Orwell response 2/23

The effects that Orwell’s society has on citizens are monstrous and somewhat unimaginable. Thought crimes alone places great limitation on personal behavior opinions and beliefs, almost forcefully making people into conformists. I’m sure the people living in these conditions where streets and buildings are run down and ravished realize but must ignore the fact that they are neglected and not taken seriously. Having a (probably plasma screen) television a building with a run down building to live in with a broken “lift” and circuits that are cut off just goes to show that the Party is much more concerned with strict enforcement of the rules rather than the less than creditable living conditions of its citizens.

The social structure of the book is twisted with many abnormalities such as children in the book playing the role of Junior Spies in which they monitor adults for unlawful “thought crimes”. It is indeed baffling how the children in a society as this have the power to accuse and apprehend adults for hate crimes, yet they must still ask permission to view someone being hanged, something in which they are mostly responsible for occurring. This greatly contrasts but also reflects on today’s modern society in which you have appointed officers and people of higher power (usually of older age) who reprimand and correct younger citizens for crimes and inappropriate behavior. My guess is that “The Party” warped the structure of this society to keep the adults in the society in a mental state where they feel under minded.

The people who abide in the Ministry of Truth must often feel contradicted by the concept of double thinking. This is another example of the psychological effects of the Party on society. Controlling the past is an interesting concept on its own, but altering the past (documents, events and recordings) and actually believing in these alterations shows that the minds of those who work in the Records are basically crippled and limited due to the depletion of mental stamina that comes with such as task of changing the past, since Big Brother is “never wrong”. It seems to me that if anyone at all poses a threat to “Big Brother” it’s the workers of the Records. Covering up the truth requires knowing what the truth is in the first place, and they know about all the lies and deception before they cover them up and alter the past. But I guess after performing a task as such, one actually begins to believe in and accept lies and deception created by them.

We all know that a major part in keeping together a society is language and communication. Modification of language throughout this book must have a devastating effect on citizens. Without a broad vocabulary people become ignorant and it becomes much harder to express ideas to one another. This is a clever yet sinister means of limiting communication between people in the Party. The development of newspeak defiantly lowers the intelligence of the society, keeping them ignorant, and also making it much harder to create thought crimes.