Kiran's Utopias and Dystopias Blog

  The severity of the problems in the original 1984, as well as the likelihood of them happening, just increases as time goes on. With newer and newer technology that could be used to spy on us, the thought police could be almost unnecessary. There would be no safe places. The importance is that we prevent it from ever getting to that point by securing our basic rights and fighting to protect them. The good thing is that this is what America is based on, though it is not impossible for what happens in 1984 to happen here. It is important that we as people keep enough power that the government cannot do anything it wants with impunity. This also includes the bigger business and such that have hands in our government. It is important that the small number of people at the top should not be able to control the much larger amount of people at the bottom. This is really the only way of preventing 1984 from happening today. But another important idea is, if 1984 does start to happen, the...

       At the end of the novel, we see Winston crying, as he believes he has finally beaten his own feelings and has true love for Big Brother. But are those tears truly out of love for Big Brother? Or have his repressed feelings come back to haunt him? Winston doesn't seem to have truly let go of his feelings. He seems to have buried those feelings extremely deep, but no matter how deep they are, these memories still exist in his mind and he seems to be unable to forget them, no matter the torture he goes through, or how much time passes. He has a suitable "defense mechanism" against the thoughts that come up, quickly burying them in his mind with his love for Big Brother, or using the newspeak idea of crimestop, albeit not properly, as the thoughts come to him before he is able to stop them, although he is able to stop the thoughts as they come. But has he truly given up home? We know that he has given up Julia, but will he be able to achieve his goal of being agai...

 In the reading, we see that O'Brien describes that the Party is not working for the people. They know what they're doing. They just want power for the sake of power. They say that they aren't even trying to be a "stupid hedonistic Utopia". They want the world to become more and more merciless, they want all science, art, and literature to stop. They want no love, except for Big Brother. This is very different from the dystopia we see in Brave New World. In Brave New World, we see a society trying to be a Utopia, and for some people it is, but from a different point of view we see a Dystopia, creating its own societal norms. However, in 1984, we see a society willingly and knowingly becoming a Dystopia. The society isn't even trying to be a Utopia, and from no point of view is it a Utopia. Even the people who accept society are scared of it, with the thought police existing, and their children always having the possibility of giving them up for the smallest th...

 The Party uses very specific methods (torture) in order to make sure that no one disagrees with their viewpoints. We can see that the party inflicts intense pain on their prisoners whose thinking is not in line with what the party wants. O'Brien even compares what they are doing to the inquisition and the Nazis, explain why the Party is succeeding where they failed. He explains that the inquisition created martyrs by persecuting the heretics, however since they kept their beliefs to the end, they just created more heretics. The Nazis took it further. They forced fake confessions out of their "heretics", however, since they were obviously fake they essentially accomplished the same thing as the inquisition. The Party on the other hand truly makes their "heretics" believe in their confessions, using various means of torture and forced submission. In the end, we see that even Wilson, the staunchest of opponents to the Party's ideals, in the end, submits to the...