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George Orwell Politics

Decent Essays

In theory, politics exist to balance the various needs of individuals and to moderate conflicts between diverse interests. However, in reality there are no such ideal decision-making system; all governments have inefficiencies caused by manipulations, corruptions, and bureaucracies. George Orwell, in , has depicted the non-ideality of politics by sketching a highly controlled society in various dimensions. In this essay, I will investigate how the Party maintains its power, in two scopes; through its extensive manipulation and its inherent inequality combined with suboptimal standards of living. First, let’s observe how the regime manipulates its population. At the macroscopic level, the Party has Hate Weeks, produces propagandas, and displays …show more content…

Had the proletariat been equal with other classes, they would have thought and stood for themselves, which would be a great threat to the Party. Also, outer party members were provided with low-quality goods and had a standard of living only marginally better than the proletariat, to make small privileges of the inner party appear bigger and to induce loyalty. To realize it, the “Ministry of Plenty” and the “Ministry of Peace” limit the supply of usable goods and exhaust any surplus, to keep the standard of living low enough to maintain the Party’s dictatorship. In conclusion, the previous investigations shed light to how the Party holds its power; it eliminates opposition by brainwashing and tight surveillance, and it stabilizes its power by maintaining a perpetually superior socioeconomic status to its residents, especially the middle and the lower classes. But still, there is an open question. As Winston said, we know how but we don’t know “why”. Why the Party craved power and control to such harsh extent? Although O’Brien answered that the object of power is power, pure power, it is not a meaningful answer because he himself is also brainwashed as an inner party member. Then why such oppressive regimes originate even though humans strive for peace and equality? It is a fundamental conflict of human nature between power, violence and equality, peace; which should be solved to leap one step closer to the

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