The Destructive Influence Of Control And Paranoia

In order for the “Big Brother” to maintain this ideology, the ruler needs to have highly organized system and individuals to follow each and every task. In the novel, Oceania’s society has reached the level of brainwashing. In order for anyone to conquer such a vast and complicated system, the individual will need a highly-organized plan and a sophisticated mind to carry through. Winston possesses neither of these traits; therefore he was doomed to fail.

One of the most important concepts that many individuals in modern day society value the most is the idea that they have the freedom to do whatever they please. The term freedom means “being able to act, think, and speak in any way one wants to without any type of hindrance,”(Dictionary.com). In the book, 1984, by George Orwell, the totalitarian society ruled by Big Brother, in many ways, controls its citizens by hindering any types of freedom a member of the society might have. In a society that is decorated with telescreens, hidden microphones, and strict rules, Orwell illustrates the many ways Big Brother uses that to its advantage to stifle the freedom of its citizens. However, under all the scrutiny of Big Brother, there are

By manipulating history and giving no opportunity for inquiry the government dehumanizes the people even more by destroying free thought. The Party knows that memories will lead to questions, and then to critical thought. So it implements Doublethink and Newspeak as tools to negate the urge to question the legitimacy of the Party’s history. “The Party tacitly acknowledges the limitation of its control of the material and by implication the circulation of stories and memories by the implementation of both Doublethink and Newspeak. Doublethink can only be thought of as an imperfect system of thought control most at

the government, but ultimately he succumbs to the pressures he has been fighting his entire life.

Out of the increased abuse of surveillance emerges human fear, as an overdose of information leads to a paranoid society, whose skeptic lens distrusts everything and attempts to micromanage all portals of information, and a suppressed society, whose fear of discovery inhibits its expression. In Winston’s world of telescreens and thought police, the idea of privacy is nonexistent. The looming presence of Big Brother’s face “[is] as though some huge

The party has cleverly stripped each individual of their personal emotions, and through the use of war mentality, creates a world where one is always part of a larger crowd. One of the main aims of the Party is to “extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought” (193). In Oceania, you can never be truly alone, and speaking individual thoughts are considered a crime. In this way, the entire society of Oceania is not made up of independent, individual thinkers, but rather it is a single, mindless mass, and that is precisely what the Party wants. To be orthodox is to be stripped of individuality. By removing privacy and individuality, the Party has removed the ability for private contemplation and reasoning. All of Oceania is a single crowd with unrelentless faith in Big Brother. The result is a mindless population driven by instincts and emotions rather than logic and reason, allowing the party to completely alter the collective beliefs of the entire society.

In George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, Winston, a rebel who lives in a dystopic society challenges the totalities regime of Big Brother. The all-knowing Big Brother controls everything in Oceania. Anybody who despised the Party will be punished, arrested or abused, until their heart desired Big Brother. In this novel, it is unknown whether Big Brother is fictitious or an actual human being. Nevertheless, he symbolizes fear, hate, and pessimism to the people of Oceania.

Winston makes it known that Big Brother is freighting him. He wouldn’t think it’s imaginably possible to brainwash the people of his country and erase what had happened.

The main version of this surveillance is through the telescreen that is stationed in every room constantly watching the people. There is always propaganda across the screen supporting Big Brother and the endeavors of Ingsoc. The telescreen combined with the thought police is the ultimate tool for destroying individual thought, "The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself-anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide" (Orwell). This non-stop flow of information stimulates everyone to join in with the demands of Big Brother even when they do not want to. Even the telescreens and Thought Police are not enough because the people are faced with the omnipresent signs reading "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU," that are constantly scrutinizing them.

Additionally, the portrayal of this dystopian society controlled by a totalitarian government might have been understood well by contemporary audiences, mirroring the rules of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy- the citizens have no influence on the government and have no freedom of choosing the rules that govern and control every part of their lives. Therefore, Winston blames the misery in his life totally and completely on the government and on Big Brother. In Winston’s case, we can see that the propaganda, deprivation, and strict rules fail to make him concur with the party and accept Big Brother- in this situation, the party has to use extreme force and torture to make Winston love the party as well as Big Brother, in order for the party to maintain complete power.

state controls all aspects of people’s lives. Oceania’s entire population is under totalitarian rule and is

   Propaganda is another way that Big Brother controls his citizens. He has posters all over the city of himself. “It depicted simply an enormous face more than a meter wider. The face of man of about forty-five.”(pg.1) The posters are there to remind the people not to break the law or do anything out of the ordinary. It strikes fear into people when they see it. Another form of propaganda is the mics hidden around the city to capture and detect the people breaking the law. “I didn’t want to say anything in the lane,” she said, “ In

Yet, in reality the government in 1984, controls everything including the past, present, and future. In our modern world, government also has the power to do anything they desire. Despite having laws, anything is possible. In some cases, the government has been accused of altering history, whether it’s the past, present, or future.

Despite Winston's passionate hatred for the Party and his desire to test the limits of the Party's power, his capacity to carry out action against the Party is burdened (i.e. lacking positive freedom) by his intense paranoia and overriding belief that he will ultimately suffer scrutiny and brutal torture for the crimes he

In Orwell’s 1984, he displays psychological manipulation through Oceania’s government which it uses to control its citizens. This includes the use of propaganda, control of content, and ethnocentrism. The Party’s methods of control relates to real life events repeated in history such as the Nazi Regime from 1933 to 1945 headed by Adolf Hitler and common patterns in cultural history.