A Dystopian Nightmare: When Our Fiction is Real

George Orwell — 1984. This book is so prolific that people use ‘Orwellian’ as an adjective, even though they might be using it wrongly. 1984 is often said to be a book about fascism and state control, but it’s a bit more than that. It tells of a vile and gritty world where a totalitarian government wages perpetual war against a changing enemy. 1984 is also a world where all actions and even thoughts are under inescapable surveillance only to be used as weapons of destruction against the individual. Words have no meaning and history no longer exists.

Does the concept of inescapable surveillance seem familiar? Instead of a totalitarian state of Big Brother, we might have sub-contracted this control to tech giants who can read your emails, hear your conversations, and monitor your search history. Even Winston Smith had a private notebook. Between WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook (Meta?), Google, Apple, and Amazon, you could probably learn more about a person than Orwell could have imagined the Ministry of Love would be able to do.

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Information, Truth, and Media. The biggest direct comparison between these three books, these three worlds and our own is the way in which information, truth and the media are categorised. They are a tool of escapism, sedation, and oppression. In Brave New World characters have everything they need to avoid facing the truth about their own situations whereas the antipode of this is in 1984, the absence of education and lack of information veracity hide the truth. As a combination to these, in Fahrenheit 451 people are simultaneously denied the truth and bombarded with mass-saturated media to distract them.

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Overall, we are not in one dystopia, we are not in a dystopia at all. We are in the most liberal, peaceful and progressive time in global history; but there are frankly quite scary existential concepts in fiction that are becoming real. Rejection of modernity, technology and progress is not the cure, but one must be wary of such quickly evolving societal norms, for what today seems progressive may turn out to be Orwellian.

Author: Alexander Archer, Dec 5, 2021