I spent the first few days of this stay at home period re-reading Orwell’s 1984. The last time I read it I was in college and I didn’t have the experiences I do now to appreciate it.

In this thread I share a few reflections on it

The key to the entire book is thoughtcrime. The Party didn’t just want to control people’s actions, they wanted to control the very thoughts people have.

“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

For the party, so long as anyone had memories of the past or did not unquestionably and enthusiastically believe what the party preached, it meant that the glimmer of a different reality still existed in the world

This is why O’Brien worked so hard to break Winston down mentally. The Party sought to extinguish any and all dissent from the minds of everyone. This meat Winston could not be killed until they succeeded

They wanted physical compliance, of course, but they most sought mental compliance & control and anyone who expressed any divergent thought was by definition insane

This meant the unquestioning denial of objective reality if the party demanded it. Since the current crisis started in our own world, we haven’t much discussed cancel culture

But the act of “cancelling” someone is done because they dare to commit de facto thoughtcrimes. They think and even express thoughts that are unacceptable

We see it now to a lesser extent in the way those who believe this current crisis could have been handled differently are treated. If you disagree with the prevailing narrative that the whole economy had to be shut down you are committing a thoughtcrime

1984 will always be relevant so long as anyone wants to totally silence someone else for his or her thoughts

I will close with this quote from O’Brien:

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”