Terms from "1984" – Which are active and alive today!

George Orwell’s novel 1984 is Orwell’s dark cautionary tale published in 1949 about the dangers of totalitarianism, government surveillance, and censorship. Orwell made up new words and phrases, one could give him full credit in coining them, to direct readers to the anti-utopia idea that “Oceania” (made up place) really was.  These coined phrases, some of which are still in use today, and still point to an overreaching government.

The problem today is they can easily be fitted to what is happening in real-time all around us. We have changed the names of some, but their meaning and force are alive and well, living and growing in our present age.

Big Brother: the personification of the unseen monolithic leader of the Party of Oceania.

Today’s Example: It is rather obvious to equate this with the mainstream press, big tech, and the democrat party’s alliance to put forth a unified agenda. However “Big Brother” has morphed into the popular vernacular to also encompass what Orwell called “Thinkpol”; see below for that.  

Doublethink: the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct. According to Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, doublethink is “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.” Four examples of doublethink used throughout 1984 include the slogans: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and 2 + 2 = 5.

Today’s Example: We see this in politics on a regular basis today. The outrage about something done or said by an opposing party, then doing it themselves when they are in the majority, then when out of power the outrage of the same thing returns. The most glaring example is the border crisis and how the parties bat this one back and forth over the net.  

Memory hole: a small chute leading to a large incinerator. Anything that needed to be wiped from the public record (embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts) would be sent into the memory hole. As a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith often has to throw things into the memory hole to revise history and keep current with the ever-evolving Party dogma.

Today’s Example: The revision of history is a key factor in the movement today. Remove any history of what we have done good which leaves the memories of only the negative. Think about the riots of 2020, the tearing down of historical monuments, the demand to rewrite the history of the US…. etc.

Newspeak: a purposefully ambiguous and confusing language with restricted grammar and limited vocabulary used in Oceania, according or Orwell, “to diminish the range of thought.” For example, in newspeak, the term plusgood had replaced words better and great.

Today’s Example: The curtailment of the use of words along with the demand to use words that are literally made up for a political purpose all fits right into newspeak. We are now told what words are acceptable, what pronouns we must use, and recently how we must talk to our government overlords if we do not like what they do.

Thinkpol: a newspeak word to describe the secret police of Oceania, who are responsible for the detection, prosecution, and elimination of unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the Party. They use audio-visual surveillance via telescreens and offender profiling to monitor the populace.

Today’s Example: Here we see another aspect of the unholy alliance between big tech, mainstream press, and the government. With the tech that is available today, computers, laptops, and your own personal monitoring device known as a cell phone, the implantation of this is easy. Not sure? Think Patriot Act, DHS, the weaponization of the FBI, IRS …etc. Then consider the government has literally spent billions in tax money creating facilities to do exactly this. In fact, this is accomplished why easier than what Orwell had imaged.

Unperson: someone whose existence has been excised from the public and private memory in Oceania.

Today’s Example: Can you say “cancel culture”? – Need I say more? Now add the anti-vaccine demonization rhetoric, and you have the perfect brew to “unperson” someone at will.