1984 by George Orwell

There is something timelessly interesting in anything that foretells the future. That sense of knowledge beyond the current time gives any prediction an air of mysticism, as well as dread for those who will expect the worst. The subjects of any prediction will always remember the bad over the good, for they may carve to their heads the possibility of them dying while falling down a cliff instead of them being able to climb a mountain. But Nineteen Eighty-Four makes no reservations for the good. Humanity will fall down the cliff, and humanity remembered.

Indeed, the real 1984 has passed and nothing of the superficial sort in the novel had happened. There was no emergence of a Big Brother or the Telescreens (not televisions, mind you), an Inner Party or Oceania. No law has been passed against Thoughtcrime, or any sign of Newspeak’s language devolutionto narrow the range of thought. Two and two still makes four. The word “Freedom” is still in our dictionary. All of this happened despite of the Cold War, when the threats of Orwell’s dystopia seemed imminent at every passing minute of nuclear tension between the USSR and the United States. Humanity sighed with relief.

But one outstanding trait of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the condition of its characters. It is the inhumanity of the members of their middle class that makes them blind and submissive with intense clarity and realism, while the proletariat is subdued to the corners of the system, forever veiled by a constant illusion of provision and unconscious protest. The novel tells of a story of the last relic of humanity on earth in that fictional setting of London in 1984; was published in 1949; and has managed to retain its power even when the eponymous year has passed.

Today, the world hails George Orwell’s politically charged novel as one of the 20th century’s best literary achievements. Indeed, the dangers of a totalitarian government as well as a blindly submissive society may have been removed through the dissipation of Communism. Humanity, however, still faces the same threat of the more subtle enemies that gave the novel its brilliance. “Freedom” may still be a word for us, but so is “Doublethink”,just grab a dictionary.

by JM Deblois