1984

## The Trap of Changing the Past What if the past didn't just happen, but was constantly being rewritten to match whatever a ruler wanted you to believe today? ## The Rules of Total Control *1984* is a famous novel written by George Orwell in 1949. It imagines a gloomy future where a government called "The Party" watches everyone all the time through two-way television screens called telescreens. The main character, Winston Smith, has a dangerous job at the Ministry of Truth. His task is to take old newspapers and books and rewrite them so that the government is never wrong. If the government promises that chocolate rations will go up, but they actually go down, Winston has to destroy the old records and write a new story saying chocolate rations were *always* planned to go down. Orwell showed how controlling history allows the government to control people's minds. As the book famously warns about the nature of power: > "Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." > — George Orwell, *1984* ## The Limits of Mind Control Even though the Party tries to police every thought—a concept Orwell called "thoughtcrime"—the book leaves us with a haunting question. Does the government actually succeed in breaking everyone completely, or does the very act of struggling against it prove that human freedom cannot be entirely erased? ## Follow-up questions 1. How does George Orwell's idea of constant surveillance compare to the way we use modern smartphones and social media today? 2. What does the term "doublethink" mean, and how does the Party use it to make people believe two opposite things at the exact same time? 3. Why does Winston believe that hope for the future rests specifically with the working class, whom he calls the proles?