"Nineteen Eighty-Four" after reading

A well-known novel, one of the dystopian trilogies. The tone of the work is depressing, dull and desperate. In the world of the book, humanity is snuffed out, freedom is denied, and thought is controlled.

I had heard of the term "utopia" for a long time, but for reasons of my own low sensitivity to political and social themes, shallow knowledge reserves, and narrow coverage, I had been unable to fully understand its concept, but only knew that it meant an idealistic state or society that could not exist, with the flavor of a utopian society (and probably have to study Plato's Republic and Thomas More's "Utopia").

"Dystopia" is a negative utopia, not an anti-utopia, which I have always misunderstood before, and I have only realized after reading the entry. That is to say, dystopian society actually refers to the representative surface that seems to be ideal and beautiful, but its internal reality is full of various drawbacks, and the entire social form is deformed, pathological, contradictory, and hopeless. Its main manifestations may be: the denial of human nature, the restriction or denial of freedom of expression, the implementation of birth control, the implementation of policies of ignorance, etc.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four" depicts such a helpless and pathetic, terrifying and desperate world: people live forever under the gaze of "Big Brother", there are police of thought everywhere, facts can be distorted, history can be tampered with.

The three sentences that recur in the book, "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is power", are particularly classic, and the most fundamental core of them is the control of people's thoughts. The first sentence is easy to understand, by waging war on the outside, the internal contradictions are transferred to the outside, thus maintaining a false state of peace internally. The second and third sentences can be combined to understand that through a series of thought control measures against the masses at the bottom, people become ignorant and ignorant, lose the ability to think and question, and then give the so-called "freedom", which is an absurd slave-style freedom, full of falsehood but impeccable.

Oceania not only created the leading figure "Big Brother", but also created the revolutionary traitor Aymiuel Goldstein, who is the spiritual pillar of the people's faith and worship, while the traitors of Oceania have become the object of hatred. Not only that, but Oceania has also severely restricted the use of language and frequently tampered with historical facts. All this, in the final analysis, is a means of thought control. (A recently read "A Brief History of Mankind" has a view that the reason why homo sapiens can stand at the top of the food chain as it is today is not to use tools or language, but to know how to imagine and fiction, to establish abstract things and concepts, so as to achieve unified coordination and management of large groups.) ）

At this point, it is easy to think of some real things: the guidance and control of social media in the contemporary information society for public opinion, the corrosion and distortion of the values of modern young people by some corporate giants, and the infiltration and encroachment of people's daily lives with the advent of the era of big data. People's lives are quietly being changed, but it is difficult to tell when this change began, let alone reject this change.

Thinking about it, I only felt creepy and chilled on my back.

Winston's final ideological struggle failed, and in a world that seemed to be only gray and black, the regime of Oceania remained unbreakable and unshakable. However, no one knows whether there are people like Winston in other corners of the world at this time, who are breaking free from the shackles of thought and slowly awakening.

Can such a social formation last? No, because thoughts cannot be killed.