Although written over 70 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell’s’ chilling prophecy about the future.
In many ways, especially with technology evolving at the pace that it is and todays ability to access information on anything and anyone with a simple Google search, the book is unsettling and sobering.
While 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever. This is particularly evident in our court system where a government has unlimited resources and will go to any length, legal or otherwise to achieve its objective.
Plea bargains are a classic example by stiffer penalty’s and charge stacking if a person exercises their right to a trial before a jury of their peers. Giving up rights of appeal and being used as a pawn by defense lawyers in exchange for favorable outcomes in unrelated cases is another. 1984 is based around a central character named Winston Smith who toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. As he starts to think for himself, Winston cant’ escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching. The story was written long before video cameras and surveillance, which are on every street corner in big cities in America and across the globe.
The story was timely as last week I asked my outside contact person to open my laptop to pull up a few files that I need. The computer would not reboot and he took it a computer store to see what was up. It seems that from the time I last shut it down, something was spilled on it and fried the mother board. The technician was able to retrieve the data and said “a Government agency went into your computer and copied all the files”. The laptop was always in my possession and an electronic warrant was never issued. If the mother board did not fry, I would have never know my privacy was violated and all my files where being viewed by a third party. My guess is that they accessed it when I was connected to my home Wi-Fi. While I had nothing to hide, Big Brother is always watching!
Something else that stood out from the book was “The Party’s” desire and ability to keep its citizens under control.
“The care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.” George Orwell was the modern day Nostradamus. I found this novel startling and haunting. It created an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions. A power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.
