George Orwell’s 1984 follows the story of Winston, who lives in a dystopia where the government entity controls everything you do, from your thoughts to your life partner. Communication is also monitored, with reality often being distorted or manipulated.

This is a novel that becomes more relevant and more important each year. Pretty dark and terrifying. ( )

"The moral of this story is a simple one: don't let it happen. It depends on you."--George Orwell ( )

One of the best books I have ever read in my life, definitely everyone should read it.
Orwell has a way of writing that leaves you wanting to know more, one of my favorite books in the world. ( )

Tommy: Do you think there's a for ever?
Janey: Anything lasts forever? (Thinks.) Sure. Everything lasts forever
— Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

On Adolescence

Suddenly the adolescent doesn't understand the gestures of his childhood; perhaps this explains why he seems compelled to repeat them in all his movements. The teenager's edgy joke — an attempt to cut ties with a lower earth — echoes the preadolescent's vault from the top of the monkey bars. Of course, these sensations are never as thrilling in their repetition, despite (and perhaps because of) his having gained the capacity to sit still. Perhaps none of his adult accomplishments will match that thrill, which he no longer remembers, of directing his weapon to hit a _target in the toilet bowl; learning to pee standing up. We adults discount these accomplishments, since it seems most anyone can do them; though such things, so to speak, are only happening behind closed doors. It's possible everyone is faking.

You get no credit for the books you read as an adolescent. It seems everyone has already made easy work of them, these texts born like Athena from the head of the male gaze. It's hard to catch a faker in the act (even just to see him give it a fair shake). He is having difficulty accessing the stream of the text. He is making do with a repetition of the movements of others, which is certainly felt to be good enough. Expectations are low. One only has to pick up a wad of information, the “general theme” of the text, the same way one achieves the growth milestones of adolescence without deliberation. In this sense these texts are already being read the same way one uses a public urinal — sometimes without particular exhileration or deliberation — in this way the text becomes a kind of a worn-down public utility.

The difficulty with writing-as-public-utility ("so anyone can get it”) is that all difficulties have been removed. Texts like these, being so didactic, miss the mark. ("What can be had for free is not worth it at any price.") The sempiternal adolescent hatred of one's bigger brother (who is always bullying us) shows that the mere existence of an adult calling himself 'Big Brother' would already be an intolerable repetition of a relation from childhood. This situation would be enough for Gogol — Big Brother as antagonist-of-no-relation like the nose in The Nose — but insufficient for adolescent sensibility, which (compulsively) demands a repetition of this gesture. To the condemned heap we are adding the book-burners (who have a reputation in books not unlike that of liberals in red country i.e. despised as matter of course) in addition to the cadres of nasty children and frigid bitches. Cover them over with a heaping of low-quality consumer products, gin, tobacco, and comestibles. So one comes to learn the edifying lesson that we should despise (Orwell's vision of) national socialism, but only because of its particular bad taste. We are not assisted here by the text's (amusing) adolescent notion that the best thing that can happen to you is Intercourse, and the (more amusing) presumption that the worst thing that can happen to you is being compelled to betray your principles. So it happens that children frequently list 1984 as one of their favourites. This feeling is accessible even to that adolescent who spent all last summer fixing up Uncle's old Mustang, (or perhaps it was his other muscle car, again, a great American make (AGAM)), and who hates "the tyranny of the minority" only because he thinks he doesn't owe society a thing.

As adolescents we entertained the heady thought of Orwell's proletariat lying in slumber under the ruling class like so many casks of gunpowder. There was a thrilling tension in the thought, not unlike the anxiety when one is about-to-be using the urinal for the first time. Of course, we now recognize the problem with the relation between ruling class and proletariat is precisely that, rather than detonating this explosive all at once, it's putting gunpowder to efficient use. The proles (if such a class even exists, and if we want to be patronizing about it), based on the most recent evidence, are mobilizing their firepower overwhelmingly for Reaction. We are trying not to learn lessons from the 2024 election. It's comforting to believe that a multi-billion-dollar campaign contribution in the form of legacy media's hard-reactionary narrative (from so-called "independent journalists") had some sort of sway. (Journalists and media executives, who have spent the last four years mostly concern-trolling about the age of a certain public servant also haven't hesitated to put a finger on the scale for the national socialist movement, yet remain adamant that they can't be bought i.e. "What cannot be had at any price is given away for free." Nota Bene, this is also the catchphrase of the relationship of "Infatuation.") To discard this would mean confronting the notion that the proles don't actually want what Historical Materialism says they do i.e. improvement in their social and material conditions. It's frightening that prioritizing wage growth and full employment in an economic recovery, delivering infrastructure to deprived communities for the first time this century, ending so-called unpopular wars / drone warfare, largest climate bill in history inter alia, are things the median voter (presumably a prole) doesn't care about. It seems as though, for the first time in fifty years, the prole has gotten a little breathing space from government policy tailored to his needs — he looked upon his improved material circumstances and subsequently endorsed a vote for concentration camps. This is governance-as-public-urinal, but in the pejorative sense.

We can picture how it will go from here — not along the auspicious lines of 1984 where torture scenes, which reveal that the Party knows your deepest inner thoughts, actually function as catharsis in the liberal-humanist sense of people-as-complex-yet-knowable-individuals. Rather, it's quite likely that your executioners under the contemporary national socialist regime won't even speak your language. The crucial moment, which was (characteristically) underreported during the junta's previous regime, was the intentional loss of migrant records, for which it seems no one faced serious repercussions. That was the moment in which those detained-migrants became disappeared-persons. From here it will be a mere logistical hurdle to have their bodies discharged from ICE facilities into the custody of a loyalist paramilitary group. Gassed en-route in specially outfitted trucks, bodies will be delivered to the black site where four Caterpillar 336 excavators are digging a long tract in the desert, and satellite imaging shows only that something strange is going down the tubes. (The Climate implications are potentially much more worrisome since, as previously noted, the management of world-historical legislative machinery by which governments enact climate policy occurs on the same scale and with the same emphasis on so-called liberal-humanism as the character drama in Wuthering Heights.)

This is an outcome that middle school language arts appears not to have not prevented, regardless of how many copies of 1984 have been sold (surely I am asking too much of this book). It's an ironic twist that in this moment, which appears to be on the brink of the point of no return (which is, coincidentally, how all history appears), we are thrown back onto anti-humanist capitalism as if it were our greatest ally in this struggle. One hopes that Capital will speak, like an intercession from on high, and declare by virtue of the law of comparative advantage, that the routine execution of migrants who are still capable of toil will result in decreased market yields (and perhaps this also applies to the collapse of the biosphere). One shouldn't hold one's stream for this. For the rest of us, we are back in our Cold War, for which the catchphrase has always been "Better Dead Than Red."

In addition to the persuasive argument from Capital as above, the parochial [sic] blue-blooded person has an additional reason to impede his putting such catchwords into active practice: He still believes in the capacity for a liberal education to change one's mind; to return, against the grain of adolescent reaction, to the openness of childhood (at least in theory). Perhaps nothing so improbable has ever happened. Though if such a thing could be demonstrated it would perhaps be one rare compelling argument for the so-called liberal project. Nobody cares about what happens in public urinals and their literary equivalent (except, of course, that reactionary who concern-trolls about restroom usage and children's sport); perhaps it's best to conclude with some adolescent thoughts on ways to think urinals differently: John Giorno breaking the onanistic contingency by bringing in another party to the individualist pursuit (at least to check our work), "I'd go in the toilet, and all I had to do was take out my cock, wave it around, and some guy would go down sucking," (John Giorno, Great Anonymous Sex), and the (more funny) Kathy Acker on the reminder that, in relations to others, we have to remember to put a person at both ends: "My cunt used to be a men's toilet," (Acker, Blood and Guts in High School). ( )

The Short of It:

Prophetic and terrifying.

The Rest of It:

I’ve read 1984 three times in the past but the details didn’t’ stick with me. With our recent election, parts of the book kept coming back to me so I was curious to see how the book would hold up now.

Let’s just say that not only does it hold up, it mirrors certain recent events and beliefs. I found it to be absolutely terrifying and disturbing this time around.

Winston Smith is a Ministry employee. There are four ministries:

Ministry of Truth (news and entertainment, education)
Ministry of Peace (war)
Ministry of Love (law and order)
Ministry of Plenty (economic affairs)

None of these ministries are what they claim to be. Ministry of Love focuses on interrogation and torture. Ministry of Peace exists solely for the purpose of perpetuating war. Everyone must worship Big Brother, the eye in the sky that sees and hears everything via telescreens placed all over Oceania. The Ministry of Truth’s sole purpose is to destroy recorded history and to rewrite new history for consumption. The results of a war? Into the memory hole it goes and a new war is created.

Citizens are kept poor and hungry, are forced to work long laborious hours, and cannot even think a negative thought without the Thought Police breaking down their door. They are only allowed two minutes of hate a week, where all hate must be directed to one particular person. The joining of men and women can only be for procreation purposes, not as a result of desire. Children attend schools where they are taught spy tactics and are encouraged to turn their own parents in if the need should arise.

Everything goes sideways when Winston meets Julia. Could there be another person like him, who wants to fight the system? Could these people exist? Could they make a difference if they joined forces? These are all ridiculous thoughts and loosely concealed ones once Julia enters the picture.

Clandestine meetings can only go on for so long, and with so much risk. The way the story is told, you are on the edge of your seat every time they meet because Big Brother is everywhere and Julia’s lofty ideas about rebellion seem a little too perfect.

No one can be trusted which is why it’s so surprising when Winston befriends O’Brien. To Winston, O’Brien is the answer. O’Brien is the man who can save humanity. Winston bets everything on this.

Without completely ruining the ending for you, I’ll say that it’s impossible to read this story and interpret it in one way. It can go many different ways based on what stands out for you. Sayings, here and there, tiny hints and intentions tip you off and send you down a path of distrust. There are some aha moments but only when you compare the story to today’s politics.

I mean, if I thought that other party were big readers, I’d say they used 1984 as a playbook. Since they are going after books in schools, history, critical race theory and the like, it’s not hard to believe at all. ( )