George Orwell
Nineteen - Eighty - Four

Man. Rational animal. Intelligent. Therefore, superior to beasts.

Man. Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Being of letters, of sciences, of manipulation, of infinite thought.

Up to here, nothing, or little, blameworthy.

And yet No.

No more.

Degradation.

Brutalization.

Catastrophe of consciences.

Big Brother Is Watching You

Nineteen - Eighty - Four (for the less anglophone 1984) sketches an apocalyptic vision of reality and of future societies not even that distant. Chilling, raw, disastrous ruin of such a majestic divine creation. Not enough. Such a dystopian panorama and an equally shocking cataclysm of the Human, according to Orwell, could possibly materialize.

The twentieth-century “Dystopian Novels” are usually grouped within that large narrative-literary current called "Modernism", a category encompassing a further artistic context: it is the era of the crisis of the previously praised Positivism, which preached total security and certainty in Man and Science, the latter, according to the numerous Comte and Spencer, capable of responding to any need, material and moral, eternally applicable to all vital activities, synonymous with progress, concreteness, efficiency. Modernist authors oppose the positivist view of progress and science with a crisis of conscience, of the individual, of values, of morality, of Man himself. In the face of great existential dilemmas the human being is naked, defenseless, uncertain, suffering, mortal. Thus, the end of great certainties translates artistically into the end of the canonical, of the traditional, of the concrete, of the comprehensible and of the visible, towards the abstract, the unconscious, the hidden. Faced with uncertainty, Man hides in his uncertainty, aware of a progressive process of secularization aimed at sweeping away the millennia-old moral superstructures, the immaterial models in which he cast his meager consolations and certainties. Not anymore. Predominance of solitude. Vision of Death. Escape from earthly Concreteness. The very prolific Joyce, Eliot, Svevo, Pirandello, Kafka, Proust, Mann, but also Dalí, Kandinsky, Klee, "concretizers" of the abstract, of the subconscious and of degradation, composed a heterogeneous literary-artistic "elite", as each of these personalities chose a precise and determined "escape route" from the Crisis: if Eliot intended to embrace religion, the only resolution after the void inherited from the war, mass production, and secularism, Joyce demolished pre-twentieth-century literary rigidity through loose and anti-canonical schemes, analyzing in detail the psychological/intimate/unconscious situation of his anti-heroes, dominators of the boredom and apathy of everyday life, completely devoid of noble intentions and/or remarkable abilities.

Nineteen - Eighty - Four draws a lot from the European modernist tradition, yet allows the application of real and concrete contexts (the ideological consequences of the Second World Conflict) to a narrative generally founded on the denial of the current reality. The society meticulously described by Orwell nevertheless lays its ancient foundations on the global post-1945 situation, while implementing an imaginary historical process completely opposed to what really happened: in the face of the obvious recovery of democracy post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the author reflects on the ancient nightmare, that is, the victory of Totalitarianism and, consequently, the overthrow of the freedoms and rights won at the end of the so-called “Ancien Regime”. The question raised by Orwell concerns a concrete and "degenerated" application of Hitlerism/Stalinism hypothetically developed in a hyperbolic manner. We witness the rational annulment of Man in light of the triumph of what is not just one of the many political philosophies born from nineteenth-century cultural evolution, but a true secular faith.

The geopolitics that Orwell envisions in the novel is simple: three "Superstates", Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, with uncertain borders, perpetually at war with each other, yet governed by "political structures" deeply rooted in Totalitarianism, characterized by the eternal rule of the Single Party with different names within the three worlds (Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Cult of Death in Eastasia). The latter reflect the individual modalities/cultures but are all rooted in the aforementioned universal Totalitarianism. A geopolitics that certainly brings to the extreme consequences the theories of "Living Space" and total conquest of Hitlerian matrix: it is clear the overthrow of national realities sacrificed in new and abnormal imperial compages.

Almost all the events take place in Oceania, more specifically in the province called Airstrip One, with the capital London. Oceania bases its (totalitarian) political system on Ingsoc, an ideology summarized in three slogans: ignorance is strength, war is peace, freedom is slavery. Three absurd paradoxes that, however, have theses to support them.

All three slogans respond to very precise needs of the Party, embodied in the "person" of Big Brother, an authority that "sees and knows everything": surely there is a reference to maintaining a state of "ignorance" by the masses (proles), deprived of any possibility of self-awareness and self-awareness, certain risks of new revolutions. The animalistic, bestial, irrational state of the Proles is directly proportional to the preservation of the Party's totalitarian rule. War, then, is a further step towards total control of the masses: by avoiding an overproduction of goods that would first cause an increase in the economic conditions of the Proles and subsequently a reawakening of their individual consciences, a state of forced poverty is established (except for the Inner Party), caused by the "investment" of economic resources in warfare, which become essential to the totalitarian regimes themselves. The conflict, a concrete symbol of mass mobilization, assumes connotations of absurdity and paradoxicality as it lacks a concrete meaning that can go beyond ideology. Finally, freedom coincides with the passivity of the Proles, with their reduction to automatons. The reader will thus notice a spectral, disturbing, and extremely bleak panorama.

Winston Smith, the protagonist of the work, the “last man,” is the anomaly. He is not a prole. He is not a beast. He is still human, but perhaps, indeed certainly, too much.

Employed at the Ministry of Truth (an organizational structure designed to erase history and adapt it pathologically to the ever-changing "truths" of Big Brother - other similar organizations are the Ministries of Love, of Abundance, and of Peace, all absurdly pursuing intents opposite to those provided by the respective names), Smith convinces himself to elevate his person and regain a rationality typical of his species.

These attempts miserably fail: the activity of the Thought Police, aimed at meticulously controlling the individual minds of the Party, but not of the Proles, considered equivalent to beasts, is only one of the endless impediments to freedom and the acquisition of rights: Smith, following his love story with Julia, another dissident destined for a similar fate, will be directed before death, or rather the vaporization of his being, to forced adherence to ideology, so that even the one condemned to self-annihilation may disappear, however faithful to the Party/Big Brother. The cancellation of an “unconverted” conscience would result as THE failure of the Regime's work.

Orwell drastically erases the categories of reality, of concrete, of tangible and demonstrable in his work, with the precise intent to explain the culture of "institutionalized lying" of Totalitarianism: what is real and tangible is what is established by the Party/Big Brother and not what Nature has shaped a priori. The manipulation of History, of what is empirically demonstrable, the malleability of minds subjected to continuous changes of ideas, deprived of the critical ability to evaluate them (Doublethink), represent only some of the stratagems implemented by the Party. Feelings are abolished, except for love towards Big Brother.

Smith is a hero, but a defeated hero. A small defenseless individual against a huge socio-political structure, devoid of any ideological weapon capable of defeating the misleading universal power of Totalitarianism. Smith is comparable to the Jew interned in the various Auschwitzes, alone before the annihilation of the conscious, of the rational, rebellious yet unarmed and consequently defeated. In the face of the overwhelming force of repressive Totalitarianism, the individual is erased and inserted into a weak, uncritical and insensitive mass. He is the cog of a machine, a cog that if faulty must necessarily be removed.

Finally, Language, the symbolic instrument of Knowledge, becomes inessential, useful only for a bland and superficial communication, sparse, devoid of any critical connotation aimed at the progress of Man and his Science. Language is correlated to ideology, the latter precedes and humiliates it.

I apologize to you DeBaserians for the excessive length of this writing, analyzing one of the works that most affected the undersigned. And I pose a question to all: can the dystopia of 1984 still be a source of fears and anxieties today, in light of the current global socio-political situations?

Big Brother Is Watching You

Nineteen - Eighty - Four, George Orwell