Zachary Utopia&Dystopia Blog

After being introduced to the Inner Party and the Outer Party in Book 1, by Book 2 we get to know the 3rd and final group of people on Airstrip One: the Proles. The interactions between groups are very orderly and form the society we learn about through the novel. The primary goals of the people in the inner state are to control members of the outer state. Since the members of the outer state are generally more educated and more likely to revolt than the proles, extra attention must be given to them to determine they do not rebel. While some out party members are completely brainwashed, some are smart enough (Syme) or freethinking enough (Winston) to pose a threat. The primary job of the other party, meanwhile, is to help the inner state control each other but also to control the proles. The best-case scenario for the inner party would for there to only be 2 castes in the society: the party and the proles. However, there are not enough people in the inner party to be able to control th...

  To me, one of the more interesting differences between Winston and Julia is their motive to rebel, internally, against the party. In some ways, I feel the difference between Winston and Julia is notable because it is meant to represent larger more general ways that people tend to be driven to rebel against authoritarian regimes. Winston is motivated by a sense of the greater good and feels it is just morally wrong for the party to oppress the happiness and withhold information from people in the society as a whole. He is angry at the party and has an unending need to search for the truth, hoping he can better understand the past and keep in touch with the world that the government aims to separate him from. While Winston has this sense of greater good motivating him, Julia is extremely angry that the government aims to suppress herself and her desires, specifically her sexual desires. She fights them by having sexual relations with as many party members as possible, getting joy f...

  To me, one of the more intriguing questions from Book 1 from 1984 is why the party hates sex, and spends time and energy battling this natural interest of its members. I believe the leaders of the party are worried about how sex can cultivate individualism, something that is extremely dangerous for the state. These ideas (perpetrated by the Party in 1984) have serious parallels to Marxism. Marx also argued that nothing should get in the way of the state, and argued that things like family and religion would not be needed in his utopia. Since loyalties to gods, lovers, parents, and siblings could obfuscate one’s loyalty to the state, Marxists regimes have historically seen these competing loyalties as dangerous and have worked to remove them. For instance, Stalin’s Russia taught children to rat out their parents if they lacked loyalty to the state and ruthlessly persecuted Jews and Russian Orthodox clergy through the 1930s. In 1984, sex is referred to as “our duty to the party” a ...

     Hate week is one of the most interesting exercises the state uses in 1984 to try to maintain their mental stranglehold on the people of Airstrip One, especially the members of the outer party. Hate week, as well as the closely related Five Minutes of Hate, are exercises that focus on “hating” the major enemy of Big Brother and the state as a whole, Emmanuel Goldstein. In traditional Western fashion, the scale of good to evil is completely binary. Big Brother is the ultimate good, and Goldstein is the ultimate evil. This hate of Goldstein relies on mob mentality powered by an advanced understanding of the human psyche. Participants in the Five Minutes of Hate become caught up in a complete frenzy, surrounded by the extreme passion of other participants. In the end, perfectly normal people are throwing books at a picture of Goldstein, completely caught up in this mob. The party strips participants of their individualism through these measures, instead making them feel ...