When Orwell wrote 1984, the world was experiencing the rise of the extreme left and extreme right in the communists and fascists. With the rise of these two totalitarian forms of government Orwell correctly predicted that, the world would become less and less private. He designed “The Party” to emulate these two organizations and amplify their cruelness, to serve as a warning of what things could come to if they went unchecked. That fear of extremism which Orwell had is instantly recognized when O’Brien says, “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently… We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means to an end; it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution… The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”(217) With these words, Orwell, bluntly sets forth the most powerful warning about Big Brother possible. Big Brother exists solely for the good of The Party. He has no intention of helping the people, laying forth a paradise so that one day he may relinquish his power. All that The Party cares about is gaining as much power and control as it can. In addition he warns us that once we allow Big Brother, or in the case of America today, the government, to seize enough power, we have doomed ourselves to a path in which the oppression can only worsen. Orwell is warning us that if we submit to the desires of the government and allow unmitigated surveillance and investigation of our private lives, the government will eventually effectively run our lives.
This nightmare of Orwell’s is quickly becoming a reality. The home and the government are associating themselves more and more with each other every day and the almost limitless privacy we once enjoyed at home has steadily shrank. Today it is perfectly legal for the government to listen to your phone calls, read your email even if the message is marked as private, listen to your voicemail, look at your computers’ hard drive, make you urinate in a cup to test for drugs, read your credit reports and look at your medical records. They can probe your innermost thoughts with psychological tests and share information about you with anyone they wish to share it with. The list grows more and more every day. In fact, recent studies suggest that at any given time more two thirds of the nations’ private investigators are trying to gather information about the citizens’ private lives for the government. This is despite the fact that private institutions are banned from collecting information for the government. As conveyed by Lewis Maltby in his book Workplace Rights: a myth?: “When most Americans go out of their house in the morning, they might as well be going to a foreign country; because they are equally beyond the reach of the constitution in both situations. And unfortunately federal law does very little to fill this void.”
Orwell even draws close parallels with 1984’s thought police and the judicial system of American government today. The thought police can arrest you for thinking of things that could prove to be detrimental to the health of the party. In other words, The Party can convict you of a crime even if no wrongdoing has occurred. Similarly, the Government today has the right to detain and even punish you based purely on suspicion. In The Party this practice is known as thought crime. For instance, Parsons is convicted of thought crime. When Winston asks him if he was guilty, Parsons replies that he was in fact guilty and he then proceeds to explain to Winston the parameters of his arrest. “Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. Do you know what they heard me saying?”(192) exclaims Parsons. “Down with Big Brother!”(193) he says. Parsons later goes on to openly wonder what his punishment, for a crime that in reality he didn’t commit, would be. This is similar to how the government today can deem you “guilty by association”, and reprimand you as they see appropriate based upon your personal beliefs. In other words, if the government sees that you have taken out a copy of The Anarchists Cookbook, a reputed novel in the topic, when they examine your library records, which they already have access to, they can fire you even if they have no evidence as to whether or not you have participated in any illegal activities.
With all these pre-existing parallels, more of Orwell’s predictions are destined to appear as time continues. At present, we see the emergence of what could be regarded as “superstates”. The alliance of the so-called “Western Democracies” would represent one such superstate. A union of Asian communist superpowers like, Russia and China could represent another such superstate. The combination of Anti-American forces in the Middle East, South America and the rest of the world could represent our final superstate. This combined with the constant state of war in today’s world draws stark comparisons to Orwell’s international political predictions made in the novel 1984. The state of constant war would lead to fear, uncertainty, and a strong desire for stability, allowing for the stronger party or individual to take over. This increase in the power of Big Brother could easily take the turn down the road of a dystopian society. If this “Big Brother” were to follow in the footsteps of former president Richard Nixon, who wrote in one of his letters to the chief justice, “If the president does it, it’s legal.”, then incidents like the Watergate breaking would become normal and there would be no repercussions, because the power of Big Brother would override any opposition those actions.
The immense hatred that reverberates throughout the world is so severe that, people now judge someone else on their bad qualities alone, neglecting to look at who the person is as a whole. Rather than deciding whether or not he likes someone based on their personality, such as if the person makes them laugh, or whether or not they person are kind hearted; man decides whether they hate someone or not based upon a tally of bad qualities and speculations they may have about a person. Orwell predicted just this and exemplifies it in 1984 when Winston describes people of the party. His description of Tom Parsons for example offers little information about the moral fiber of the man but more only about his inadequacies. “He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than the thought police, the stability of The Party depended.”(22) George Orwell’s book 1984 predicted many of the fundamental characteristics of what many people see to be as an impending dystopian society. The author used his own fears to truly create a sense of verisimilitude, which allows for so many analogous parallels to be drawn between the book and contemporary American society. While it provides us with a warning on what things could become, it goes beyond that and provides us with a roadmap that explains the circumstances that would create any of the situations that Orwell sets forth in his literary work of art.
