Man, life is strange.
I would immediately veer away at the sight of any English honors or AP classes throughout high school.
Needless to say, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started appreciating some of the finer and underrated things in life.
Books, for one, are hugely underrated.
If you take a book, read it, find something that you can apply to your everyday life, the return of that immensely exceeds that of the 10 ~ 20 bucks you put in the book.
This isn’t gonna be some crazy high level overview for 1984 – you have google and reddit to really dig deep.
But this is a review from another lens!
- Ignorance is strength.
- Freedom is slavery.
- War is peace.
These lines you’ll hear reoccur throughout the book. But what does it really mean?
Those lines really tie in together with the dystopia theme the book presents – that theme being a world trying to eliminate consciousness. A world governed by an authoritative force, that authoritative force having control over everything – right down to the very level of how people think.
Throughout your lens, as the reader, you might be thinking “why” does this represent a dystopia world?
We compare everything we know about ourselves and our lives throughout the lens of our experiences, what we’ve learned in school, and what our parents taught us.
Those three characteristics alone make up the majority of who we are as individuals.
I found myself countless times comparing our world to theirs.
It was book written in 1948, WAY ahead of its time for all we know!
It makes me really wonder though – living in a world where every single inhabitant is controlled and monitored by an authoritative force, why, is it, that through our lens, is it such a dystopia?
Surely, there are characters that are self-aware like Winston who constantly think, but for the majority of the characters in the book, not the main ones, but just any average “party member” or prole – they don’t see themselves as in a dystopia world. They are simply just existing and living life to their own. It only appears as a dystopia world through our lens, and through a 3rd point of view of Winston’s experiences.
This isn’t gonna be the page you research for your school assignment – this is only just to get you to try to think a little.
I’m trying to ask myself and both you –
Why is it such a bad world?
If everyone is happy/content/going on about their daily lives, then why is it so bad?
To try to add another thing into perspective, are we, as humans really “happy”?
How any of us consciously think about our happiness?
I’d assume not very many people.
From what it seems, the majority of people I’ve come across merely just exist as a function of what their lives have brought them.
For example, if you were born into a lower income family, and I mean low, like parents barely able to make rent payments, living on food stamps, living in neighborhoods with shattered windows, graffiti all over the place, then chances are, you’re living a similar life and not having gotten out of that situation or “income bracket” even.
If you were fortunate enough to be privileged, having parents to support your education, buy you text books, send you off to college, graduating with a white collar jobs, you’re merely a function of what your parents have provided for you.
I’m not saying this accounts for everyone – as there are many who have “broken the cycle”, so to speak.
But the majority don’t break the cycle.
It seems though, that everyone finds some way to feel unhappy about their life – regardless of what they have.
Let’s take Americans!
Americans are hugely privileged people – especially compared to other parts of the world. Countries like the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and more, countless more, are much worse off than we are.
It’s normal to live in a house with proper indoor plumbing, air conditioning, internet access – this isn’t the case for everyone else! And often times, we forget that!
We take what we have for granted, daily.
Before lockdown from COVID-19, we’d complain about traffic. Now, I even see posts about people begging to be back in LA traffic!
What can we see happening once lockdown unfolds? More people start to complain about traffic again!
Sorry to go a bit off tangent here, but the point we’re trying to make is this – we aren’t even happy ourselves. Yet why do we view such a world as in 1984 a bad one itself? Is the world we live in really perfect?
It’s not!
Having being out of high school now, it’s fun to actually learn and think about the world.
I’d be caught dead on the ground laughing if I knew I’d be reading this book on my own spare time.
Funny how times change!