George Orwell 1984 Freedom Essay

Words: 855
Pages: 4

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” written by George Orwell in 1948 is a dystopian novel where the party has full control over all aspects of life. The novel is based around the idea of having individual freedom and freedom can be interpreted as various meanings. The great impact of manipulation is what caused and shaped the ignorant people of Oceania. Manipulation was used significantly to restrict one’s individual freedom. The party heavily uses the manipulation of truth, fear and language rather than ignorance to control one’s behaviour and their perception of reality.
The party is constantly masking the truth and this restricts one’s freedom in terms of their ability to remember about the past. Freedom is being able to remember the history of your
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The party has always imposed on everyone what to do, what to think and what to feel. The Party uses fear to restrict one’s behaviour, resulting in people not being able to do what they want and what they like openly. The fear of “being watched at any given moment” and the fear of being capture and punished by the “thought police” is what managed to manipulate the citizens. With the fear of being tortured, naturally, most people will obey the party’s order and compromise the Party’s thinking to get away with trouble. People cannot even have any facial expression as “a single flicker of eyes could give you away” and “to do what everyone else as doing was an instinctive reaction”. Therefore, people can no longer have the freedom to express their true feelings and they are restricted to only behave how the party wants them to. In addition, Room 101 for instance, is another prime example of manipulation of fear. Fear is brought out through presenting them “[their] worst thing in the world”. Winston is once again a key evidence to prove that this tactic the Party uses is working. According to Winston, he insisted that “freedom is the freedom to say that 2 plus 2 makes four”. However, after experiencing excruciating pain, the Party has managed to make Winston twist the logic and say “2+2=5”. This shows that the Party is able to use fear to change one’s perception of reality and force them to say what they themselves do not believe through fear.