It’s now 75 years since Orwell’s influential novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. Completed in 1948 (Orwell picked the year of his dystopia simply by reversing the last two digits of the year of publication), the novel speculated on a future dominated by an authoritarian regime and monitored by constant, intrusive surveillance.
Nineteen Eighty-Four has caught the public imagination as few other novels have done. It has given many words and ideas to our language and popular culture. TV programmes like ‘Room 101’ and ‘Big Brother’ lifted their titles directly from the book. Words like ‘doublethink’, ‘newspeak’ and ‘thought police’ have become absorbed into our everyday language. It’s also been a gift to those on the right, who use it to attack socialism.
Naturally, any novel set in the future – utopian or dystopian – invites speculation and comparisons with the present-day reality, once the future time arrives.
But did Orwell really have the acute political foresight that some have suggested? Well, there are several aspects in Nineteen Eighty-Four that do, in fact, support this theory.
Portents of modern surveillance and political gaslighting
First of all, there’s the surveillance. Orwell describes ‘telescreens’ – basically, a two-way TV that allows the watchers to themselves be watched by the government. The population reacts by self-censoring; they avoid saying anything that would incriminate them, even ensuring their expressions are neutral, to avoid being accused of ‘facecrime’.
Whilst the telescreens themselves failed to materialise, our lives today are under more surveillance than at any other time in history. CCTV is omnipresent in our towns and cities. Internet cookies trace our habits, from who we support politically, to which celebrities we admire and even our favourite brand of washing powder. Recent suggestions from politicians that the bank accounts of people claiming benefits should be open to government scrutiny also have disturbing shades of Orwell’s dystopia.
There’s also political sleight-of-hand. In the novel, constant gaslighting (although the term was unknown in Orwell’s time) is used against the population. The three key slogans: “WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” are accepted without question by the citizens of Airstrip One (or England, as it used to be known) as is the burying of bad news and the re-writing of history. Orwell’s chief protagonist, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth, whose responsibility is to re-write history and to manufacture government-approved lies for the consumption of the population.
‘Fake news’
Again, this notion isn’t completely unfamiliar today. We’re used to seeing political lies being spun and amplified by politicians and the media on both sides of the Atlantic. A very quick trawl of Twitter in the run-up to both the UK and US elections reveals many examples. Among the more egregious is a tweet from the Conservative Party, claiming that Labour’s plans to impose VAT on private school fees has already caused a school to close. The school in question had already announced plans to close, some weeks before Labour unveiled their planned policy.
The final disturbing similarity is the fact that one of the responsibilities of the Ministry of Truth is the use of mechanical devices to create novels, songs and even pornography. The currently increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create misinformation – deep fakes – not only threatens human creativity but allows the possibility of creating ‘facts’ that can be used to undermine our democracy by misrepresenting politicians and events.
A prediction or a warning?
So, should we be worried? There certainly seems something remarkably prescient about a writer who has managed to include AI, political gaslighting and round the clock surveillance in a novel that was written several decades before these things were happening. The world in general seems to be shifting towards a more totalitarian model of society, one which Orwell might have recognised from his interest in – and some experience of – such regimes.
Orwell had already criticised the Russian Revolution in his previous novel, Animal Farm. Word coming out of the USSR about Stalin’s show trials gave him a structure for both the surveillance society and political gaslighting in his final novel. An astute journalist and writer, Orwell extrapolated what might happen in Britain, if totalitarianism was allowed to flourish. Writing to a friend in 1949, shortly before his death, he said he wished “to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere”.
Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning. In these currently unstable times, 75 years after he wrote it, we might do well to heed him.
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