Power In 1984

Reality is usually seen as a concrete idea: stable, never changing, and forever. Such a fragile definition can be easily altered in a world where the media is controlled, though, such as in the world of Big Brother in Orwell’s work 1984. According to Big Brother, also known as the Party, reality is neither subjective nor objective. The only mind where reality would remain unscathed is in the collective mind of the Party. Collective reality is nothing new; religion, patriotism, and even cultism are all examples of collective realities, also known as hive minds. As long as the individuals in the collective reality know nothing about other realities, they will remain oblivious and ignorant to the world around them. They can be easily controlled,

“The object of power is power” (Orwell Part 3 Chapter 3), states O’Brien in 1984, and he is undeniably correct in that aspect. By using all sorts of media (such as news outlets and social media), a government, like that of Oceania’s, can control the thoughts and the ideas of its citizens. Big Brother has done just that, and has proved to themselves and to the past that it is very effective. The media can and has influenced and controlled people’s minds in society today. For example, the NRA is a powerful organization that refuses to limit its power for the safety of students, children, and society as a whole. Power is a crucial asset to have, and the NRA has kept its power to capitalize off of it, to capitalize off of the deaths of students. Counterculture and gun-rights activists have blamed and accused the mainstream media of wrongly blaming guns for the several school-shootings this year, while others agree with that guns pose a threat to learning institutions. The media has played a large role in influencing people’s mindset or opinion on an issue, what’s to say that it cannot control society’s actual mind, such as Big Brother and the idea of

Such a claim is not valid, though. How can the individual know of something that they know nothing of? The truth is what their government makes the truth out to be. In 1984, the main antagonist O’Brien tells the story’s protagonist, Winston, that he is “the last of his kind” (Orwell Part 3 Chapter 2). What is meant by this is that Winston is the last individual with memories of the past, of his childhood where the Party was still not in power. A government with control over the media is an all-knowing one; that government has the power to make their own truth and ultimately implement their own reality and make it universal. If such a fictional piece of evidence is not enough, then North Korea should be more than enough to provide evidence. North Korea had to start from somewhere, and now the citizens of that nation worship their leader like a