Totalitarian+Control

George Orwell’s novel __Nineteen Eighty-Four__ depicts a world in which the major continents have been divided by three different totalitarian governments that are always at war. The plot takes place in Oceania, which is controlled by one of these governments, and makes up most of Europe. Oceania’s government is headed by what is possibly a fictional head called Big Brother, but the philosophy that allows him to maintain control is INGSOC or English Socialism. However, the ideas behind English Socialism could not alone ensure that countless populations could be controlled. In __Nineteen Eighty-Four__ the people carry out the party’s will and all the while blindly worships their leadership and refuses to question anything. The Inner Party uses panoptical control, the Standardization of Society, and Sexual Control in order to control the people. 1) Panoptical Control is a philosophy in which people are controlled by the sheer idea that they are always being watched. In __Nineteen Eighty-Four__, the Party uses Telescreen’s, the Think Police, and the children to complete this purpose. A telescreen simply amounts to a television screen in all rooms and workstations that uses a camera to record and watch all citizens. Panoptical theory is based upon the idea that prisoners are more likely to behave if they are constantly being watched. So in order to insure the perfect inmate, you must insure that they are never private. Orwell writes, “You had to live- did live, from habit that became instinct- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized” (Orwell 3). It’s understandable that if even in the privacy of your own bedroom you were always being watched, it would begin to break down your will to break out. On telescreen’s one critic says, “A feeling beyond mere invasion of privacy was engendered with the telescreen, suggesting a deeper violation- the theft of a part of one’s self” (Strub). Another way that panoptical control was accomplished in __Nineteen Eighty-Four__ was the use of children. Orwell writes, It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak…had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police (Orwell 24). One could never act against the party’s control if even when the telescreen isn’t around; they are still being watched by even their own children. 2) The control of information is important in a totalitarian government, so that no questions about the effectiveness of the government are raised. In this novel, the actual subjects like Winston and his co-workers, help to complete this goal. Winston’s job is to go through the Times daily, and to change the facts in old issues so that no incongruities come up. For example, if Big Brother said once that the war with Eurasia would be over in six weeks, and the present day is on the seventh week, it would be Winston’s job to edit the information in the speech. This work is so efficient that there are no copies of the originals and there is no trace of a change. By eliminating information, the party deprives the people of any hope of taking control of where their lives are headed. The readiness of information also involves the cinema in __Nineteen Eighty-Four__. The telescreen and the showing of war moves are the only real cinema the people get, but they are heavily burdened with applause for the state. One critic describes the attempts of control through the media as, “The members of the Inner Party do not want to daze their subjects’ minds so much as to train them and bend heir resistance: more than prevent from thinking, they impose their own way of thinking” (Varrichio). This idea that the use of the media to break the subject down and to control thinking is disturbing and obviously a powerful tool for a totalitarian government. 3) The last important way in which the party controls the people is through the degradation of sex into a yearly act of necessity. To complete this goal the party creates the Junior Anti-Sex League and encourages the people to adopt oaths of celibacy. Orwell writes, “Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it” (Orwell 65). One critic puts it as, “Party Neurologists, we learn towards the end of the book, are devising methods for destroying the orgasm and creating the type of procreation, nurture and education in which maternal or paternal involvement would become unnecessary” (Tirohl). The idea here is that if you destroy the orgasm you destroy the last reason man can rely on himself. If we no longer get pleasure from anything outside of the party, we can never rebel against it.