Could Oceania Ever Really Exist?

1984 and the Orwell’s greatest fears

                George Orwell hated communism. . . but, more importantly, he hated the unenlightened aspect of humans that believed it could exist. Orwell’s greatest critique of mankind, as evidence in 1984 and the blatant use of brainwashing propaganda by “Big Brother”, is their refusal to believe in the fallibility of what they are taught. In speaking of England he wrote, “Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.” He later expressed that, “It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. . . but no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected.”

As a fervent democratic Socialist from a young age (he once remarked that, after the Spanish Civil War, he had a revelation that everything he had written since he was a young boy had been in favor of Socialism), Orwell was a great critic of the socioeconomic inequality inherent to capitalist societies. “I have spoken all the while of ‘the nation’, as if forty-five million souls could somehow be treated as a unit ,” he laments in his dissertation, Why I Write. “But is not England notoriously two nations, the rich and the poor? Dare one pretend that there is anything in common between people with £100,000 a year and £1 a week?” Orwell believed that this economic discrepancy was the cause of the Englishman’s fear of internationalism, or working on behalf of the entire world and not just one’s own people.

These separate fears are very apparent in 1984, where Orwell takes his hatred of totalitarian government and epitomizes it, and what he was afraid would come after the Red Scare, in the dystopian society of Oceania. The government controls an unquestioning population with an ever-present propaganda machine, from the fading posters of the mustached personification of an expansive bureaucracy to the Two-Minutes Hate, a video clip designed with all the appropriate elements of making a population despise something they know nothing about. In critique of political language and propaganda, Orwell wrote that it is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” In 1984, Orwell critiques the Communist’s gross oversimplification of culture into “good” and “bad” by exploring complex emotions easily bearing both of those labels—lust, hatred, passion and fear.

During the time of his writing, however, he saw his fear of these generalizations coming true in his own country of England, where critiques of Charles Dickens as nothing more than a “proletarian writer” and Rudyard Kipling’s stories an evil portrayal of imperialism were pervasive.  He viewed these statements as shallow and uninformed.

Ultimately, the dystopia of Oceania was the nightmare world of George Orwell—but even worse, it was the world he saw society headed towards. It remains in popular culture as a warning of authoritarian and bureaucratic government with a message reaching far beyond its cult socialist following; Orwell believed that in the end, it is too much to ask for a society to change. Rather, we can only change our own personal habits that create this society, and from that, we will best be able to fight the chains of tyranny.

By: Rachel Gantz