Brainwashing constituents in Orwell’s 1984 and Today’s World
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Course
El Inglés como Vehículo Intercultural
Institution
Universidad De Almería
In this essay I’ve provided a comparison between brainwashing constituents in Orwell’s 1984 and Today’s World (particularly United States). It helps us gain a deeper insight into the motives and purposes of United States international politic as well as its political ideology. I’ve also at...
Bibliography and Webliography ...................................................................................... 11
, George Orwell’s world and career
Born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal, India, in 1903, George Orwell was a
novelist, essayist and literary critic. He became famous for his novels Animal Farm and
Nineteen Eighty-Four. His father worked as a civil servant for the British consulate. The Blair
family moved from colonial India back to England when Eric was just a young boy and he
remained there until after his lackluster academic career was over. Like many notable authors,
Orwell began writing at a very young age but despite the quality of his work, he was not
immediately able to make a living from his hobby. Orwell moved back to India and was working
as an administrator for the Indian Imperial Police. Orwell worked there for only a few years as
he began to notice the injustices and inequities inherent to colonial rule.
Returning to England, Orwell moved from job to job before finally deciding he wanted
to write professionally. He took his penname “George Orwell” and began to write his first novels
including Out in Paris and London and Burmese Days. It was during that period of his life when
he married Eileen O’Shaugnessy and his socialist views began to solidify in the wake of several
worldwide events. After realizing his political views, Orwell went to Spain where he fought with
the United Workers Marxist Party. The war made him a strong opposer of communism and an
advocate of the English brand of socialism. Shortly after this experience, he served for the
British in World War II as a correspondent and it was after this that he wrote “Animal Farm”
that gave him the critical and even commercial success he was looking for. After the war Orwell
lived mostly on the remote island of Jura in the Western Isles of Scotland. Unfortunately, the
majority of the recognition came too late with his death (from tuberculosis) in 1950.
Another world wide success was “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, one of the classical works of
science fiction along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and H.G. Wells novels Time
Machine, War of The World and Invisible Man. Orwell has inspired a number of other science
fiction novels, among them Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and he himself implicitly
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, acknowledged his debt to Evgeny Zamyatin's (1884-1937) novel “We”, which was written in
1920 and translated into English 1924. Science fiction, with its ability to elaborate thoughts,
experiments, possible courses of events in fantastic versions of the future, often uses the trope of
brainwashing. In a brainwashing scenario, some entity or person seeks to convince the masses
into believing a false version of reality. In 1984 Orwell uses this brainwashing feature as a means
of discussing the nature of reality.
Throughout the novel the author makes us to make a conclusion that the reality is
largely a matter of perception, reading the book we find out that this brainwashing process is
possible only if some other concepts work well. This process comprises different means of
control people such as media and language control, psychological manipulation, information
regulation, etc. Thus, using all these different forms of control, The Party is able to run the lives
of the citizens of Oceania. We see that the Party controls everything: every aspect of people’s
life is under its control, there is no privacy because it has installed cameras in every house; the
public life of the inhabitants is under party’s control as well. It is worth to remark that this
control is not directed only by arms or force, but mainly by fear: the fear of the party as
institution the fear of the internal common enemy and also, in Winston’s case, the fear of himself
or of his own thoughts.
The science fiction novel is often recognizable to us by the fact that it involves
technology or ideas that do not belong to the time in which they appeared and sometimes these
ideas are prophetic. We can find the prophetic elements in many science fiction books like the
scientific romances of Jules Verne or Well’s “The Time Machin”e or Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit
451” and “The Brave New World” by Huxley and Orwell’s “1948” is not exception. However,
from Orwell’s biography we learn that he insisted that his book wasn't a prophecy, he claims that
«he intended to warn a society of the potential perversions bureaucracy and the state and the
perversion of power» that he had witnessed over his life in different forms in England and Spain.
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