Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

(Yes i got the idea form a riff-raff post, no I;m not posting there because I'm actually serious about this)

I am wondering if the Party, of 1984 infamy and they who created various evil things such as Room 101. Is realistic as a dictatorship, and if the Book itself, a common source for comparisons for mass censorship and power-grabbing schemes, is realistic for the era it was written in.

tl;dr is the Party and the book realistic , or not?

I wish i could say it isn't, but a man named Rákosi Mátyás succesfully made nearly all the shit what was written in that book a freakin reality. Plus, if you want more evidence about how deep can people fall just read Donald Rayfield book about Stalin and his hangmen.

It will show you that how a "dictatorship could survive on pure blunt oppression without something to offer the populace".

The processes are very true, the means are a bit over the top, but can also find them in real life.
Basically, no, the Party itself is not realistic. But analogies, observations and processes are very, very true.

Same goes to the Animal Farm. After all, we don't see talking animals at all. However, the whole Revolution is an analogy to he Bolshevik revolution.

Fairly realistic in concept, but overly simple and pushed to an unlikely extreme. The concepts were probably simplified on purpose to make it an easier read, or perhaps incidentally because Orwell only understood the topics on a superficial level. The latter is something I doubt, but is a possibility worth considering.

Mass surveillance on the level described in the book was not possible in Orwell's time, but is certainly possible in the modern era. The idea behind it was that everything you are doing is being recorded, but not necessarily watched; it would be impossible to have every single person constantly watched. Instead, it was the threat of being watched that kept people in line, and you can already see that kind of thing in effect today. How many opinions have been self-censored due to fears of being put on an NSA watch list or, for a less extreme consequence, shadowbanned on Reddit? I hear now and then that people do not want to voice their opinions online because of such fears and the fear of their thoughts being on a permanent record.

Room 101 is brainwashing through torture, plain and simple. This has been happening for centuries. The concept was not pioneered by Orwell or the totalitarian governments he was criticizing. Medieval witches would be tortured into confessing their "crimes" and then executed following their "apology." Very similar to the ending of the book.

The Party, and especially the personage of Big Brother, has not really manifested itself anywhere in the world except in North Korea, where Kim Il Sung still has his portrait hanging in every schoolroom across the country. The position of President was abolished upon Sung's death, making him the "Eternal President of the Republic" forever. He is, in essence, a very real Big Brother.

The eternal wars, with the flip flopping between enemies and allies, was something really only endemic to the twentieth century, and did not happen exactly as Orwell predicted. Rather than three powerful factions being always at war, only two really engaged each other, and while their fighting was indeed nearly constant, the use of nuclear weapons and willingness to engage in direct combat was not quite as pronounced as Orwell presumed it might be. Alliance realignments have not been as frequent either, with only one happening thus far.

Funny, I don't seem to recall either of those dictatorships surviving.

They are pretty much "survived" since they were able to still stand after the death of those human-monsters who have been operated them.

It collapsed because the western culture was way stronger and influential. They showed a better alternative, a life where saying no to oppression was an existing thing. The CCCP collapsed because the people seen an alternative, something what they could hope for.

Without the western counterpart, without a strong international presence the terror never would ended. The CCCP would pretty much would be still arround with sadist like Stalin and Menzhinsky.

Of course as i see you already made your choice to not see the thing from my perspective…

P.S.: Not forget about our biggest shame on the Earth: Democratic People's Republic of Korea

One thing I always found interesting about 1984 was thinking about it as a thought experiment; and just how antithetical the party of "Big Brother" was to the nature of free will and even life itself.

It always came off to me that the higher ups really had nothing much to gain, and even bought into their own batshit ideology. They weren't motivated by greed or quest for power like Hitler or Stalin, instead they seemed utterly devoted to irradicating the idea of humanity and replace it with subservience. Applying it even to themselves.

The higher ups (as they are described, and never really seen), seem to have become soulless, inhuman, and spend their days making the entire world like themselves. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the higher ups don't live in opulence with giant mansions or luxury. But almost as simply as the people they subjugate. Almost as if you took the concepts of Zen philosophy but with a nightmarish turn.

They wholeheartedly believe in their inhuman ideology, a concept that simply can't be rationally understood, because it isn't human.

Anyone ever get that vibe?

I think the torture segments were an imagining of what to true may advance to. It has become more psychological than about physical pain. After 1984 was written this was shown in various places of conflict in the world.

I don't know, was From the Earth to the Moon unrealistic?
The point is, works of science fiction are almost never intended to be Nostradamus-like "predictions" of the future. They are thought-experiments, which are supposed to make the reader critically think about the implications of whatever the author is bringing up. Virtually every repressive aspect of Oceania are ramped up to eleven not for Orwell's lack of care for realism, but because he wanted the points he was trying to make to be as striking as possible.

Nostradamus hasn't predicted shit.

Head over to London sometime and take a gander at the massive amounts of police surveillance they have going on, and you'd think it partially came true.

I consider the underlying premise of 1984 feasible, but improbable. I read somewhere once, I can't remember if it was in relation the general opinion of fascism or to Orwell's impression of it, that the major mistake in evaluating the totalitarian governments of the early 20th century was the assumption that they were rather efficient (the old "the trains ran on time" view). In some ways they were, but in many ways they weren't. It's against human nature for any one person, let alone a group of people, to either act rationally at all times or avoid making errors in judgement. Absolute power eliminates any checks on human nature for those who hold it, and human nature has too many self-destructive aspects for a group such as the Party to hold power forever. With the exception of the People's Republic of China (which was the last to obtain power and is undergoing a sort of transition) and its client states, all the great totalitarian states of the 20th century collapsed.

That's not to say elements of 1984's dystopia became a reality and are present in contemporary societies, or that they don't pose the type of dangers Orwell was concerned about. What I do doubt is the ability of individuals in a Party-like group to be able to set up an apparatus whose stability borders on permanency. Interior greed for power would eventually tear it apart. Hubris would lead to a suicidal leap such as a world war. And while human nature may be dark if the 20th century dictators taught us one positive lesson about it, that lesson is its resiliency in the face of unimaginable and oppressive evil.

I have always found a more plausible road to dystopia laid out in Brave New World. The idea of a society whose members have voluntarily surrendered their personal autonomy and intellectual curiosity in exchange for hedonistic pleasures seems much more likely to me based on how human nature works. There are elements of this in 1984 of course, as it is how the Party keeps the Proles in check, but in Brave New World it is not so much controlled by puppet masters as a natural evolution of Western culture.

It's why I feel guilty about loving football. And feeling guilty about loving football is why my posts about topics like these are often so long.

Personally I think the most unrealistic thing in 1984 is oceania itself being so efficient at repressing the peoples of the former UK and USA so soon. With a 400 year tradition of rebellion and opposition against totalitarianism it I found it hard to believe that the blatantly opressive party could become anywhere near as stable in those regions the novel portrays it after only 40 years.

The lack of subtlety in its oppressive methods of control make it's very survival in a post WW2 west a miracle in itself.