Some prophetic fulfilment of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four which we are seeing in recent history.
'It's a beautiful thing. The destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself.'
Winston's friend, Syme, was explaining to him the beauty of the New Language, designed for efficiency by cutting down on words.
Fulfilment: The regime in the Middle Kingdom has invented a new writing script which is a much Simplified version of the Traditional Chinese characters. The result is of course an improvement in literacy. This in itself is a 'good' thing, but the similarities between reality and fiction (1984) should not be overlooked.
The regime no doubt will be boasting about this, just like Syme 'We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.' Then finally Syme reveals the reason for the change, in addition to linguistic efficiency: 'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it....Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller...'. There, the idea of thoughtcrime, a crime where people can be arrested for thinking the wrong thing. This is much later made into a related idea in the movie 'Minority Report' starring Tom Cruise.
' There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. .... And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programs, plays, novels'
Today we are dealing with Fake News. In Nineteen Eighty Four, the Fake News has been perfected by the Party. The Records Department under the Ministry of Truth, is not simply a propaganda machine. It's aim is nothing short of re-writing history. Today a version of this is already happening under the label of the 'Cancel Culture'. Any part of history that is not part of the 'narrative' will be re-written.
' The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator'.
The 'versificator' - is the name that we should be giving to the AI-powered music writing machine we have now in our generation. Along with this, there exist AI technology that can write How-To instruction books, History books and even Fiction. So the automatic music composing device in Nineteen Eighty Four no longer belongs to the realm of fiction. To name a few such AI music software or companies: Amper Music, Jukedeck, Melomic Music. More can be found here: https://www.nanalyze.com/2018/05/11-startups-ai-compose-music/
'In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.'
To say that this is happening in the world today may be pointless if people insist not to open their eyes and observe objectively the environment and world around them. Of course the majority don't see this and of course the Party trying to control the narrative will make things look normal. The only suggestion is look at the facts and put the pieces together. Then you will see that the narrative delivered by the news, Social Media and leaders do not always make sense. When you realize this, it is the time to start reading the news between the line.
'He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking'
The reference to the 'SMART TV' called the telesecreen. In the story, not only is the telescreen showing propaganda from the Party, but it is also a listening and watching device. Presumably people are required to install at least one of these in their homes by law and leave it switched on. So the Party could watch the people all day. Today, we have very nice flat LCD TVs and they are also build with Internet connectivity and called SMART TV. Not only does it deliver pictures to the homes, with the internet connection, it could deliver information out of the homes. Coupled with microphones and hidden cameras, our SMART TV are perhaps more advanced than the telescreen.
One of the ways to train Party members to not think of anything bad of the Party is Crimestop. 'It includes the power of not grapsping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments .... being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.'
Sometimes the twisting of facts is so obviously impossible that, there is no choice but to believe in contradictions. This is called blackwhite - essentially calling black as white and calling white as black. It is forcing oneself to believe in such contradictions and to know these contradictions as facts. 'Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.' This naturally leads to a 'continuous alteration of the past, made possible by a system of thought which really embraces all the rest' known as doublethink.
To implement the above mentioned twisting of facts on a national scale, the machines of government is busy at work. 'And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.'
'Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. .... At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now.' Needless to say this is what happens when people essentially are in control of the truth. Contrast this to what God wants us to know, which is rather comforting that, God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
A more detailed description of the Party's doublethink is '...the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.
Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc (English Socialism), since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them and to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. ...... Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able - and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years - to arrest the course of history...'
The Appendix of Nineteen Eighty-Four is an interesting description of the lengths the Party goes through to re-write the Dictionary, and in essence, language itself to ensure that communication becomes a tool of oppression. The idea is to suppress people's ability to communicate anything that is contradictory or unfavourable to the Party's orthodox view. The language becomes stunted, so that people's thoughts and free will becomes paralysed. 'As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous.'
Naturally when reducing the words that people can use or express potentially counter-ideas to the Party, the official dictionary becomes smaller. 'So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning "to quack like a duck". Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.' In other words, to receive the compliment of 'bullshit artist' is the best compliment one can give to a Party member.
