These days, the word “Orwellian” gets thrown around so much that it barely means anything anymore. What it actually refers to is a societal condition that severely undermines public freedom through totalitarian control, mass surveillance, manipulation and the suppression of truth.
George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, written and published in the aftermath of the Second World War, depict dystopian worlds where state control, propaganda and the erosion of truth become so normalized that citizens no longer seem to recognise their own oppression.
Take Newspeak from 1984. Orwell presents the idea that a government can shrink language until certain thoughts become difficult to even form because the capacity to express those thoughts is limited when the words themselves no longer exist. In the current day and age, whole arguments can get reduced to a single loaded word. It doesn’t matter who is doing it or which side they are on; the idea is the same. Pick a word, load it with enough moral weight, and the nuance disappears. This limits people’s ability to even form their own opinions before they can debate them with others.
Then there’s doublethink: holding two contradictory ideas and believing both without noticing the contradiction. An example from 1984 is “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength”, which citizens accept without registering that the words cancel each other out. In the book, it is presented as something only a totalitarian government could pull off.
Today, the description of it just feels normal. Institutions ask for your trust while hiding how decisions are made. Rules get bent for people in charge but enforced strictly on everyone else. Nobody even reacts anymore. The scary thing is not that people are choosing lies over the truth, but that they have stopped bothering to check whether something is a lie or the truth.
Animal Farm gets treated like the lighter, easier read next to 1984. In it, farm animals overthrow their human owner, only to end up being ruled by a new tyranny built by their own pigs.
Unlike in 1984, the pigs on the farm don’t need cameras or secret police to manipulate the other animals. They just need to change the rules slightly, again and again, until nobody remembers what was originally promised. Their slogan, “All animals are equal,” gets an addition, and by the time anyone notices, questioning it looks like disloyalty. If that sounds familiar, it’s because promises made by people in power tend to grow into footnotes the moment they become comfortable in their positions.
Here’s the part I want to be fair about, though: in both books, the desire for control isn’t tied to one side or one ideology. It’s just a human habit. Plenty of people who are currently upset about surveillance or rewritten history have, at some point, been fine with the same thing when it was aimed at someone they disagreed with. The point here is that this is what any group can start doing once it decides that the outcome it wants matters more than the truth.
Now, of course, we haven’t built a surveillance state exactly like the ones in these books. There’s no secret room where thought itself is punished. But the instinct behind it the acceptance of being watched, the shrinking of language to shut down disagreements, and the rewriting of what was promised is something we can observe if we pay close enough attention.
Srishti Mehta is a student of Navy Children School, Goa. Views are personal.
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