<< Freedom of thought

 There’s this interesting interaction in Orwell’s 1984 that keeps you thinking for a while. This exchange between Syme and Winston both working under the department of truth, gives a very strong insight into the actual power of words and what they mean.

In this dystopian reality, the government's absolute control trifles with reality (constantly), reshaping it over lies and a constant redaction of the past; creating a collective amnesia in which the party by means of narrative constitutes the absolute power of life and death.  

Syme, one of the architects of the regime’s new official language: “Newspeak” details how an orchestrated reduction of the linguistic capacities of the population reduces its whole capacity of thought by taking away even the possibility of expressing dissent.*

This destructive machination (at the core of which lies a perverted desire for control and security) seeks to alter thought itself, until the will of the collective unifies with the party’s making it one and the same. 

When this book was written at the end of 1949 it might have been hard to imagine such a situation from ever happening. A fundamental flaw at the heart of every healthy society is the naive belief in the non-existence of evil. We take for granted that which we know and immediately discard anything else that contradicts our narrative. 

This is quite possibly a very natural thing in the end. Our mind gives meaning in one way or another to the interactions we live through  providing (or taking away) value from an event on a measure aligned with our pattern of thoughts (that which we consider to be the truth).

In today’s world, we live in a future that Orwell could have never envisioned: technological advances that would seem more like witchcraft or wild maniac derrangements in 1949; and yet, the threat remains the same.  

Overtaking of reality by means of altering the narrative, on any side of a political spectrum is as dangerous then as it was now.

The communication constructs around us are the ministry of truth’s dream: a fantastic media machine capable of altering reality sometimes in a single day. We should remain vigilant though, for the ministry’s dream was Orwell’s nightmare and might as well be our own.

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Notes:

1984- Pt.1 Ch.5