“1984” by George Orwell
A society is easiest to regulate when people are almost programmable, unable to feel or think for themselves and are completely devoted to the state. Stripped of their humanity, the people are putty in the government’s hands and have limited personal freedoms. In George Orwell’s fictional dystopian novel, 1984, Oceania enforces regulations through language, personal relationships, work, and the media that limit the Party members’ freedoms and destroy their human spirits.
People think, speak, and communicate with words, and by controlling the words that they are able to use, Oceania controls and limits its member’s thoughts and conversations. By creating a new language, Newspeak, and enlisting it as the national language, Oceania began requiring its members to write and speak with the improved language. English was then considered Oldspeak, and was declared outdated and flawed. Deleting words and eliminating ideas, Oceania slowly began to compress Party members’ thoughts and control their minds with each new installment of Newspeak. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” declared Syme, an Outer Party member defending Oceania’s purpose for limiting language. The time in which Party members would only be able to think what the Party wants them to think since unwanted ideas cannot exist would begin an era in which Oceania would completely control its members’ minds and their overall humanity.