This is a buddy read with Cyberkitten! I distinctly remember reading 1984 for the first time in high school, as it was the most depressing thing I’d encountered since Flowers for Algernon. and yet it’s one I’ve returned to time and again — not for its plot, so much, as for the sinister world Orwell constructed, and the insights gained from studying it. I posted a review for 1984 in 2013, so this will be a little more informal and muse-y.

I imagine anyone reading this knows the gist of 1984, but I’ll render it anyway just in case a Martian has added me to their RSS feed.A minor functionary in a police state whose name is Winston Smith works in the “Ministry of Truth”, which is more than a propaganda firm: it continually revises books and newspaper articles to comply with the reality dictated by the Party. Wheat harvest lower than predicted? No worries, we can alter the predictions retroactively and remove all evidence to the contrary. Winston’s role in actively manipulating ‘the truth’ creates a strong amount of cognitive dissonance and a deeply-buried hatred for the party that controls his entire life and the world around him. Rebelling, he begins a secret journal to write down his thoughts, to have something solid to look back on — and has encounters that make him think there’s hope for the future. Then, of course, hope is thrown into the woodchipper. The result is a deeply unsettling but perspective story that has cast a long shadow over the Anglo-American world, making it a modern classic and must-read.

I’ve read 1984 several times over the last 20+ years, and every time different parts of it have leapt out. My first reading simply would have been a depressing story of a man in the clutches of an all-powerful state. The book improves with age, though — at least, the age of the reader. Later readings, as I matured, brought out different aspects. I noticed, for instance, that while people frequently make Big Brother dictator references, that misses something important: Big Brother is not a man, but the system: a system that controls every aspect of people’s lives, spying on them via Telescreens that propagate ‘news’ and issue orders. There is no Caesar to assassinate, but an network of cruel technocrats. I noticed, too, the sheer inhumanity and ugliness of this world: ugliness and inhumanity pervade this novel: goods are shabby, food tasteless, streets grey, faces pale and spiritless. People are experts in masking their faces so their emotions don’t give away doubt, confusion, or anything that’s not hatred toward the Party’s enemies. The one moment where something of joy and light enters the picture is when Winston is approached by an attractive woman who seems to know he’s a rebel-in-the-making, and they have a love affair beginning with a tryst in a field. The role of sexuality and nature here are a wonderful contrast against the joyless industrial machine Winston and the rest are caught up in. Sexuality has a similarly subversive role in Brave New World, as I recall — animal passion disrupting the cold command of the State.

Reading this in 2025 was an interesting experience: we all relate the insights to our particular political irritants. My political biography began with my opposition to the terror-war and the federal-corporate surveillance state it created, so when I read this in 2013 the aspects on surveillance were especially salient. That’s still incredibly relevant today, especially since Google and facebook appear to be more attentive than any Party official with a telescreen, hastening to muffle, smother, or outright block what they judge as thoughtcrime — Google even plays with its search results, astonishing given that Search is what it made its name on. Government surveillance can have only grown since 2013, and the beast on the Potomac has yet to forgive Edward Snowden for exposing its sins to the world. What stood out most this time, though, was the political control of language, which has been on full display the last decade or so — with sense thrown out the window. A world where math can be racist and women are reduced to “cervix-havers” is one consumed by nonsense and unreality brought to mind by “newspeak” and “doublethink”. The Ministry of Truth in 2025 might have an easier time of weaving unreality, given the sheer fluidity of the digital world, and the overwhelming amount of content generated. How difficult it would be for any person to hear a signal in the noise, let alone continue paying attention to it as Winston does here. Even if someone had documentary evidence of wrongdoing in the party (as Winston has, briefly) it could simply be dismissed as a fake.

I doubt this is my last time reading 1984: it is a genuine classic, giving new gifts every decade. Coming up next: Bloodlands, a history of Europe between Hitler and Stalin. So much mass murder by men with bad mustaches.

Quotes:

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you— something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.

Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.

He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.