Keys:

• Relationship between empire, warmaking, ‘superpowers’, and poverty
• Social control (through a variety of mechanisms, such as … ?)
  • Language, mass media, (revising) history, fear and propaganda, social breakdown, mass anxiety
• Are there parallels with modern societies?

Background

• Utopia and dystopia–guess which is Orwell’s take … 
• Totalitarian government
  • use of force, torture (and threats thereof), surveillance, control over media, propaganda
  • Why the need for such high levels of control? Who benefits? Why pays the price? How is it framed?
  • Extreme poverty, inequality
• War (so thinks the reader, anyway …)—a fearful society is a compliant society
• Society make-up
  • Globally: The three ‘superstates’: Oceania, Eastasia, Eurasia
  • The rest of the world? T the ‘non-aligned’ states
  • Domestically: Social classes: There are three within the ‘Ingsoc’ party (‘Ingsoc’ meaning English Socialism, but Oceania was anything but)
  • Inner Party–the ruling class (1% of the population;
  • Outer Party–the civil servants (Winston fits here, within maybe 14% of the society’s population;
  • The Proles–or working class, which comprises the other 85% or so
• Reality—How is it experienced by the different sectors of society? Who is in control of it (see quote at bottom of this page)?
• Influence of the novel continues today (obviously ; )
• Examples include: Apple ad; anti-Hillary Clinton campaign ad; V [sponsored by the Ketchup Industry]; Brazil, music videos,[Muse & David Bowie]; films and franchises including (but not limited to!) Inception, Divergent, Blade Runner, Hunger Games, The Giver, The Handmaid’s Tale, I, Robot, I am Legend, references in the news, etc.)

Some important concepts:

• Doublespeak
  • ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’
  • ‘the ‘memory hole’ (where information is ‘stored’, it’s actually an incinerator)
  • ‘Victory mansions’ (where Outer Party members like Winston live, they are really slums with a patriotic theme), ‘Victory cigarettes’, ‘Victory gin’, hopefully you get the picture
  • Ronald Reagan and ‘peacekeeper (nuclear) missiles’
  • Bush/Cheney White House’s ‘Clear Skies‘ program (undercut 1970 ‘Clean Air Act’)
  • Obama and the ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’ (‘toxic assets’ become ‘legacy securities’)
  • Trump and ‘weaponizing‘ of government (after 6 months), going after ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ ‘draining the swamp (ending corruption), deporting at-risk ‘refugees’ who were granted asylum, while declaring white South Africans ‘refugees’ and welcoming them.
  • Spying vs terrorist surveillance; weapons of mass destruction vs smart bombs; How about the ‘Active Denial System?’
  • ‘Newspeak’ vs ‘oldspeak’ (from 1984) … Pres. Trump responds to his own government’s climate change report in less-than-scientific terms)
• Big Brother
  • Surveillance: TIA, phone ‘records,’ wiretapping, email / internet?
  • Force: torture (waterboarding, (or mere threat of . . . .)
• Information control
  • ‘who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past’
  • techniques: Censorship, alteration of history, propaganda
  • Fake news? Sometimes it’s fake, sometimes it’s just easier to discredit when so labeled.
• Perpetual war (‘the long war‘, ‘war on terror’, interventions)
  • demons/villains (Goldstein; al Qaida, Zarqaawi, bin Laden . . . . Islam??)
  • profiteers (who benefits?)
  • fear
  • Normalizing nuclear holocaust (duck and cover; fallout shelter)
  • Superpowers (or ‘superstates’), which still seem to be with us almost 80 years later
• Police state
  • Lack of due process
  • ‘Thought Police’ that pursue citizens guilty of ‘thought crimes’
  • High rates of incarceration (and at one extreme, torture)
  • Use of excessive force
  • Lack of accountability
  • Alliance with those in power, not with communities or professional standards of law enforcement
  • Collaboration with the military to create a ‘monopoly’ on use of force

Sociological concepts

• Dismantling of social institutions:  Family, marriage, parent/child bonds, etc.–anything that creates potentially divided loyalties with the state–and more recently in the US, higher education and K-12 public education.
• Random punishment (do people know when they’re being watched, or do they have to assume they’re always being watched?)
• Construction of reality—based on what? How do we know what’s real in 1984?
  • How do we know what’s real in 2025??
  • How much of what we perceive as ‘reality’ is presented to us through mass media?
• Newspeak—eliminating words from the language? Or concepts? What’s the point? Consolidating concepts: Republicrat.
• Max Weber and legitimate authority —force is expensive, coercion is expensive—why are people so poor? Inequality? The expense of total social control?
• Dehumanization, desensitization—to violence, sex, emotion, etc.
• Torture, ‘re-education’ (classical conditioning) O’Brien was ‘tormentor, protector, inquisitor and friend’
  • Torture of Afghan detainees in Guantanamo Bay—US government ‘rendered’ them to other countries if ‘ needed’, in other words, ‘outsources’ torture)
• Social control–Does it have to be at the end of a gun barrel? What if similar outcomes could be sold as ‘freedom of choice,’ or ‘American Dream,’ and provide impressive returns for the investor class? Will everyone be well off then?
• McDonaldization–if you can figure out how this might apply to the discussion, you’re getting in a useful frame of mind for the rest of the term.

in the NY Times (2004, relayed to journalist Ron Suskind, this was White House aide Karl Rove):

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Sound a little like O’Brien? And this, from Orwell:

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications – that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police State. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”.

Tribune, 19 October 1945

Why is it people still talk about the novel?