Big brother

       The name "Big brother" is significant because big brothers are commonly viewed as superior, but protecting as well, which is exactly how a communist government wants to be seen. One expects a big brother to be demanding, making a younger sibling do his will, but a relationship is maintained with the brother because the big brother's natural instinct is to look out for his sibling. So as long as the government has the people thinking that they are being protected, they can keep the population patriotic and under control.

       Though it may not seem so, methods like this are used in modern society all the time. It takes the form of advertising. Advertising intentionally trys to keep the population occupied with what is new to distract them from what is really going on in the world. This makes the population oblivious to what is going on that matters. The government is not trying to distract the population from matters as big as those taking place in 1984, but nevertheless, it is still manipulating a population, which the population would certainly disagree with if they had more knowledge of this.

Freedom

       Our world is similar to the world depicted in 1984 in many ways, though not to such a great extent. In 1984, there is no freedom, so the people can be kept under control. For example, people do not even have the right to think freely. In the modern western world, there is the illusion of freedom, but due to the structure of this society, there are great limitations that go unseen. Without these limitations, the modern western society would fall apart. These limitations take the form of laws. One who lives in this society would have the illusion of freedom, having the right to do what is acceptable in our society. But one does not have the right to do hat seems wrong in our society, though it may seem norman in another. Therefore, the government is limiting us to what they themselves have shaped us into believing is right in this society. This, one could say, is nearly the same thing as the situation in 1984.

      In the modern western society the people are completely content with their lives. In the society in 1984, those who are used to life being the way it is, are content with their lives. Therefore, for one to see the lives in 1984 as horrible because of the lack of freedom and ignorance of the population, he himself would be ignorant, forgetting the fact that the people in 1984 are actually not unhappy. The society in 1984 seems horrible to most readers of the book, but only because of their ignorance.

Journal 1

As much as I would hate to live in a distopian world such as the one depicted in 1984, I quite admire the techniques the government uses to keep the population under control. In "Nineteen eighty-four," the people have absolutely no freedom, but to prevent rebellion, the government has to completely conceal the fact that life could be better than what the people knew. An idea I quite admired was the "two minutes of hate." In a world like this, the people are bound to be angry about something, so to keep that anger from being directed to the government, they proposed the two minutes of hate, so all the hate of the people could be directed away from the government and towards the enemies of the government. This deals with the people who want to rebel, and also gives the people a false sense of patriotism, that by hating, they are doing good for their country.

The idea of "newspeak" is an ingenious idea. The thing about newspeak is that it is close enough to English for people to learn easily, but it has no words for ideas which could cause rebellion, such as freedom. As long as the youth are being educated in newspeak, they will not know that these ideas ever existed, and when the English speaking generation dies out, the government would have a population who did not even know what rebellion was. It is true that ideas can exist with out words for them, but with nothing even similar to the concept of freedom, the population would be completely patriotic and manipulable by the government.