The 1984 novel, with the book Animal Revolution, is the most famous works by writer George Orwell, who presents us with a political literature with extremely interesting psychological nuances. Orwell is famous for having an ideology based on democratic socialism (not being confused with social democracy) and antitotalitarism, which is why Orwell went to Spain to fight fascism in the POUM militia during the Civil War, a story he tells in his book Fighting in Spain.
1984 is a dystopian novel based on a system of government called IngSoc. This government has created a society based on information control, whose main premise is: “Who controls the present, controls the past and controls the past, controls the future?”Today it is considered an excellent job to reflect on our current society, questioning the extent to which we have become an Orwellian society.
- During the book.
- George Orwell presents a series of concepts or ideas that are very attractive from the point of view of psychology.
- So in this article we will discuss in depth some of them.
- In particular we will talk about: ( a) dual thinking.
- (b) a new language and (c) a society based on information control.
One of the central aspects that allow population control in the IngSoc system is dual thinking. Double thinking means the power or ability to have two conflicting opinions simultaneously, two opposing beliefs housed at the same time in the same person.
The population is educated in a dual language to accept contradictions and understand their practical existence, in the control society of 1984 do not hide the devices of totalitarian state, people learn to accept them and reject them at the same time. is reflected in the three slogans proposed by IngSoc:
War and Paix. La freedom is slavery. Ignorance is a fortress
The ultimate goal of dual thinking is for individuals to turn it into automatic behavior. In order to take into account two contradictory ideas without even realizing that the two are contradictory. Now, does this happen in real life?This is where the interesting psychological fact of double thought comes in.
Numerous studies have shown us that our brain has contradictory ideas, this revolves around Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, which states that, on many occasions, we have dissonant ideas, but there are mechanisms to ignore or resolve this dissonance. a way to rationalize dissonances and be able to live with them.
Today we use double thought more than we think and governments benefit to some extent, a clear example is animosity towards terrorist attacks, while many of our states (protected by the governments in which we vote) also commit similar acts and even sell weapons to these terrorist groups. You have to be very careful, because rationalizing contradictions is an automatic process and we can do it easily and without realizing it.
Another fundamental aspect of 1984 control is the control of thought, for this IngSoc seeks to change language so that thought becomes practical and not useful for reasoning, because if people reasoned too much, they would eventually break with double thought, lead to the destruction of the state order. Thus, following Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis, George Orwell proposes that by changing language, we change the human spirit.
To achieve this, IngSoc reduces language to its lowest level of complexity, transforming it into a fully pragmatic communication language, in this way synonyms and antonym lose their meaning, it is no longer important to communicate the nuances of words that lead to value judgments. interpretations. And antonymps generate conflict, and conflict comes from rationalization. An example of this could be the elimination of the word “war” and speak only in terms of more peace or less peace.
The lesson we can extrapolate from language to our lives are the dangers of language, language is able to change our perception and our way of thinking, so a political discourse can be very different depending on the words used in it. To use words like “democracy,” “constitutional,” “peace,” and if you put them on the other side of words like “attack” or “war,” whatever your program, seek the sympathy of citizens. , it is important to explore reasoning and not fall into the superficial but powerful inspiration of language.
In 1984, the big brother? (Big Brother) is the one who always watches and controls everything, citizens see each other everywhere, even at home. Even within families, children learn to monitor their parents and report them if they commit a crime. A key aspect of the control is the manipulation of information.
For IngSoc, the past can be rewritten to control the stability of government. In the novel, there is the Ministry of Truth dedicated to changing all texts, newspapers or books to promote the “Big Brother”. that chocolate rations would increase, and now there is less than before, past data is modified to give the impression that they have increased.
Currently we are not immune to the manipulation and control of information, mass media, such as television, radio or newspapers, generally have parties and governments behind them that change information to influence people’s opinions, so any information or reading requires a minimum of caution and a lot of thought.
George Orwell, in 1984, presents a very interesting dystopian society with great parallels with our current society. It is important to think about it and see the perversion of our society. If we want to avoid moving to an Orwellian world, it’s important to think about it. Maintain a critical view of the mechanisms of influence and persuasion, so that even if they exist, we are not victims of them.