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Dehumanization In 1984

Decent Essays

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever” (220). The government’s power in the entire world has been increasing over the years. People are settling with what the government provides them, and many of them are ignoring what it could take away from them. Being human means to have the ability to express feelings and thoughts, to love and hate, to feel compassion and happiness, to have dignity and a decent life. The government in the novel 1984 is intended to dehumanize the people of Oceania in order to maintain power. With this novel, George Orwell warns about the consequences of conformity and ignorance. Ability to reason is one of the qualities that define a human. The human brain is capacitated …show more content…

The government attacks people’s ability to reason; the coworker of Winston explains to him, “’don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it’” (46). It takes away every source of knowledge that could contradict its principles. Also, The Party manipulates their potential of love and hate by determining whom these feelings should be directed to; people have to love Big Brother and hate the enemy, either Eurasia or Eastasia. It teaches people not to show any compassion for others, not even their own parents; children are trained by the Spies to denounce thoughtcrimes without compassion, as the author states “it was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children” (24). The government destroys their dignity by making them feel worthless and keeping them from having a decent life, the author argues “the Ministry [of Plenty] had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat” (39). Finally, it induces fear among people by watching them all the time, and punishing, torturing, and killing whoever doesn’t follow its rules or is against the …show more content…

Personal freedom is supposed to be limited by the authority so that public safety could be maintained, but The Party suppresses this liberty in order to maintain its own safety and interests. People are brainwashed so that they only express what the government wants to hear. They have come to a point of conformity where they don't think they could possibly deserve better because The Party has made them think that they live better now than people in the past, the story informs “day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses… than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved” (64). Winston knows this is not true so he tries to find evidence of the past, and he realizes that the only evidence is in his

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