1984 Position Paper

1984

Winston Smith is a disillusioned Outer Party member in Oceania, in the year 1984, and he begins to question the validity of the Party and its policies, like no sex for joy, only for procreation and the ever-present telescreen, which monitors his apartment all day. He feels the Party is restrictive and overriding free thought and will which is what Winston feels is essential to being human, but he is fearful of the Thought Police who patrol people 's very thoughts and make people "disappear" into "nonpersons" if they think poorly about the Party and its leader, Big Brother. His job working for the Party involves falsifying history for Party purposes, but he is tormented by the idea that soon, no one will have a sense of true history, since the Party can change it whenever it wants to say whatever it wants.
One day, he meets Julia, who becomes his mistress, and together, they decide to take the risk of passively resisting the Party. They arrange with O 'Brien, an Inner Party member, who leads them into the world of the "Brotherhood," an underground organization dedicated to fighting against the Party. However, their relationship is destroyed when it turns out the O 'Brien is really an agent of the Party, who has set them up to be discovered and recycled through the system. Winston is taken to the Ministry of Love, which maintains law and order in Oceania and tortured endlessly until his thoughts change from hatred of the Party to undying love to the organization and its purpose in controlling the masses called "proles". After his exhaustive torture, Winston is a new man, completely loyal to the Party and Big Brother. The Party has won out over humanity. Winston seemingly has lost all his sense of self-riotousness, and ultimately lost all control even over his seemingly secured thoughts.
Today, we may not yet have monitoring systems in our homes, but the government has increasing power to invade our privacy. Aside from the fact that your Internet activities are monitored and your phone calls can be tapped. In "1984", Winston kept a diary where he wrote down all his treasonous thoughts. He was too afraid to act on them or speak about them; he would have been arrested and tortured, maybe even executed, if he had. I think that our country is slowly moving toward an Orwellian Dystopia by limiting our privacy in both the public and the private sector of our lives. The Party constantly watches all citizens for any sign of rebellion or thought-crime, but tries to appear kind and concerned rather than ruthless and invasive. It adopts the caring, false identity of 'Big Brother ' and the slogan: "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU" (Orwell, 3).
One of the most important ways that the Party keeps citizens under surveillance is through the telescreens. They are found in all rooms belonging to Party members, and in public places. No one knows how often the Thought Police tap into any individual wire; it is therefore possible that they watch all screens all the time. Outer Party members can dim the sound and picture coming from their telescreen, but the screen never turns off. Only senior members of the Inner Party have the power to turn off the telescreen, but can only do so for short periods of time. Very few proles have telescreens, mostly because members of the Inner Party do not feel they pose a threat. For the proles who do own one, the telescreen is an expensive item that they might buy for the entertainment value. In addition to telescreens, the police also have patrols of surveillance helicopters that fly around peering into people 's windows.
Today, the government has cameras placed almost everywhere, they could listen to and trace anyone’s calls, and are pushing for RFID which is Radio Frequency ID tracking microchips to be placed inside of humans and everyday-items. The government is supposedly using surveillance for “security” purposes, but if under the wrong hands, they could use the sophisticated technologies to control people’s everyday activities, similar to the world of 1984. In addition, the bank and automotive bailouts making the headlines today further strengthens the government power of the U.S. economy. Government involvement allows them to control the salaries and bonuses of both the financial and automotive industries. This is scarily similar to the parameters mentioned in 1984, where people have the mindset of which they were being constantly watched and their every move was monitored.
The Party uses children to keep tabs on their parents. Through the Spies, children are trained to be devoted Party followers. The children are fierce towards thought criminals and most adults over the age of thirty are afraid of their own children. Children are encouraged to eavesdrop and most weeks there is a story in the Times about a child hero who has denounced his family. Child spies were one of the only major differences between the Orwellian Dystopia and current day America that I could see. Adults in America today put all their trust into their children without any induced fear. Unlike 1984 where adults had to control themselves around their own children provoked by the distrust that would lead them to be ratted out and eventually turned into the police. I don’t foresee a time in the near future where people can’t have reliance in there kids, if anything that bond will be preserved.
Winston thinks about how dangerous it is to allow your thoughts to wander when you are in public or facing the telescreen. Your facial expressions are watched closely and the wrong expression can have dire consequences. For example, looking disbelieving when a victory is announced would be facecrime. "Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom" (Orwell, 64). Even when Winston is at his desk at work, he is closely watched by the telescreen. When he finds the photograph, he must force himself to control his facial expressions and breathing. He even worries the quickness of his heartbeat will be picked up by the telescreen.
I learned in one of my classes involving government affairs, that our U.S. military is implementing facial recognition software that would allow drones to track anyone in the open air from up to a height of two miles. The drone would take a snap shot of what it sees, particularly facial features, and then would save this image into its memory banks and from there the image would be handled by a technician responsible for identifying the drone’s targets. These drones can go by unnoticed and could be watching anyone for up two 24 hours with the intention to kill. This act closely resembles the situations exemplified in 1984, where the citizens never really feel safe even in their most private of sectors. This invasion of privacy is very unsettling and just one more similarity to the Orwellian Dystopia type of lifestyle.
In the open country there are no telescreens, obviously, but there are hidden microphones by which your voice can be picked up and recognized. Making a journey by oneself also tends to attract attention. Patrols freely hang around railway stations to check the papers of any Party members they find and interrogate them. To go a hundred kilometers or more, you need to get your passport endorsed. Then Winston realizes that for seven years the Thought Police have watched his every act, word, and thought with far more subtlety than he would ever have imagined. They even replaced the whitish speck of dust on the corner of his diary so that he would not think it had been disturbed. They have soundtracks and photographs of absolutely everything he has done.
Cameras are being placed everywhere for "our protection." Sales of security cameras have gone through the roof in post 9/11 America. Millions have been installed in the past decade, with most being used to spy on students, employees or to keep track of pedestrians on the sidewalk. The City of London is far ahead of us; with citizens being caught on camera hundreds of times times per day. Televisions with spy-cameras that are shockingly similar to those described in 1984 are now being sold around the world. The real shocking fact is that, if the government desperately wanted to know literally every last detail about you, they could. They have the authority to spy on your every phone call, and obtain any photos of you they see fit. These truths just spark the notion that our lives today aren’t much off from those of the people who lived in the novel 1984.
The Party constantly researches new ways to find out what people are thinking - the scientist is "a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture." (Orwell, 194) Parsons is arrested for thoughtcrime because of his little daughter. She listens at the keyhole, hears him saying, "down with Big Brother" in his sleep and runs to get a patrol. Parsons is actually proud of her for this; he was completely unconscious and unaware of doing anything of the kind, and thinks that it is terrible that he could have unknowingly harbored these evil thoughts. He says that when he goes up against the tribunal he plans to thank them for saving him before it was too late.
Homeland Security encourages citizens to spy on one another. The "See Something, Say Something" campaign being run by "Big Sis" our Secretary of Homeland Security should scare the living hell out of everyone. In Great Britain, children are encouraged to snitch on adults they suspect of dodging taxes. The correlation of how these Party members choose to develop methods of invading peoples thoughts aren’t that far off from what our government is currently doing. All these advancements in technology seem harmless but in actuality this innovativeness comes at a cost. While we just see a new gadget we’d love to get our hands on, it provides the government indirectly a new source to gain information from us.
These ideas are scary to comprehend but after reading this book and letting its message sink in, I’ve come to terms with what our government is doing. I believe that we in fact are heading in the direction of an Orwellian Dystopia. Most of may be blind to this apparent truth but I feel that the less you know maybe the better.
Works Cited
“1984 by George Orwell. Orwell, George. 1984. Ed. Erich Fromm. New York: Harcourt, 1949”

Cited: “1984 by George Orwell. Orwell, George. 1984. Ed. Erich Fromm. New York: Harcourt, 1949”