1984

1984 by George Orwell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Finally it's done!! It's taken me so long to finish this book (well over a year) partly because I just stalled out over the doublethink and newspeak and the philosophical treatise Winston spends so long reading in middle, trying to understand the why of it all. There's a lot of good nuggets in this book, and it definitely makes you think about society as a whole and your place in it. What makes something real? Even if you know something to be true, is it really true is everyone else says it's not?

In the end, I wanted to enjoy this more than I actually did. If I wasn't so stubborn, I probably never would have finished it. We read this in school, but at this point, I'm not convinced I had even finished it. These days, it almost feels TOO real: I can actually imagine our society and government turning into this, and it's terrifying. Part of me wants people to read this as a cautionary tale, but the other part of me is afraid there are people out there who would read this and think, "these are great ideas, let's do that." No, how about let's not?

Here are some things I underlined while reading:

"This - although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense - is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace."

"It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done thins, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

"In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news in untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious ans is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world."

"Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards and organization."

"The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it an nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields the power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same."

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