Utopias & Dystopias

For most of 1984 I thought that the main goal of both societies was stability. Of course they achieved this in different ways - while in Brave New World stability is achieved by keeping people happy, in 1984 it's achieved by keeping everyone under the absolute power of Big Brother. But then we get to read O'Brien's long explanation about the real point of the party and how it was actually just set up to hold onto pure power.  At least that's the gist I got from his spiel - although I don't know if I caught everything O'Brien was saying, most of it seemed to revolve around power and how anyone that says they want power for any other means than just having power is fooling themselves. This marks a pretty big difference between the two books. While Brave New World is a story about a utopia that doesn't work in practice, 1984 is a story about a totalitarian government that went too far to satisfy it's need for power and control. This means the warnings the a...

I'm wondering whether or not the Thought Police is going to release Winston. Doing so would mean they believe that their conditioning and torture is going to last - that there's not way his anti-party thoughts are going to resurface. This seems unrealistic. Sure in the face or torture he's willing to confess anything, and in the face of his greatest fear he's willing to give up Julia, however why would they think that'll last once he's out just living his life, safe (at least in that moment)? If somehow he does get released, would the party let him live out his life or just kill him sometime in the future. I expect they might just kill him, but then what was the point of doing this in the first place? The other option would be to kill him, and if they feel the need to do that publicly all his torture may have been worth it. Otherwise, if they're going to kill him as he's walking down the hallway as Winston suspects, I still don't understand what all ...

    The way the Thought Police convinces stray Party Members to fully submit to Big Brother and the Party is pretty interesting. They started about by beating Winston just to get him to confess to a bunch of crimes, some of which it was pretty clear he didn't do. I did wonder why this was a step in the process. If they're end goal is to make Winston an actual believer in the party, why make him confess to everything and anything when you know he's only doing that to stop the pain. These interrogations could be a way to break him down, physically and mentally, and make him more receptive to future torture, but I'm not sure.     After that it seems like they get Winston to submit simply by confusing him. O'Brien lays out complicated arguments about why what he sees is not actually reality and reality doesn't really exist, and at some point he's drugged so he's no longer sure about seeing four rings. This was a pretty weird approach, and I wonder how they c...