1984

No police state could really be that effective, you couldn’t rule such a tyrranical regime unless you had masses of advanced technology too help monitor potential dissidents. Yet for every piece of technology such a state possessed, so to would the dissidents. Orwell presents us with an implausible, hypothetical extreme which obviously couldn’t happen in real life.

Or so you’d think. Or at least, that’s the purpose of the book, to inspire such chains of thoughts. Could 1984 happen? Obviously it’s chronological out of date, but you could just as well argue that the writing of 1984 helped stop the events it described from coming true. When the prophets of doom are heeded and appropriate action taken, cynics complain that the prophecy didn’t come true and was therefore invalid.

Either way 1984 gives us a language with which to attack the powers that be, for which we can be grateful. Maybe some of the terms get over-used, maybe every camera put up in town centres is lazily critized as another ‘big brother’, but surely this suspicious attitude itself is healthy to maintain the values of freedom of thought the right to privacy.

You can’t prove that 1984 could never happen because you can’t predict what possible futures are waiting for us. Ruling it out as mere science fiction may be a little now-centric and show up your ignorance of all the possible ways that a civilisation can organise itself. Societies are in constant flux, they may settle into an equilibrium for a while, but for as long as there is innovation, competition, invention, science and media there will be forces of change pushing us towards a different stable state. It is at least plausible that as soon as we chance into a state where there are no forces of change, that we stay that way for a very long time. Yet the purpose of 1984 was not prediction, but warning. Orwell didn’t say: “This will happen.” he said: “Don’t let this happen.” and we haven’t. Yet.

(Stuart Bray 2001)