Orwell's 1984 - Prophecy or Warning?

Comrade-yutyo, CC BY-SA 4.0

George Orwell’s novel 1984, written in 1948, seems to be coming to life before our eyes as we witness the advent of Biden’s Ministry of Truth, Homeland Security’s Thought Police, and modern Doublethink. 

As President Biden announced to US citizens that he is “losing his patience” with those who don’t follow his dictates, we realized America is no longer a free country. Instead, we live under a dictatorship. It no longer subscribes to the principles of our Founding Fathers, principles that used to include freedom of speech, due process of law, and the freedom to decide what to do with our bodies.

Some believed that Orwell was referring to Stalinist Russia or Hitler’s Germany in his novel. However, it was much more than that. Orwell was referring to the growth of totalitarianism within America and England because even in 1948, the tell-tale signs were emerging of what was to come.

By 1961, intellectuals like Eric Fromm and Aldous Huxley saw clearly the West’s brand of totalitarianism - one that was not obvious to most. According to Fromm in his Afterward written for the book 1984, “We and 1984 depict the completely bureaucratized society in which man is a number and loses all sense of individuality. This is brought about by a mixture of unlimited terror combined with ideological and psychological manipulation.” 

Sound familiar? 

As anyone who watches the Nightly News or PBS Newshour knows, we Americans are constantly in a state of fear, whether it is the fear of the virus, the fear of nuclear war, or the fears of freezing or starving to death from contrived famines or oil shortages. Or it is the fear of the coming housing market crash, the devaluation of the dollar, or a host of other ills, including climate change, catastrophic weather events, etc. We worry about war with China, and its imminent invasion of Taiwan. Each night we are treated to new pictures of death and devastation in Ukraine, while in America, Homeland Security has declared that parents who speak out at PTA meetings deserve investigation for domestic terrorism using our tax dollars. 

Not only are we kept by our handlers in a constant state of fear similar to the protagonist in Orwell’s 1984, but we are fed a steady diet of propaganda and doublethink designed to conform to the party line.

Orwell explained that constant war was necessary to fuel the economy and keep the population controlled with fear. 

The Documentary Filmmaker, Francis Richard Conolly illustrated this in his classic “Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick” by explaining the problem after the fall of the Berlin Wall was that America no longer had to fight the Cold War. We, in essence, had no enemy. Thus, one had to be invented. And we are well aware of what occurred on September 11, 2001, just one day after Donald Rumsfeld admitted that his Department of Defense could not account for trillions of dollars that had “gone missing” from the taxpayers’ coffers. So, a full investigation was pledged on September 10th to find the whereabouts of the missing money, which in an Orwellian twist, was totally forgotten after the horrors of 9-11. Not only has this been swept under the rug, but the stolen money has now reached some 21 trillion dollars.

Dr. Robert Malone recently wrote in his Substack Column, “For me, the stunning bookend is this recent revelation on Tucker Carlson that the first thing that I remember as a young person born in 1959, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was probably propagated in significant part by the United States Intelligence Community. Okay? And we have been to lied to about that my whole life.”

However, Conolly’s 2014 film, “Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick" gives incontrovertible evidence to support this contention and helps put the current events into perspective. We are now hurling headlong into a real-world 1984 scenario, and we would do well to understand Eric Fromm’s prescient words penned in 1961. Fromm explains we are headed towards a Western Totalitarianism that has all the hallmarks of 1984 - yet provides the illusion of living in a free and democratic society. A society where the Oligarchs rig the stock market and elections. A society where we are fed a steady diet of doublethink, a woman has a right to control her body when it comes to abortion, yet a citizen may not decline an experimental vaccination - where a person who is a biologic male, may legally claim he is a female. A society where one former President is branded a criminal for (inadvertently) storing so called classified documents in his home, yet a favored President who does a similar wrong is declared innocent. 

Fromm notes that Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning to those in the West who were lulled into a false sense of security in believing their nation was immune to the ills of totalitarianism and its evils, which included mass murder, imprisonment, and similar human rights atrocities. Orwell felt it was possible to avert this disaster by awakening the population which Madison Avenue and the drug of capitalist wealth had seduced.

The central question as Fromm distilled it is this: “Can human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love - that is to say, can man forget that he is human? Or does human nature have a dynamism which will react to the violation of these basic human needs by attempting to change an inhuman society into a human one?”

Fromm further explains the psychology of those Oligarchs in power, the puppet master(s) pulling the strings of our various nations’ presidents and prime ministers. He explains the leaders have but one aim, and it is not money, but power. Unlimited power over you and I and all human beings. “And power means the capacity to inflict unlimited pain and suffering to another human being.”

The method of achieving this, Fromm writes, is to dehumanize the population, to use technology to transform people into mere machines, while striving at the same time to transform machines into humans. With the rise of AI, we see this happening with applications like ChatGPT and a host of other software. In addition, we see the dehumanization of people as their genes are “edited” using mRNA technology. We witness Noah Harari calling people nothing more than “useless eaters” and “hackable animals.” We hear Klaus Schwab predicting and inviting the rise of transhumans, genetically edited people essentially bred to meet the needs of the ruling class in the New World Order.

Today in 2023, the Oligarchs have the technology to exert full and complete tyrannical control through transhumanism - a tyranny so complete using total surveillance and modern technology that escape from it may become impossible.

“Now in the past, many tyrants and governments wanted to do it, but nobody understood biology well enough,” Harari said. “Nobody had enough computing power and data to hack millions of people - not the Gestapo nor could the KGB do it. But soon, some governments and corporations will be able to systematically hack all the people [4:10].”

Fromm explains that Orwell desperately tried to warn us of what was inevitably coming to the West and pleaded with us to take head and stop it. In the name of all we hold sacred. In the name of freedom. In the name of humanity. 

Orwell’s hope can only be realized “by recognizing, so 1984 teaches us, the danger with which all men are confronted today, the danger of a society of automatons who will have lost every trace of individuality, of love, of critical thought, and yet who will not be aware of it because of “doublethink.” Books like Orwell’s are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too.”