Ahem, I have finished reading Nineteen Eighty-Four today. What an unnerving and extreme view of a future, a future, thankfully, did not happen. At least, not yet, and hope it will never happen in this universe. In addition to being a good read, Nineteen Eighty-Four also serve as a warning to future generations. In consequence of elucidating the intentions of The Party, the book offers quite a deep, almost philosophical, view into the ideas of freedom, of the perception of reality, of the concept of past, and other abstract notions uninteresting or too onerous for me to talk about. But there is one particular schema that did strike me. It lies in the following quote, where Syme is talking to Winston about Newspeak:
“How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
Newspeak is the official new language created by The Party, the omnisciently despotic government of Oceania. The driving feature of Newspeak is its very limited and extremely concise vocabulary. Where words like “excellent” and “splendid” is replaced by “plusgood” and “doubleplusgood”, and “bad” is “ungood”. Its purpose is to restrict one’s imagination, and therefore restrict one’s potential to rebel, captured by that quote above. As someone who regards language as more than simply a way of communication, but as an art form, this scares me, and scares me immensely. I cannot even imagine what literature is like written in Newspeak. Will there even be literature when the very word and its meaning is diabolically twisted or lost? It is like asking will there be the color red when the definition of red is changed into something we do know yet. Ow. My brain. Resuming my thought, Newspeak is just one implementation of the main driving force of The Party and Big Brother. Thought Police, relentless propaganda and brainwashing, and alteration of past, present, and reality, all function to force people to think, behave, know the “right” way, the only way. “Right” with respect to The Party’s view, hence in quotations. After all, the words “right” or “wrong” implies there are choices, and there is no “right” or “wrong” when one can only do one thing with nothing else to compare. From the psychology 101 course I took last year (I will be taking psychology 102 and 205 – culture and evolution in social behaviour next semester as my electives), some of the defining characteristics of consciousness is the awareness of oneself, and the ability to make choices through that awareness. The Party is steadily diminishing the possibilities of being an individual, eventually, there is only one “right” possibility remaining, and at this point consciousness is driven away, and along with it, individuality, which dissolves into uniformity. And thus there lies perhaps the most disconcerting thought of the novel, where humanity is lost and human beings are not human beings anymore, but like a mass of bacteria, just merely existing.
Muir Woods 