Free Essay On The Individual And The Collective In 1984

While many new advances in technology have brought the menacing intrusion of the government into the lives of the individual that Orwell foresaw in 1984 closer to reality, few have resonated as ominously as the recent revelation that the American government has ordered itself access to metadata about all of the phone records for subscribers to Verizon Wireless, as well as access to Internet activity going through such major hubs as Apple and Google. While the American public was up in arms, the response of Congressional leadership on both sides of the aisle indicated that the White House has shown, through the use of classified information, that these programs are needed because of the terrorist plots that they have foiled. It is clear that, in the United States of the 21st century, that individual and personal freedoms are daily falling prey to the needs that the government declares exist for the collective. While it is possible to find freedom in our own world, and in Orwell’s world, those opportunities are continually shrinking. The allegorical applications of Orwell’s tale for our own time become more and more valid as time goes by, and our technology catches up with Orwell’s vision.
Moving into 1984, the story begins with the idea that all people have the same basic parameters for their lives. Winston Smith, the main character, lives what appears to be a fairly normal life for a Party member in Oceania. He lives in an apartment with a telescreen that not only shows him programming but watches him. His apartment seems to be about the same size as everyone else’s, and the smell of cabbage and dirty laundry appears to permeate the entire building equally. There is rationing for food and other consumables, but that rationing appears to work the same for everyone in the story. Membership in the Party sounds like a privilege, but it also means that Winston has expectations for social activities in the evenings that do not apply to others; in fact, they actually amount to an extra form of supervision and control. Winston’s job – eliminating inconvenient facts from the historical record within the Ministry of Truth – would seem to be a highly important one, but he does not have any of the trappings of prestige.
Things are much the opposite in the life of O’Brien. When O’Brien gets his eye on Winston as a possible revolutionary, and especially once Winston falls into O’Brien’s trap, the true nature of “equality” manifests itself. O’Brien has a telescreen that turns on and off, meaning that O’Brien can choose whether or not to be supervised; this luxury alone amazes Winston. O’Brien has access to finer alcoholic beverages than the Sterno-esque “Victory Gin.” His apartment is far finer than the place where Winston lives, and the promise that O’Brien at first offers, of a chance to overthrow Big Brother, is heady not just in terms of a lack of supervision and control but, certainly not least, of a chance to move out of that smelly apartment building.
The “freedom” that O’Brien enjoys, though, is only the sort afforded to those who live at the very top of the political order. His real job – finding and “training” those suspected of thought crimes to the point where even the ability to think dissident thoughts is fried out of the cerebral cortex – means that he is one of those who are “more equal than everyone else.” His job is the true maintenance of order, which is the most important job of any government, no matter what form that government takes. Freedom, true freedom, may be possible within the confines of the mind, but the ban on journaling and the ubiquitous telescreens and microphones go as far as Orwell’s imagination could in taking independent thought and grinding it out of existence. In the world in which Orwell grew up, two of the most brutal regimes in world history – that of the Nazis and the Soviets under Stalin – consolidated their power using cruelty and repression. The fact that the Soviet experiment began with the desire for socialism – equality for all – gave it a lasting irony. The fact that even the “good guys” in World War II had to resort to dropping the most destructive weapons in history on the enemy in order to win, and that the war ended with the creation of a stalemate in which both sides would race to see which could destroy the other, left Orwell with a sour view of any regime’s likelihood of focusing on anything other than its own survival.
The only way, then, to secure true freedom for the self was to be in power. O’Brien had power, but he was part of the mechanism keeping the masses in the Party in line. Those in the regular ranks of the Party had no greater shot at power than anyone beneath them in society; instead, they just had the illusion of freedom through greater responsibility. In modern times, much the same has become true. In the name of the Patriot Act, as well as all of the other measures of security that have come into place in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, freedom is disappearing at an alarming rate. This is true on a number of levels. For example, members of Congress and executive leadership in American government have their own retirement plans and their own health insurance plans. They come up with policy suggestions for the retirement and health plans for others, but they are exempt from the proposals that they make. The legislative branch decides its own salary, meaning that there is no check (save the veto) on what they can vote themselves.
This is also true about the way that the government controls others. When the news broke about the American government’s seizure of phone records and Internet access details, while there was some dissidence, the primary response from both parties was that there was a need to have these protections in place, even though the actual basis for that need was the blasé response that the people in power knew what needed to happen, and that the rest of society did not need access to this “classified” information. If you combine this with the fact that the Internal Revenue Service has recently admitted targeting groups with political ties to the Tea Party (the current opposition to President Obama’s policies), there are plenty of reasons to suspect that the government is becoming less and less a set of representatives for “the land of the free.” Instead, the government is becoming more and more brazen in its pursuit of its own security.
The American government has a weapon at its disposal, of course, that Orwell did not foresee – the use of the entertainment media as a source of distraction. With hundreds of cable channels, easy access to the Internet and a wealth of gaming systems available for the public, there are many ways for people’s time to pass without thinking about the changes that are going on about them. The American public never knew that laws were passed to allow their government to seize all of their phone records without any due process. Do you think that there is no such thing as Orwell’s Room 101 in the American government? It’s called rendition, and it’s called Guantanamo Bay. How different are the Bushes and Obamas from the royal family of George III, when it comes to the brutal exercise of power? The casual answers to the tough questions about surveillance are quite telling.