1984 by George Orwell

1984

If the state or a man has absolute power over his citizens it has always been a mystery what the consequences are going to be. George Orwell shows us one of the dystopian results in his book 1984. He created in his book a world devastated by nuclear war and poverty, where the West has fallen under the spell of a totalitarian socialist dictator, Big Brother. A political demagogue and religious cult leader all rolled into one, Big Brother's power is so strong that no one may know if he even exists. People have no priorities and no individual rights. The state has such a power that it can even change people’s ideologies.

One of the book’s main ideas is Thought control. Big Brother's Ingsoc Party has perfected the uses of high technology to monitor the lives of its populace, and to insure unswerving loyalty through surveillance and propaganda. One of the technologies which Big Brother uses is televisions that are two-way interactive and it cannot be turned off, and which give the government a faceless surveillance window into everyone's life. We cannot know who is on the other side of the televisions, if people are watching and is all the monitoring done by machine. All we learn is that members of the Inner Party, the elite, are allowed to turn off their televisions, if only for a brief period. By using this technology Big Brother shows what he wants. In other words, he washes people’s brains with unreal news, stories and information. People who think for themselves or have own ideas labeled as Thought Criminals and Big Brother has its own force against these people. In book this force is called Thought Police. Their main purpose is to catch Thought Criminals and to change their opinions with using force and torture. Therefore, they never lose their control over citizens. I consider that with the main purpose of the state is the restriction of citizens in a small area so they can always interfere situations they wanted to correct.

Another important idea is the repression of the emotions. What I mean is that, Big Brother represses the feelings of its citizens with abstracting from pleasures. For instance, in the movie we see that people have not private lives. They cannot do things which can relax themselves. By doing like that Big Brother can easily control the citizens because without calming down people can not think clearly and create new ideas. So people who live in Oceania cannot realize the lies that are told by Big Brother and as a result they become brainless slaves of the state. For example, we can understand it from the scene in which state shows a propaganda film in a big room. Normally in this film nothing is real. However, people are so poor and they need something to hold on, they speak and shout