Brainwashing constituents in Orwell’s 1984 and Today’s World

(José Tomás Quero Montes)

Introduction.

I think we could compare the world imagined by Orwell with some current and not-so-current
governments, such as the American government, or the North Korean, or some older and
totalitarian regimes such as Italian, German or Russian totalitarian regimes. If we look at the
way in which the government in "1984" controlled the population with the so-called Big
Brother, we can compare it with the way in which the totalitarian regimes controlled the written
and radio press for their own purposes.

The establishment of fear as a method to revolt the population is something that can be seen
reflected in the novel, and is something that both Nazism and the communist government of
Stalin used, as well as the Mussolini regime. But we are talking about a past era; let's move on
to the current environment. It is not unreasonable to say that the Pyongyang regime uses
censorship and the press to control its people, and we speak of a totalitarian regime. But this
also happens in the case of American democracy, because the United States has also been
controlling for years what the reader can or cannot know at street level. So I would compare the
way in which the big brother can observe his population and deceive it at will with various
methods so that he can do what he wants, with the way in which old and new regimes make use
of the press and other means.

We can also see an idea that has been raised for many years, and is that governments are
controlling us subconsciously through advertising, music, food and, ultimately, everything that
appears or disappears in our day to day. This idea was called “Mk-Ultra Project”.

Brainwashing constituents in Orwell’s 1984 and Today’s World.

The project Mk-Ultra was developed by the American CIA as an experimental means used in
humans to obtain new methods of torture and interrogation that gave positive results in convicts
or prisoners.

The project was born in the 50s, often with controversy since some of the methods used were
illegal. But the CIA was able to carry them out with very clever legal means to get around the
barrier of illegality. In 1977, after many investigations, many documents related to the project
were destroyed and it was definitively closed.

The intention of this project was to discover drugs and procedures that could be used in the
interrogations, but there is a large world community that believes that this project never
stopped, if not, it got even bigger. The opinion is that governments control us subconsciously
using all the means at their disposal (music, food, movies, video games, the same smartphones
that we use every day, in short, everything).

It is true that we can observe that the population is controlled through advertising and other
means mentioned above, and is something that is not really hidden, we just do not usually see it
from that perspective.

To give an example that is comparable both in the novel and in our real world, let's observe the
moment in which, in the novel, they change the price of a product: before the product cost 20,
they wanted to raise the price to 30 and their strategy was to say "now it is worth 30 when
before it cost 40". It is a lie but citizens believe that the price has gone down when it has really
gone up. In a current example we could use the so-called "day without VAT" of large
technology companies.
I will propose an example of something that happened to myself: In the week of Christmas I
bought a television for my parents for the price of €490, the following week the company
announced the days without VAT and I entered out of curiosity to know what would be the
price of the same television that I bought just a week ago, to my surprise the price was €485,
that is, only €5 discount. Why the discount is so low if they should have lowered 21% of the
original price? The reason is the same as in “1984”: they had changed the original price to the
television for a much higher one, to make us believe that they had made a real discount when in
fact it was a lie. This is something that happened just a few weeks ago, at present.

In conclusion we could say that the idea of Orwell was not at all outlandish, and that is
happening now, subconsciously, and we are so similar to the society that he raised that we do
not realize. Big Brother observes us and controls us in the same way that happens in 1984, and
we do nothing to avoid it.

Bibliography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

http://www.iispandinipiazza.gov.it/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Nineteen-Eighty-Four-
themes-1.pdf

My own knowledge.