I was chatting with a friend about re-reading George Orwell’s ‘1984’. She’d recently started to do it, but had to put it down “because it was so grim”. I confessed that back around 2017/2018 I had also tried to re-read it. I’d loved it as a teenager and younger adult, and given what was happening in the UK at the time I thought it might be worth a re-read.
But I could barely get through the first 25 pages.
It hurt to read because it was too close to what was happening at the time.
You see, at the time I was trying re-read it Brexit was happening, the first Trump Presidency was happening, and between the two of those events there was a common thread: a single “political consulting” company that had 4,000-5,000 pieces of data on hundreds of millions of Facebook users.
Whether micro-targeting voters works or not is irrelevant. The fact remains that a political consulting firm, with comfy relations to the British and US militaries, the UK monarchy, private military contractors, and ruling elected officials, had a lot of data on hundreds of millions of people that they were trying to use to manipulate those hundreds of millions of people into voting for their preferred candidate.
If anything, it was confirmation to me that people who are attracted to power will do anything to get it and keep it.
So, what else is in ‘1984’ that is just like the real world of the last decade or so?
This post will contain: spoilers for the book ‘1984’ by George Orwell.
This post will contain: Violence, including mention of sexual violence, and Nazism.
The Party
One great irony of ‘1984’ being a premonition of what is happening in 2025, is that Orwell had written it about communist governments in Spain and Russia. And while one might consider that and take away that the book is only anti-communist, that would be a mistake. In ‘1984’ Orwell was targeting totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is a form of high-control state management. It’s a style of political governance and can occur under any sociopolitical belief system.
The totalitarian regime in ‘1984’ is called The Party and, like the real world regimes that inspired it, it is ferociously successful at strengthening its own power, while at the same time woefully incompetent at providing for the citizens they rule.
But this is not unique to communism. I doubt the UK Conservatives who ruled for 14 years would consider themselves to be communists, but they were incredibly effective at enhancing their own power1, and deathly incompetent at providing for the citizens of the UK during that time.2
I also doubt the US GOP or the leaders of Afghanistan, see themselves as communists, but it doesn’t take a communist to consolidate power into a single, theocratic, militant group as is often the case in totalitarian regimes.
Telescreens - Part 1
In ‘1984’ The Party saturates its subjects with giant telescreens that stream 24-hour, uninterrupted propaganda into every citizen’s room, the streets, the workplaces, everywhere. Every ‘private’ and ‘public’ space.
The voices from telescreens turn every failure and incompetence of The Party into a fantastic accomplishment. Enemies who have been the target of hate and warfare for years become allies overnight with no explanation. In ‘1984’, The Party rewrites history with no explanation. Any evidence of the new ally as an enemy is altered to say that they were always an ally.
The voices from the telescreens make me think of the 24 hour news cycle, where there is a lot of repetition and redundancy in covering the same stories without adding anything new; there is a focus on speed rather than accuracy in reporting, and ratings are more important than ethical journalism or genuine public interest.
The telescreens also remind me of how difficult it is sometimes to escape advertising. I hate the fact that almost everything can be understood as an advertisement. Everything. Everything is something to be consumed.3
The psychology of advertising is its own special subject, but like the telescreens in ‘1984’, what we see on news channels, streaming services, social media and its algorithms, is often using psychological tools to create insecurities and manufacture desires that can only be fixed when you buy something or vote a certain way. And it’s right in the palm of our hands. What we see shapes the perception we have of ourselves, where we judge ourselves and each other on our ability to buy shit, or conform to social norms we see on screens.
The messages coming through the telescreens in ‘1984’, like advertising and other media, take up mental space. The slogans, jingles, logos, and memes are constantly repeated, easy to remember, and pop into thoughts whether people want them to or not. It is impossible to have any thought that isn’t interrupted by a call to action, a call to hate, a call to be so overwhelmed we feel completely impotent to change, and cannot even dream of a better future.
Express Yourself (but not like that)
In ‘1984’, the only form of self-expression truly possible is during ‘The Two Minutes of Hate’ where the people of Oceania gather at 11am each day to scream, shout and throw things at images of an enemy of the State projected from large telescreens: traitors, thought-criminals, Eurasian spies.
Of course, many of these enemies are often simply invented by The Party.
In the real world, we are told every so often by media outlets and politicians of a new group we are to be fearful of and hateful towards, whatever group suits the current agenda: Jewish people, Muslim people, Black people, Irish people, people who are refugees, homosexual people, transexual people, poor people, disabled people, the list goes on. It doesn’t matter who it is, so long as it’s hate and fear and not directed towards the people in charge.
I watched a documentary the other day about Neo-Nazis in the 80s and 90s in America. Gangs would tell their members to not listen to any music but nazi music, not watch any sports, not watch films or tv, all because of an irrational fear that these things were run or dominated by non-whites. All kinds of expressions of joy or curiosity or wonder or self were severely limited due to fear.
It’s the same in ‘1984’ with The Party who have limited self-expression and human desire because they need citizens to be trapped in a constant exhausting state between anger and fear.
You Do Not Want This
In ‘1984’ desire is prohibited. I think the protagonist of ‘1984’, Winston, might have been a red-pill podcast bro had The Party realised it was an effective form of psychologically manipulating the people. Or perhaps today he might be a religious leader that promotes chastity and prohibits masturbation as it’s considered a sin, but would of course be a hypocrite and ask for God’s forgiveness anyway (which God gives).
Very early in the book, during the first ‘Two Minutes of Hate’, we see Winston direct his hatred not towards the traitor of the day on the screen, but towards the beautiful dark-haired woman behind him. He daydreams of “slitting her throat at the moment of climax”, and hates her “because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so” because of her commitment to chastity. He sounds like an incel to me.
In Oceania sex is a duty, performed for procreation alone, but The Party really wants artificial insemination (artsem) to be the only means of becoming pregnant. Desire, lust, even basic attraction is suppressed. Winston hates the woman he is attracted to, but he also hates himself. In the real world, although there is pushback on IVF treatments, these beliefs about “the purpose of sex” definitely exist. Men in suits and positions of power who’ve never made a woman orgasm believe the most outrageous lies about the human body; they hate themselves for their own desires and make laws to punish those who don’t, they hide in glass closets, and report their porn viewing habits to their sons in the name of “accountability”.4
Controlling Bodies
In ‘1984’ there are various ways of controlling bodies. The citizens watch each other for any tiny twitch and micro-expression that may hint at disloyalty to The Party. Citizens must do exercises each morning, then head to long, gruelling work at the various government organisations that have a lot of bullshit work going on in them, almost everything somehow feeds into advertising propaganda for The Party and Big Brother. The Party keeps citizens physically exhausted for a reason: to keep citizens in an all-embracing fatigue or weariness.
The former Neo-Nazi mentioned earlier talked about how exhausted he was from hating so much, from keeping such a tight lid on all the things he actually enjoyed, like football, gigs, and comedy shows. Hate is exhausting. Being fearful all the time fries your central nervous system and leads to burnout.
Fear of missing out, fear of not fitting in, fear of not being successful, fries your central nervous system too.
Trends like The Grind Set or The Hustle mentality are deliberately designed to exhaust you. From “Waking up at 3:45am, working out for 6 million hours, slamming down my protein, creatine, caffeine, nicotine, amphetamine, and T, heading to the office on my private jet, in my Tom Ford suit, with the six models I keep completely sexually satisfied at all times, while I will never be satisfied because I have to give 150% to the pursuit of appearing like I’m not burnout and as boring as half-wet cement.” to “I’m a girl boss, trad wife, madonna and whore, boy mom and submissive to my husband. I’m curvy, but never fat. I’m smart and know when to keep my mouth shut. I’m a pick-me and a cool girl. I’ve got a head for business and a bod for sin. I get my lips injected to be the latest shape. I don’t dye my hair because I’m a natural woman.”
And that’s not even considering the laws people put in place to control women’s bodies. That’s not considering that you need to do an hour long commute to work in the office, so that people can observe you working, then do another hour long commute home, where you will have to cook your meals, clean where you live, tend to children, spouses, parents, have a hobby, play video games, keep up with the news cycle, watch your favourite team, do the same thing every day, and watch as the money you earn pays for less and less, so you have to find a way to earn more to stave off eviction or repossession.
It’s physically and mentally exhausting, no?
Telescreens - Part 2
Given that ‘1984’ was written in 1949, well before the world became surveilled to the point that it is today, it is startlingly accurate. Telescreens are two-way: they transmit Party announcements and propaganda, and they also watch and listen out for any sign of dissent.
The telescreens are in every room. In 2025, we carry devices similar to telescreens in our hands. We have them sitting in our homes, idly listening out for their names to be called, and asked a question or to perform a task or tell us a piece of information it has access to.
One of the things I notice whenever I drive into England is the amount of cameras and warning signs for cameras that begin almost immediately after leaving Scotland on a motorway.
I’m not actually sure if there is a speed camera up ahead, but there’s a sign on the side of the road that makes me think of it and so I might watch my speed more closely or slow down because someone might be watching or recording me.
We call this The Observer Effect. Physics says that observation of atoms changes the behaviour of atoms; sociology (philosophy, psychology) says that even the suggestion of observation changes the behaviour of people.
The latter is best exemplified by the panopticon: an architectural design, typically proposed for prisons, where inmates can be observed by minimal staff without the inmates being fully aware of when they are being watched.
From the video below: “The guard watches the prisoners. But the prisoners do not see the guard, and do not know when they are watched, and must therefore act as if they were always watched.”
(I used to work in an education institution where the owner wanted to build classrooms in this kind of structure. I left before I found out whether he realised his dream.)
In one of the film versions of ‘1984’, the director chose to build the offices people work in as a panopticon. We don’t have to build offices like this in 2025, though I think open plan offices may do the job sufficiently, as well as be a Circle of Hell in a modern take on Dante’s ‘Inferno’.
In 2025 our constant observers are software monitoring tools, email monitoring, location tracking, key-logging, and mass data-scraping; our personal assistant devices like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri who are always passively listening for us to call their name; we do things simply for the purpose of sharing it on Instagram, calling out to have our exemplary behaviour observed; we drive into England and are bombarded with the suggestion that a speed camera might be ahead or it might not; it could be the possibility of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God that is the only thing keeps a person from killing everyone or it could be the reason that they do kill everyone. We must behave as if we are being observed, thus we control our own behaviour.
The Meaning of a Word Is in Its Use
To be honest, I feel like I’m burying the lede here.
One of the central themes of ‘1984’ is how The Party controls language. The citizens of Oceania must speak in ‘Newspeak’, a language that has a very limited vocabulary, very simple grammar, and The Party created it so that citizens have a very limited capacity for thinking.
Controlling language means controlling thinking, and in the real world there are many ways it’s done, but I’m going to look at just three.
Colonialism
The English literally beat the Welsh and Gaelic out of the mouths of the people in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland5 (not to mention all other languages in all the other parts of the world they were in). If you are punished, beaten, or tortured for using your native language, you’re going to be less likely to use it. When you stop using native language, it risks becoming meaningless because nobody speaks your language. Literally. That is the goal for the colonist.
Appropriating existing words to distort the meaning
I especially think of the Nazi’s being the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” which certainly conjures up a lot of left-leaning, socialist, worker solidarity, anti-capitalism, and socialised healthcare ideas. But in reality, their targets were poor, working class people and their focus was on one thing: “achieving power whatever the cost and advancing [a] racist, anti-Semitic agenda”.6
More recently appropriation of words has been done with the word “woke”, which was used in the early 20th century in Black communities to remind people to be careful where they travel to. In the early 21st century it was used by Black communities to simply mean “be politically conscious and aware” of the issues going on around you. Somehow it is a now pejorative term, used by people who don’t want us to be politically conscious and aware.
One could also use this logic to describe communities reclaiming words that have historically been used against them - re-appropriation. In many cases this can neutralise the meaning or value of a word; “Why, yes, I am a fat, queer bitch, what’s your point?” It can make terms less stigmatising than they had been used previously, but not everyone in a community is going to be comfortable reclaiming words that have been used in violence against them.
I digress, my main point here is that it’s not just words like ‘queer’ and ’bitch’ and ‘gay’ that get appropriated and re-appropriate and used in new ways. It’s also words like ‘socialist’, ‘democratic’, ‘anarchist’, ‘conservative’, ‘terrorism’, ‘liberal’, ‘Labour’, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘antifa’, and ‘leftist’.
I don’t think I have time or room here to think all the way through the tension created by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations §43 “the meaning of a word is in its use”7 in a post-truth world. But if any Wittgenstein boffins out there already knows of such work, or wants to chime in, please let me know, I’d love to read it.
Newspeak
As mentioned above, Orwell created an entire language for the citizens of Oceania.8 It’s very limited so as to limit thought. There are new words created to simplify thought: compound words and noun-verbs such as ‘facecrime’, ‘goodthink’, ‘prolefeed’. And many words have been removed from use in Newspeak: bad, democracy, innuendo, freedom, lie, thought, well. Because if you don’t have the words for it, you can’t think of it. Apparently.
It reminds me of the 1921 UK Director of Public Prosecutions saying that even mentioning lesbians and lesbianism was “too dangerous”9. Don’t talk about it and it won’t exist. It was used in 1921, in ‘1984’, and in 2025 it’s any mention of ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ or ‘women in STEM’ or ‘cis’ or ‘trans’. Remove words from use so that eventually what they refer to is impossible to think of.
Other forms of Newspeak in the 21st century are just as fascinating. On social media we use new words such as “unaliving”, or words like “grape”, or words like “cornography” or “corn” to talk about things we are not allowed to talk about on the platforms for fear of being muted, shadow banned, demonetised, or banned from the platform.
Unaliving = murder, death, killing; grape = rape. Cornography / Corn = Pornography / Porn. We are not allowed to talk about murder, death, killing and rape directly, only indirectly. Will it become impossible to even conceive of calling murders murder and rapes rape? I think it is already true of the word rape. Will we censor ourselves to the point where we no longer talk about these things as what they are? There are occasions when rather than saying ‘rape’ people will say ‘non-consensual sex’. This term makes no sense, it is nonsense. There is rape and sexual assault.
Don’t get me started on the use of passive voice in headlines that aren’t allowed to use the word ‘genocide’. Or the way young girls, children, are talked about in terms of being “underage women”, unless they’re black/brown boys and are then called “young men”. Imagine certain newspapers calling a 12 year old white boy an “underage man”.
Loyal to a Fault
Presidents Trump and Musk have removed civil servants, those who enforce military justice, and military generals, with the view to install people who are loyal to the leaders’ world view10. All the world’s great totalitarian leaders have done this. Even Keir Starmer did a similar thing within the UK Labour Party prior to his appointment as PM by ousting anyone who was too far left for his (keepers’) version of the Labour Party.
In ‘1984’ there is no other kind of loyalty except loyalty to The Party. People are not loyal to their neighbours, their colleagues, their customers are not loyal and neither are the businesses selling goods. They’re not even loyal to their own children, who they report to the Thought Police without a moment’s hesitation. And intimate partners (if they can be called that) are also not worthy of love the way The Party and Big Brother are loved.
Totalitarian regimes rely on people dobbing on their neighbours, friends, colleagues, even family members. Reporting people to authorities11 if they do not fit a very particular presentation of femininity or masculinity is fucking insane. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks these things are only in place to give paedophiles and sexual predators the role of ‘Genital Inspector’ in order to “verify” people, but the more rational part of me thinks it’s more to do with creating a single, theocratic, militant, corporate ruling entity. When they say they want ‘small government’, they’re not talking about building communities that self-govern. They’re talking about having a few people control everything: totalitarianism.
2 + 2 = 4
Rereading Orwell’s ‘1984’ is tough. I can’t say I enjoyed it this time around. I’m sure if I looked Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ I would say the same thing. We are watching this play out again.
I don’t know how to solve the problem of post-truth, 21st Century Newspeak and the world’s spiral into fascism. There’s part of me that has to believe that words mean things. The closest I get to finding peace is in the idea that actions will speak louder than words when words fail or betray. Don’t listen to what these fuckers say, look at what they do (and hope like hell it’s not AI).
As Hannah Arendt explained:
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”12
If you liked this piece, please consider subscribing to my newsletter or leaving me a tip in my TipTopJar.
THIS WEEK
Most listened to song: 'Abracadabra' by Lady Gaga
Favourite thing I’ve watched: The sunshine in Scotland.
Favourite thing I’ve read: ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ by Hannah Arendt
I’m most excited by: The Blood Moon
Brexit and the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018: Ministers were allowed to make changes to legislation with minimal oversight through “Henry VIII clauses” which gave them the ability to amend or repeal EU laws without full parliamentary scrutiny.
Investigatory Powers Act 2016: This allowed the government to collect data in bulk and require internet service providers to keep users’ browsing history. Which seems a lot like what the US NSA do, and what that political consultancy firm did (does) to attempt to influence elections.
Voter ID as a tool of gerrymandering. It didn’t work for the UK Conservatives, but it works elsewhere. And they redrew constituency boundaries anyway.
The Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022: reduced the ability of individuals and organisations to challenge government decisions through judicial review, especially if those decisions are about the environment or immigration.
There’s more, but damn, it’s the first footnote.
BMJ 2024; 386:q1602 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q1602
I am sorry that I have to include referral links to the books I mention, but I live in this world too and have bills to pay.
It might be flippant of me to say, but I do believe quite a few of the world’s problems could be solved if the men in charge had a wank or kissed a man. Maybe both? At the same time?
Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic are different languages. Still were both beaten out of mouths by the English.
“Were the Nazis Socialists?” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., www.britannica.com/story/were-the-nazis-socialists. Accessed 9 Mar. 2025.
The full quote is: “For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer.”
At the end of most modern copies of ‘1984’ there is his essay ‘The Principles of Newspeak’, and he wrote another essay called ‘Politics and the English Language’ in 1946 which are both great reads.
Earl of Desart, Hansard, House of Lords, 15/08/1921, col. 573
“Trump Fires Top US General in Unprecedented Pentagon Shakeup | Reuters.” Reuters.Com, Reuters, 22 Feb. 2025, www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pushes-out-top-us-general-nominates-retired-three-star-2025-02-22/.
Abels, Grace. “Missouri Has ‘Tip Line’ for Complaints on Trans Health Care.” @politifact, 20 Apr. 2023, www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/apr/20/tweets/yes-missouri-attorney-general-has-a-website-for-re/.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Books Ltd, 2017. p.474