actually achieved. In the past, even though fascist and communist states have risen up and tried to achieve such a world, there has never been enough technology or a means by which a government could truly regulate every aspect of life, and thus there has been failure in every attempt at creating a truly totalitarian society. However, in this modern day, new technologies of every kind have made the possibility of such a society to arise a pending reality. Through things such as censorship of the media, new advances in spy technology, and the disintegration of the family in our world today, the world described by Orwell seems ever more a possibility. There are factors that exist in this book that pertain not only to the totalitarian regime of 1984, but apply directly to the democratic republic society in which United States citizens live today.

To begin with, the ability of governments to censor media in the world today is a primary factor in the ability of a totalitarian regime to arise. In the society of Oceania, all of the citizens’ thoughts and beliefs are fed to them directly from the government. All of the information about production figures, current wars, and other current events all are filtered and approved by the government. The people do not hear or know anything that the government does not want them to know. In addition, the citizens of Oceania take what they hear as absolute truth, never questioning its validity. In example, regarding the state of war that Oceania is in, “Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines.” Although throughout the story, the conditions of these wars were constantly changing, it made no difference to the masses, and the current “truth” was all that mattered. “Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia” (Orwell, pg 35). The truth is whatever the government wants it to be, and the people accept it at face value, a concept cleverly worded as “reality control.” (Orwell, pg. 36) Likewise in today’s society, even though the people live under the rule of a democratic republic in the U.S., a large portion of the news that we receive is distorted and filtered, many times the truth is not what it appears to be. Being a democracy does not stop that from happening. Furthermore, like the citizens of Oceania, we as citizens often accept the information that we receive from the media as absolute truth, not questioning what we hear, even though we have the privilege of doing so. In the totalitarian society of 1984, the government alters history constantly and changes it to fit the predictions and needs of the party, so that they always come out ahead. The Party destroys any evidence that the past has been altered, and asserts absolute correctness and truth. One might argue that it would be impossible to get rid of all past evidence in today’s world, because of the ability to store and recover information and data, and recover it again with the technology possessed today. However, one might also argue that because of the way that information is stored today, in example much of it on computers, the possibility of hackers that are able to change data, or viruses that can wipe out data completely, shows the reality of a world where data is altered and destroyed today. The censorship of the media and the novel has a strong connection to the censorship of the media today, and the enabling power it would give for a totalitarian society to rise up. One might wonder for example if the mild flu season this year was a result of the government’s failure to secure flu vaccine.

To continue, the modern advances in technology today make the possibility of a society in which every aspect of life is monitored a reality. In Big Brother’s society, every moment of every citizen’s life is constantly under surveillance