Utopias & Dystopias

 This whole time I've been wondering why exactly this society was set up like this in the first place. Goldstein's book explains that the goal of everything in the system is to impose a permanent hierarchy that could never fall to revolution or anything of the sort. However Winston gets conveniently distracted from the book right when it's about to explain why this is even it's goal. It's interesting to think about why Big Brother / whoever founded these ideas would even choose this as the ultimate goal. It means that this person wasn't didn't just want to keep themselves in power, but aimed to keep someone in all future generations of the foreseeable future in power without having to face revolution. Even if these future generations weren't his own children, since the hierarchical system isn't wholly hereditary.   But why? I would say he might be trying to stop violent revolutions from happening in the future, except for the fact that there's a ...

It's interesting to me how Julia hasn't been caught by the Ministry of Truth yet. Winston makes it seem as if as soon as you commit even the smallest thoughtcrime you could disappear at any moment, yet somehow Julia has met with "scores of people" without the Party's attention. I wonder if her outward involvement in the Party actually makes as big of an effect as she describes - has the Party just not bothered to look at her or is their surveillance system not as astute as they make it out to be? It's also interesting how Julia even formed these ideas in the first place. The Party is all she's known her whole life. But somehow all the propaganda and conditioning that she got growing up didn't work. Could she even have negative ideas about the Party if she didn't know about an alternative - didn't know that life could be better and freer? Maybe she heard stories of the world before The Party, since it's hard to imaging her forming such a har...

I'm still not completely certain on the role that the continuous wars play in this society. If alliances between the three big countries (continents? states?) mentioned in the book shift so often, it doesn't seem like the wars could possibly have a real cause worth fighting for. The Party could see them as a way to promote nationalism, making people more likely to accept shortages or the rule of Big Brother. At the same time, it feels weird that the Party is willing to let areas of the city be bombed regularly and spend so much of their *seemingly* very limited resources. It seems like there could be other ways of stirring up nationalism without constant violence, for example focusing on internal enemies of the state. It's also interesting to think about whether these two other societies even actually exist. We do hear a few stories about people fighting on the front lines or dying in battle, so it seems like they're fighting someone. At the same time The Party makes up...

      A lot of people have mentioned the similarity between Big Brother and technology today. Although I agree that it seems like companies today have a lot more data than I'd like to admit, and they could probably be capable of tracking people in the same way that Big Brother does, their motivation feels fundamentally different. The spying in 1984, in my opinion, isn't bad just by nature, but because it's used to stifle any dissent - whether in the form of spoken word or even just thought. The worry today is that many companies provide free services in exchange for people's data. As far as I understand this data is used to target people with ads as well as study & profit off of social trends. This seems benevolent - it's used for the companies benefit and has nothing to do with controlling people. They profit off of people's viewing patterns sure but they don't change them.     At the same time, I understand that a lot of people's criticisms with th...