Thoughtcrimes with Alice

You've finally done it now. It's lying there. You see  it lying there. You know  you killed them because the blood still drips from your hands. There is  a dead body there. But what really is reality? In part 3, O'Brien is asking Winston to change what he believes is a fact. There are many things in our world which we consider to be absolute truths, such as 2+2 = 4 and the earth is round (although some people disagree with that one). Who is the one who dictates these truths? Well in math logic, (I am no number theorist so this is just to my understanding) we say 2+2 = 4 simply because it is convenient and is consistent with all other more complex theories. Similarly, in science we accept a hypothesis as a theory when it has been proven empirically through experimentation. And obviously seeing is believing. Yet scientific theories constantly change. Thousands of years ago, most people thought the Earth being flat was an absolute truth. Even now, findings in studies are ove...

 The Party's main administration has four ministries, which I think outline the central pieces of its control. Goldstein's book pretty much explains that the Ministry of Peace is trying to maintain constant war, and the Ministry of Plenty is trying to deplete resources through that war so the Middle/Low classes will stay complacent. (therefore WAR IS PEACE) What I am more interested in are the other two pieces of the puzzle: Minitruth and Minilove. We have seen much of how the Ministry of Truth works through Winston and Julia. This is my simple interpretation. Currently, most humans see time as linear (unless you're a quantum physicist or something): But in 1984, because of the Party's work in the Ministry of Truth, the past half of the line is ruined. Consequently, as the present moves forward, the future will become the past, and therefore also be destroyed. By induction, then, the future also doesn't exist. Therefore, people in 1984  view time like this: This app...

I honestly have no words for what is happening right now in the book. Winston gets swept away by pretty much his only fantasy, in which the girl he is horny for says she LOVES him and then takes him to a secret place to have sex.  And he says to her: "I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards." Her response is to laugh. I feel like Orwell's intention was to make this relationship the most twisted possible in the eyes of the viewer, such that the one sanctuary in the book was this demented beast. He also made the power dynamic such that Julia was objectively better than Winston (what does that say about his gender ideals?) This is a tactic used a lot in dystopian books: take something often viewed as sacred/pure/good to most humans and degrade it to create dystopia. For example, in Brave New World, Huxley destroys the family. In the Hunger Games , children are literally pitted against each other so they become murderers. In Divergent , having a personality with m...

Age plays a much bigger role in 1984  than it did in BNW . Sure, Brave New World  had the child conditioning and weird erotic play, but the quality of age itself mattered even less. People looked the same age until they suddenly died at 60. Aging didn't even happen, so it was hard to even gauge how old someone actually was. But that definitely does play a role in our society AND that of 1984 . Be honest, if you ran into someone looking like Mrs. Parson wouldn't you instinctively recoil? Instead of having class divisions (yes, there's the proles, Outer, Inner party but other than that), the society in 1984  is much more based on age. As we increasingly see, the Orwellian government relies on young people to uphold their regime. They brainwash them to actively seek and destroy threats to the Party's power. This capitalizes on their naivety and energy. (Kids are also used in the armies, etc.) Then, the older people are less useful to the Party and are pretty much tossed as...