When George Orwell sat down in a remote Scottish farmhouse to write Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1948, he wasn’t trying to predict the future. Instead he was issuing a warning. Whether we live in the world his novel portrays is hardly up for debate; our decision-making is tracked and easily influenced; our future is determined by choices presented to us by algorithms; we pay, handsomely, to be tracked by technologies such as Alexa and Siri; and, with a handful of people in control of swathes of the world’s media, unwinnable wars for global domination continue, as we simply try to deduce what is real and what is not. (One mightn’t be surprised to hear that in the week in 2017 when Donald Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” to defend the White House’s claim that the “largest audience ever” had just witnessed the new US president’s inauguration, Orwell’s novel returned to the best-seller list.)
Nineteen Eighty-Four – published 75 years ago, in summer 1949 – depicts an imagined future where the world sees its people surveilled and controlled by three totalitarian states constantly at war. In our own world, Russia’s state-controlled media desribes Putin’s war on Ukraine as a “special military operation”; China’s social credit system ranks a person’s trustworthiness through constant supervision; Israel’s war on Palestine sees genocidal acts committed under the guise of protecting Judaism; and North Korea’s generational dictatorship, built around the Kim family’s cult of personality, claims that the late dictator Kim Jong II invented the burrito.
I first read Orwell’s masterpiece at 21. It was a tattered copy I picked up from a station bookshop when visiting Cambodia. I raced through its pages, unnerved by the fictional oppressive regime I was reading about while learning, around me, about the very real horrors of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The world as we knew it then did not seem to be far off Orwell’s depiction. Today it feels closer still: stories about anarchy, war and oppression dominate the news while, on Instagram, users control how others perceive them, photographing themselves in five-star hotels or the changing rooms of upmarket department stores before returning to the hostels they’re staying in and giving back the clothes they’ve rented by the hour.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four the truth is simply a starting point, one that could be deconstructed, moulded and changed, utterly, to fit a narrative. Ours is a time that will surely be categorised as one with an excess of information, resulting in a plague of division and leaving ordinary people to try to work out the facts – notwithstanding our prejudices. This age of disinformation, with its deepfakes, populist authoritarian presidents and fragile democracies, allows for a level of censorship not seen in decades to creep back in: book bans continue to surge across the US public-school system, far-right YouTube stars insist that women belong to men, tradwives rally against fourth-wave feminism, and profiles attempting to highlight genocide are purged from the internet. There might well come a day when we see Nineteen Eighty-Four removed from library shelves, too – a prospect that brings to mind one quote from the book in particular: “Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
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Orwell – real name Eric Arthur Blair – reportedly wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four during a period of ill health when worry about the state of the world was at an all-time high. He was particularly concerned that objective truth was becoming a thing of the past, while society withered down to the individual, as the rights and powers of the community were stripped away. We saw something similar, perhaps, with Brexit and the way zero accountability seemed to be demanded of the likes of Nigel Farage and the statements he made – and, indeed, when, during the US presidential campaign of 2016, propagandists at a Russian troll farm circulated a meme on social media with the words: “The people believe what the media tells them they believe: George Orwell.”
Ironically, Orwell never said this. At its core, his novel is about a person who is struggling to hold on to what is real. Today so many of us seem to have walked willingly into groupthink: it can be easier to envelop oneself in other people’s opinions than try to establish the truth ourselves. So some in our communities blame asylum seekers for their troubles instead of the politicians who are actually in charge, while incels believe they should hate women rather than turn inwards and work out why they feel the way they do. Truth, it turns out, is among the most difficult things to cling to.
At the climax of Nineteen Eighty-Four, when O’Brien, the commissar, gives Winston and Julia The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, he convinces Winston that two plus two equals five. How? Because this is a state where citizens have been made to question truth and accept obvious falsehoods over their own judgment. A result, as the Harvard professor Louis Menand describes, is the feeling that we’re losing control of our lives, and are powerless to resist.
That may seem far-fetched, but the practice scoops us all up. Think of automatically clicking to accept a website’s updated privacy policy. We don’t know exactly what we’re agreeing to, we didn’t know what the old privacy policy was, but we suspect that everyone else just clicks the box, so we do too. Or, less simply, think of when an electoral process is corrupted by a foreign government, as the United States’ was in 2016, and, as Menand puts it, “your government talks about charging the people who tried to investigate this interference with treason”. That’s Orwellian – and it’s no longer a warning but a reality.
A country in which one can read Nineteen Eighty-Four cannot be the country the novel describes. But whether you call them Big Brother and the Thought Police or big tech and X, we’re living with organisations that have persuaded us, as the American writer George Packer puts it, to willingly constrict our intellectual freedom, with all the damage it brings. As Orwell wrote, “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”
