Examples Of Totalitarianism In 1984 By George Orwell

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party embodies the collective mind and all members are forced to participate in communal activities. Winston, locked in loneliness, becomes a lunatic, a minority of one, the only man still capable of independent thought. He is “The Last Man in Europe” precisely because he adheres to the importance of the individual mind. Orwell shows that totalitarianism paradoxically intensifies solitude by forcing all the isolated beings into one overpowering system. “Much of Orwell's success in Nineteen Eighty-Four,” writes history professor Malcolm Thorp, “lies in his creating a plausible description of how totalitarianism can destroy the individual and turn him into an automaton.” Here, the term “automaton” is particularly
Oceania teems with “docile denizens” who have long suppressed natural human emotions like love, twisting reality and subscribing to doublethink in order to believe that their condition is natural and just. Oceania teams with the dehumanized.
As Hannah Arendt writes in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, “There is…one thing that is discernable: We may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous.” What is Oceania, if not this exact type of system?
Fahrenheit 451 begins with a man on the verge of complete dehumanization—a firefighter who incinerates the written word without hesitation—and ends with a man of revived humanity, a flickering flame who will carry hope onward into the future. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes the opposite course, beginning with an alert, rebellious individual and ending with a man who has been utterly destroyed and is no longer discernable from his neighbors. Through their respective dystopias, Bradbury and Orwell ease readers toward discomfort, prodding them to unearth the human values within them that reject such uncomfortable acts as burning books, mutilating language, or relinquishing