An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truth

Soon after the first elec­tion of Don­ald Trump to the pres­i­den­cy of the Unit­ed States, George Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four became a best­seller again. Shoot­ing to the top of the Amer­i­can charts, the nov­el that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s lat­est opus, the poet­ry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, and the mem­oir of an ambi­tious young man named J. D. Vance. But how much of its renewed pop­u­lar­i­ty owed to the rel­e­vance of a near­ly 70-year-old vision of shab­by, total­i­tar­i­an future Eng­land to twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, and how much to the fact that, as far as influ­ence on pop­u­lar cul­ture’s image of polit­i­cal dystopia, no oth­er work of lit­er­a­ture comes close?

For all the myr­i­ad ways one can crit­i­cize his two admin­is­tra­tions, Trump’s Amer­i­ca bears lit­tle super­fi­cial resem­blance to Ocea­ni­a’s Airstrip One as ruled by The Par­ty. But it can hard­ly be a coin­ci­dence that this peri­od of his­to­ry has also seen the con­cept “post-truth” become a fix­ture in the zeit­geist.

There are many rea­sons not to want to live in the world Orwell imag­ines in Nine­teen Eighty-Four: the thor­ough bureau­cra­ti­za­tion, the lack of plea­sure, the unceas­ing sur­veil­lance and pro­pa­gan­da. But none of this is quite so intol­er­a­ble as what makes it all pos­si­ble: the rulers’ claim to absolute con­trol over the truth, a form of psy­cho­log­i­cal manip­u­la­tion hard­ly lim­it­ed to regimes we regard as evil.

As James Payne says in his Great Books Explained video on Nine­teen Eighty-Four, Orwell worked for the BBC’s over­seas ser­vice dur­ing the war, and there received a trou­bling edu­ca­tion in the use of infor­ma­tion as a polit­i­cal weapon. The expe­ri­ence inspired the Min­istry of Truth, where the nov­el­’s pro­tag­o­nist Win­ston Smith spends his days re-writ­ing his­to­ry, and the dialect of Newspeak, a severe­ly reduced Eng­lish designed to nar­row its speak­ers’ range of thought. Orwell may have over­es­ti­mat­ed the degree to which lan­guage can be mod­i­fied from the top down, but as Payne reminds us, we now all hear cul­ture war­riors describe real­i­ty in high­ly slant­ed, polit­i­cal­ly-charged, and often thought-ter­mi­nat­ing ways all day long. Every­where we look, some­one is ready to tell us that two plus two make five; if only they were as obvi­ous about it as Big Broth­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

George Orwell Explains How “Newspeak” Works, the Offi­cial Lan­guage of His Total­i­tar­i­an Dystopia in 1984

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

George Orwell’s Har­row­ing Race to Fin­ish 1984 Before His Death

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You!

What “Orwellian” Real­ly Means: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son About the Use & Abuse of the Term

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.