A BRAVE NEW WORLD: PARALLELS WITH 1984

NAME

AP Government

INSTRUCTOR NAME

May 13th, 2019

Creation & Maintenance of Prole Class 3

Surveillance 5

History-Rewriting 6

Language Reconstruction 7
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In George Orwell’s 19841, the time of the truly free men is long-gone for good. All that

remains are the proles, the stereotypically idiotic working class, the party members, who are

watched aggressively, out of paranoia for what they could do, and the higher party members,

who are high up enough that they gain nothing from a revolt; motivating them to keep the other

classes oppressed. Through the centralization of government (and the usage of “doublespeak”

to confuse and muddle), four institutions now serve as the monolithic primary institutions: the

Ministry of Peace (war), the Ministry of Love (crime), the Ministry of Truth (“truth-modification”

and establishment of a new, doctored language), and the Ministry of Plenty (economics;

presumably the source of the skimpy rations). Above these four institutions, although it is

relatively unclear what the leading figure is, Big Brother is used as an idol, of the “well-advised

parent” just looking out for you. In this essay, I propose that the locking of classes, and the

gradual enslavement of the population is now equally applying to our population, in this world. In

order to best accomplish this, I will look over a number of categories, and discuss how they are

implemented: The maintenance and creation of a stable “prole” class, surveillance /

centralization, history-rewriting and newspeak-like changes to popular language.

In summary, however, the 5 categories can be described in this fashion. Creating a prole

class requires a manipulation of culture and education; to encourage mindlessness and

listlessness, and conversely to discourage literacy as well as the process of obtaining greater

understanding; with particular attention to maintaining your mediocrity. Surveillance is

accomplished through centralization, and centralization makes surveillance simpler; the US

government truly stepped over this line after the PATRIOT Act2, but bad precedents stretch

back into the seventies; and centralization is a continual, growing process, with an increasingly

limited process of oversight in the Executive branch becoming electing a different (and hopefully

1
Orwell. 1984.
2
H.R. 107-56, 107th Cong., U.S. Government Printing Office (2001) (enacted).
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not corrupt) president. History-rewriting, unlike in 1984’s paper-backed time, is very simple; ask

all of the news companies, who you oftentimes fund, to change something unannounced. Then,

with sympathetic Wikipedia administrators covering you, change some of the facts on the

Wikipedia page to match (and use the articles as citations!). Just like that, the vast majority of

people will only see your rewrites. The modification to language is nowhere near that of 1984’s

gigantic agency dedicated to accomplishing a new, government-friendly language, but the

phenomenon of “political correctness” implies an increasingly repressive and punishing culture

that is trying to accomplish Orwell’s grand aim in its limited fashion. It’s impressive, looking

around at the changes that have occured, that they have been so well implemented; a hundred

years ago what we have taken for granted would have been unacceptable.

Creation & Maintenance of Prole Class

The American anomaly is that for a unique first time, the working classes were

empowered to become educated, and educated they did; which meant that the abuses of

government were weakened under the proper scrutiny of the lower classes. This has been

successfully “fixed” through “improving” the educational system.There are 3 main ways to

weaken the lower-classes to the point at which they are no longer a significant threat. First,

control public education so they cannot be taught, and rig it such that they will in fact “un-learn”

the ability to learn and change. Second, control their entertainment so that it promotes traits that

make them easier to manipulate. Third, encourage fracturing of families, from fully-built tribal-

style ones, to nuclear ones, to dysfunctional ones that collapse, leaving only atomized

individuals.

Thus, once loosely-tied proles are the only remnants of a previously familial system,

people can be much more easily manipulated by the government and corporate institutions, as

they have no support network they are born into EXCEPT the government’s “generosity”. ow do

you de-famili-ize someone? Public Education. Whether you believe or not, it accomplishes this
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seeming purpose well. John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education

covers it well [emphasis added]:

“The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human

development aren’t hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to

satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience

raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem encountered in

actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings,

experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. ... Growth and

mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing,

reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures

of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.”3

The goal, I restate, is to produce conveniently easily-managed proles who cannot connect to

others, cannot self-organize, are wandering and listless, connected to nothing but perhaps their

own narcissism.

This similarly appears in 1984, but via making random people into potential spies:,

including parents’ own children; breaking the individual down not through state-sponsored

education, but constant paranoia:

“Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from

before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between

man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a

friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be

taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.”4

How do we accomplish taking children from their mother? Simply force them to spend a majority

of their developmental years in public schools! This will them into a swarm of human locusts,

3
Gatto, John Taylor. The Underground History of American Education.
4
Orwell. 1984. p. 337
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always on the lookout for something to wring dry, unable to connect meaningfully except in

pursuit of money.

Surveillance

In 1984, surveillance is complete and constant; you are monitored constantly and only

through hiding in the middle of crowds and talking to one another without looking are you able to

communicate semi-privately. Surveillance is performed by telescreens, televisions that are also

monitoring devices, essentially two-way TVs. Whilst proles are given the right not to have them,

people who are trusted, Outer Party members, all have them, and have no ability to turn them

off, merely make them quieter. Inner Party members have the luxury of turning it off, but even

they rarely tend to do so. Essentially, the proles are assumed to be unimportant and are

ignored, whilst the Outer Party members are watched constantly, for they could be dangerous if

they were given the opportunity.

In our world, a much stranger system is evident. Instead of the government compulsorily

installing telescreens in every apartment, we buy them. Whilst they normally don’t have

cameras, and they normally don’t spy on you, there is a CIA exploit that would allow them to

easily do that regardless of any warrant. In addition, while the government can’t spy on your

phone, multinational corporations can and will to spy on you for advertising purposes, aka to

make money. In addition to this, the PATRIOT Act permits the government to compel

companies to give them their records, so maybe they are spying on you after all. Even if they

aren’t, though, it permits them to go through FISA courts, which constantly approve warrants

without proper cause (meaning you have no right to defend yourself), delay sending notice of

warrants, secretly search homes and offices, and scrutinize the “outside” of emails (including

the subject line) and letters.5 6 In any sense, the Federal government doesn’t have much

restriction on what it can do, it just usually doesn’t.

5
Sharon. How the USA Patriot Act Will Permit… .
6
Rubel. Privacy and the USA patriot act: Rights,
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History-Rewriting

The next section is largely hypothetical; sourcing on the topic is mediocre and instead I

use observations of how people and Wikipedia work. First, I observe that news articles, while

they frequently do enlist notifications that the articles changed in order to retain a sense of

legitimacy. By the law of “If they can do it, they will, AS LONG AS it’s easier”, if they can also

without a notice, then it will have happened at some point. As a logical extension of this, you

could significantly rewrite articles, change their conclusions, and as most people don’t regularly

check articles for rewrites after, have that as the record. Conversely, you could write a biased

and low-quality article, and then unapologetically “finish” it afterwards. Everything here is very

possible and easy; if they cannot do anything and more then it would highly surprise me.

Second, I observe the vulnerability of Wikipedia to being rewritten at any given time. This

particularly applies to certain topics, but if you have an administrator, who can override the

opposing “force” on an article, then you are completely fine. I don’t mean vandalism, either;

change some of the facts, incrementally enough not to accumulate a great number, and pretend

you haven’t changed anything. It is very possible for Wikipedia to ignore this, and if you can

(which is easy, they are a not-particularly-discriminative group of volunteers) gain control

through “owning” admins or higher, then you don’t really need to be even subtle. If the users

complain, just ignore them! Nobody over relying on Wikipedia will notice a thing; they are too

uneducated to detect bias even if someone beat them over the head with a roll of worksheets on

exactly that.

Now, let us stand back from the two observations. What we have now are two

capabilities, and these two are very well enough. First, if we are the government / a corporation,

we can threaten the news company, and force then to change an article unannounced. Then,

the facts are “changed”. Second, if we have plants in Wikipedia, again easy if you have any

reasonable budget, then you can “correct” the information on Wikipedia. Let it be known

additionally that these two aspects work very well together; lazy news writers copy from
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Wikipedia, spreading the “fixed” reality, Wikipedia can then cite the lazily-written articles as

proof. The information age is here, but we have become too lazy in researching, and because of

the constant internet-borne bombardment of information, a simple infiltration of the top three

sources on Google means that a majority of people will never see another perspective. They

would need a gigantic Ministry to rewrite the history in Orwell’s time, but now that we have the

internet, now that we have regressed into sea sludge with the representative attention span, all

we need are a few changes to the articles to keep them “in line”.

Language Reconstruction

In 1984, the central government, working alongside the Ministry of Truth, worked on an

ambitious project to mutilate English until all that was left would not permit people to think

rebellious thoughts. They did this via two means; very specifically-defined words that then

replaced their ingredients; and via very vaguely defining words that served as political ‘rivals’ to

desirable thought. Let Orwell explain:

These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they

contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered

by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten.

“All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance,

were contained in the single word CRIMETHINK, while all words grouping themselves

round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word

OLDTHINK. Greater precision would have been dangerous. ... The less he knew about

them [criminal thought] the better for his orthodoxy.”7

“Speaking is a necessary requisite for thought; with limited language comes limited

thinking, unless the person is inventive enough to create his own language.”8

7
Orwell. 1984.
8
Orwell. 1984.
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Finally, I found the most compelling proof it does so in a book with seemingly no relation:

“Based on the presence of certain obligatory grammatical markers for distinctions such

as number (singular/plural), tense (past/present/ future), gender (male/female/neuter),

direct/indirect speech, conditional, subjunctive, perfective/imperfective and so on,

languages limit the ambiguity of utterances, and lend a certain automatic precision to

both thought and expression. This is more of a statistical effect; if a language obligatorily

marks hearsay, then people are more likely to distinguish hearsay from evidence in daily

life. But even if it doesn’t, then people can still understand the distinction once it is

explained to them, and act on it.”9

Language is vulnerable!

Conclusion

We’ve outlined four different comparisons throughout this paper. First, the prole class is

ignored in 1984, but actively created in our world, using electronic devices to entertain them,

and “schooling” to break them into being proles. Second, surveillance can best be described as

very complete, but not often used in this world, with the added vulnerability to hackers, which

could steal your personal information because the government keeps electronically storing it.

We’ve also, funnily enough, bought the surveillance devices with our own money. Third, history

rewriting is very easy as a result of the intellectual decline of the population, as well as the

electronic age; fixing the first few articles and POSSIBLY rigging the search engine to give

those first would be adequate. Fourth, languages serve as a means of mental precision. If it is

not given in a topic, and the person does not provide it, they are unable to continue. I don’t think

we live in a better time than in 1984; certainly a happier one, but this is a drugged happiness,

not a conscious realization of our potential, which is seemingly forgotten.

9
Orlov. The Five Stages of Collapse. Survivors’ Toolkit. p. 241.
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Bibliography

Dean, Mike, and George Orwell. 1984. Pearson Education, 2008.

Gatto, John Taylor. The Underground History of American Education. Oxford Village Press,
2000.

H.R. 107-56, 107th Cong., U.S. Government Printing Office (2001) (enacted).

Orlov, Dmitry. The Five Stages of Collapse: a Survivor's Toolkit. New Society Publishers, 2013

Rackow, Sharon H. "How the USA Patriot Act Will Permit Governmental Infringement upon the
Privacy of Americans in the Name of Intelligence Investigations." U. Pa. L. Rev. 150
(2001): 1651.

Rubel, Alan. "Privacy and the USA patriot act: Rights, the value of rights, and autonomy." Law
and Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2007): 119-159.

"Vault 7: Projects." WikiLeaks. https://wikileaks.org/vault7/.

Womersley, Hugh Bryan Spencer. (1984). South Australian Gov. Print., 1984.