The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern “degeneracy”) that stuck around at least until the 2010s.
It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn’t put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidencesupporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][5] that a language’s structures influence a speaker’s perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
I think the premise is not linguistic relativity, it’s the political bullshit itself. Something like “all countries bullshit against their own citizens, so that those citizens defend things going against their own best interests. Watch out when yours does it.” If what I’m saying is correct, the only role of that relativity would be that Orwell incorrectly believed to be one of the tools used to craft bullshit.
I’m saying this based on two things. One is the book itself; in plenty situations there’s no relativity, the bullshit pops up because people forgot what happened. Check the first two quotes for examples.
The other reason is another text Orwell wrote, Politics and the English Language. IMO the six points are bad advice (and often propagated by muppets, who didn’t understand the text in first place), and Orwell was completely clueless about language, but the premise itself is related to the one in 1984; something like “stop hiding bullshit behind walls of babble”. The last quote shows it
Quotes
[1984] It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
[1984] Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.
[Politics and the English Language; emphasis in the original] In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. […]
EDIT - moved quotes to spoiler tags for less clutter.
It might not be the best book ever written, but I think it’s important to read. It’s one of the most cited books to support whatever people want. Once you read it, you can interpret it for yourself, and you actually know what it’s about.
The thing most people know from it is Big Brother watching you. It’s just surveillance state stuff. That’s a relatively small part of it though. It’s more about shaping culture through information control. Yeah, surveillance is part of it, but even that’s not just cameras; it’s also about having people inform the government about their neighbors, or parents, or whatever else.
Which was of course already incredibly contemporary with what Goebals, Himmler and Stalin had been up to. Everyone sees the novel as the endgame of the opposing ideology, though it’s basically a warning against those who would seek to cement their power by making opposition impossible.
There are two types of linguistic relativity: “strong” and “weak”. Usually, when people simply say “linguistic relativity”, they’re talking about the strong view.
In the “strong” view, language limits your thought, perception, etc. You’d be completely unable to understand certain concepts, unless your language has words for them. Nowadays we know it to be false, but in Orwell’s times it was popular, and Orwell was clueless about how languages work, so he used it in 1984 (that’s where Newspeak comes from).
In the “weak” view, language doesn’t dictate your thought or perception, but influences them a bit. It’s probably true, but it’s a rather trivial conclusion.
So, for example. Let’s say there’s some language out there using the exact same word for two different concepts:
unrestricted, unchained, unbound
costless, at no exchange of money
If the strong version was true, a monolingual speaker of said language would be completely unable to tell both concepts apart. But since the weaker version is true, they can do it; it’s just they’ll have a bit of a harder time. (The language from the example is English, by the way. Cue to “free beer” and “free software”.)
I don’t know if I missed it, but I don’t think it’s been disproven. I actually think it’s true still, though maybe not as dramatic as 1984 would say.
For example, IQ tests (in particular old ones, as modern ones try to control for this) are built on a modern western sensibility. However, the way some cultures handles different concepts can be different, and it can measure it poorly.
As an example of this, classic Greek math is built on geometry. Having that basis on math makes solving certain problems significantly easier, but equally it makes some thing calculus significantly more difficult. It’s much harder to do abstract math when you’re mind is trained on concrete shapes.
I dropped it about halfway through. I’m sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5.
I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn’t really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don’t need real agency.
The lesson it’s trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn’t let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations’ lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.
If we’re still talking about 1984, then from what I read I would still say it was meant to cover a totalitarian state as a whole. We get to see the Ministry of Truth the most because that’s the department Winston works at, and controlling what information the populace receives is certainly important for the state. But there are other implicit criticisms to the society’s structure that aren’t really related to just media.
And if anything, I think we could only read a criticism of government-controlled media from the book. We can’t infer if Orwell has a problem with private media when it doesn’t feature at all in the story. And personally, I would say a free press serves as a check against the descent into this kind of society by informing the public about their government. Private media has its own agendas, but at least it’s only incentivized to lie when there’s a profit motive.
If you mean Fahrenheit 451, then yeah, I agree he focusses on media. The government is still tyrannical, but other abuses are smaller than in 1984 and are more in the background compared to their focus on eliminating media they didn’t control. It mostly cares about hitting you on the head that burning books is what the bad guys do.
Also spoilers ahead here.
I’ve read it, and i completely agree. The plot is quite sluggish, and after i was finished reading, i wished that i would have dropped it halfway through. The last third, is basically graphic descriptions of torture. And i wouldn’t have needed that to get the point of the book. I don’t need a happy ending. This isn’t what the book is about. But i also don’t want 150 pages of literal torture.
I learned recently that although identifing as a socialist, Orwell was kind of a crappy dude. He sold out a ton of people he saw as too communist to the British intelligence service in a weird dossier with kinda bigoted descriptions of people.
He was apparently on his deathbed and dying of a disease (I think TB?) That some have said makes you not all mentally there, but it seems unlikely to me that the bigotedness was fabricated entirely by the impact of disease on his mind.
It kinda made me reconsider how I interpreted parts of 1984. He seemed to kinda look down on lower socioeconomic groups and indigenous populations as like baser more animal, less human creatures, and you can kinda see a bit of his McCarthyism in 1984. I found it kinda odd what groups he said he thought would form the authoritarian bougiosie class (sorry I dont feel like looking up how to spell that right now, so you get my horrible butchered spelling)
‘Orwells List’ is rightfully controversial. Im not gonna try and fully defend him siding with the British Goverment against anyone
But I do think to judge him fairly you gotta understand a couple things
it was written in 1949
it called out people who he thought were too closely tied to Stalin’s Russia
the British Establishment at the time were nominally friendly with the Stalin government
Orwell was unhappy with Soviet Communists due to their liberal collaboration and repression of anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
Orwell was always explicitly anti-stalinist
So I don’t think he’s immune from historical judgement, but I do think that modern conclusions of Orwell as a kind of ‘counter-revolutionary’ miss a lot of valuable context
He definitely wasn’t just informing on people whom he thought were ‘too socialist’, even if from a 2026 perspective he had more in common with the communists he was listing
And it’s worth noting that this was years before American McCarthyism and the associated witchhunt
Orwell was unhappy with Soviet Communists due to their liberal collaboration and repression of anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
This is most certainly not true. Modern estimates of Soviet repressions of Anarchists in Republican Spain number a total of 20 individuals, there were literally 10 soviet NKVD agents in Spain at its peak. The whole idea of the “Jewish-Bolsheviks” repressing everything and anything in Spain stems from Francoist propaganda and from widespread application of anecdotal evidence of one or two cases such as the assassination of Andreu Nin.
For a more detailed review of my sources on the topic as a Spaniard myself, I wrote a post on my alt account detailing the reality of the Soviet repressions in Spain.
Also, being anti-Soviet in 1949 is extremely suspicious too. The Soviets had just saved Europe from Nazism, regardless of his thoughts about Catalonia if one is antifascist in 1949 one supports the Soviets, period. It’s not until a few years later as you say that anti-Soviet propaganda starts to be widespread in the west out of fear that the revolution will spread to the rest of the capitalist world.
Interesting, I appreciate you adding additional context. I dont know how or if it changes my perspective on things but having more info to consider is helpful :)
From a google it does seem like the second red scare (I didn’t know there were two of them) was right around the late 1940s through the 1950s according to Wikipedia. I described it him that way cause thats how one of the people listed in the Wikipedia article on his list described it reflecting on him and I felt it was apt, but if I’m missing about what happened when something I’d welcome additional info and correction ☺️ I’m honestly really ignorant about history and have been trying to learn more lately.
If you wanna share anything more you know about the subject please feel free (no obligation or anything of course)
He grew up in the British Raj, with his father supporting the opium war in China. He also worked as a radio host for the British government to spread propoganda (insisting that him not doing it would mean someone worse would). This makes his assertion that things like 1984 media influence of opinion a little insane, with him saying it wasn’t happening then, but it could happen soon. He was literally a part of it.
A lot of his views seem to come from when he went to Spain to fight in their civil war against the Fascists. He ended up joining the Anarchists (not by choice, but because this was the option available), and the Communist faction treated them poorly, saying they weren’t really leftist enough (as usual). This is why he ended up focusing almost all of his energy on anti-USSR/anti-authoritarian stuff, rather than anti-empire or anti-capitalist. He was a leftist, just one with a massive grudge against “the wrong leftists”.
Ok, I’ll take the bait. It’s a good book, and not all that long!
The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern “degeneracy”) that stuck around at least until the 2010s.
It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn’t put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
I mean saying it isn’t as good as anything by LeGuin is hardly an insult. Nearly everyone isn’t as good as LeGuin.
The romantic sub-plot… That’s a misunderstanding. It’s a love triangle between Winston, Julia and Big Brother. It’s not really a sub-plot at all.
But you’re right. Le Guin runs rings around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
I think the premise is not linguistic relativity, it’s the political bullshit itself. Something like “all countries bullshit against their own citizens, so that those citizens defend things going against their own best interests. Watch out when yours does it.” If what I’m saying is correct, the only role of that relativity would be that Orwell incorrectly believed to be one of the tools used to craft bullshit.
I’m saying this based on two things. One is the book itself; in plenty situations there’s no relativity, the bullshit pops up because people forgot what happened. Check the first two quotes for examples.
The other reason is another text Orwell wrote, Politics and the English Language. IMO the six points are bad advice (and often propagated by muppets, who didn’t understand the text in first place), and Orwell was completely clueless about language, but the premise itself is related to the one in 1984; something like “stop hiding bullshit behind walls of babble”. The last quote shows it
Quotes
EDIT - moved quotes to spoiler tags for less clutter.
It might not be the best book ever written, but I think it’s important to read. It’s one of the most cited books to support whatever people want. Once you read it, you can interpret it for yourself, and you actually know what it’s about.
The thing most people know from it is Big Brother watching you. It’s just surveillance state stuff. That’s a relatively small part of it though. It’s more about shaping culture through information control. Yeah, surveillance is part of it, but even that’s not just cameras; it’s also about having people inform the government about their neighbors, or parents, or whatever else.
Which was of course already incredibly contemporary with what Goebals, Himmler and Stalin had been up to. Everyone sees the novel as the endgame of the opposing ideology, though it’s basically a warning against those who would seek to cement their power by making opposition impossible.
i’m interested–further reading on this?
There are two types of linguistic relativity: “strong” and “weak”. Usually, when people simply say “linguistic relativity”, they’re talking about the strong view.
In the “strong” view, language limits your thought, perception, etc. You’d be completely unable to understand certain concepts, unless your language has words for them. Nowadays we know it to be false, but in Orwell’s times it was popular, and Orwell was clueless about how languages work, so he used it in 1984 (that’s where Newspeak comes from).
In the “weak” view, language doesn’t dictate your thought or perception, but influences them a bit. It’s probably true, but it’s a rather trivial conclusion.
So, for example. Let’s say there’s some language out there using the exact same word for two different concepts:
If the strong version was true, a monolingual speaker of said language would be completely unable to tell both concepts apart. But since the weaker version is true, they can do it; it’s just they’ll have a bit of a harder time. (The language from the example is English, by the way. Cue to “free beer” and “free software”.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
I don’t know if I missed it, but I don’t think it’s been disproven. I actually think it’s true still, though maybe not as dramatic as 1984 would say.
For example, IQ tests (in particular old ones, as modern ones try to control for this) are built on a modern western sensibility. However, the way some cultures handles different concepts can be different, and it can measure it poorly.
As an example of this, classic Greek math is built on geometry. Having that basis on math makes solving certain problems significantly easier, but equally it makes some thing calculus significantly more difficult. It’s much harder to do abstract math when you’re mind is trained on concrete shapes.
I dropped it about halfway through. I’m sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5.
I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn’t really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don’t need real agency.
The lesson it’s trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn’t let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations’ lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.
How do you feel about Bradbury’s claim that it was less about a totalitarian state than a condemnation of the effects of mass media?
If we’re still talking about 1984, then from what I read I would still say it was meant to cover a totalitarian state as a whole. We get to see the Ministry of Truth the most because that’s the department Winston works at, and controlling what information the populace receives is certainly important for the state. But there are other implicit criticisms to the society’s structure that aren’t really related to just media.
And if anything, I think we could only read a criticism of government-controlled media from the book. We can’t infer if Orwell has a problem with private media when it doesn’t feature at all in the story. And personally, I would say a free press serves as a check against the descent into this kind of society by informing the public about their government. Private media has its own agendas, but at least it’s only incentivized to lie when there’s a profit motive.
If you mean Fahrenheit 451, then yeah, I agree he focusses on media. The government is still tyrannical, but other abuses are smaller than in 1984 and are more in the background compared to their focus on eliminating media they didn’t control. It mostly cares about hitting you on the head that burning books is what the bad guys do.
Also spoilers ahead here.
I’ve read it, and i completely agree. The plot is quite sluggish, and after i was finished reading, i wished that i would have dropped it halfway through. The last third, is basically graphic descriptions of torture. And i wouldn’t have needed that to get the point of the book. I don’t need a happy ending. This isn’t what the book is about. But i also don’t want 150 pages of literal torture.
It’s the one with all the animals, right?
I think. Is Star Wars the one with the wizard boy?
In a way, yes
It insists upon itself.
I learned recently that although identifing as a socialist, Orwell was kind of a crappy dude. He sold out a ton of people he saw as too communist to the British intelligence service in a weird dossier with kinda bigoted descriptions of people.
He was apparently on his deathbed and dying of a disease (I think TB?) That some have said makes you not all mentally there, but it seems unlikely to me that the bigotedness was fabricated entirely by the impact of disease on his mind.
It kinda made me reconsider how I interpreted parts of 1984. He seemed to kinda look down on lower socioeconomic groups and indigenous populations as like baser more animal, less human creatures, and you can kinda see a bit of his McCarthyism in 1984. I found it kinda odd what groups he said he thought would form the authoritarian bougiosie class (sorry I dont feel like looking up how to spell that right now, so you get my horrible butchered spelling)
‘Orwells List’ is rightfully controversial. Im not gonna try and fully defend him siding with the British Goverment against anyone
But I do think to judge him fairly you gotta understand a couple things
it was written in 1949
it called out people who he thought were too closely tied to Stalin’s Russia
the British Establishment at the time were nominally friendly with the Stalin government
Orwell was unhappy with Soviet Communists due to their liberal collaboration and repression of anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War
Orwell was always explicitly anti-stalinist
So I don’t think he’s immune from historical judgement, but I do think that modern conclusions of Orwell as a kind of ‘counter-revolutionary’ miss a lot of valuable context
He definitely wasn’t just informing on people whom he thought were ‘too socialist’, even if from a 2026 perspective he had more in common with the communists he was listing
And it’s worth noting that this was years before American McCarthyism and the associated witchhunt
This is most certainly not true. Modern estimates of Soviet repressions of Anarchists in Republican Spain number a total of 20 individuals, there were literally 10 soviet NKVD agents in Spain at its peak. The whole idea of the “Jewish-Bolsheviks” repressing everything and anything in Spain stems from Francoist propaganda and from widespread application of anecdotal evidence of one or two cases such as the assassination of Andreu Nin.
For a more detailed review of my sources on the topic as a Spaniard myself, I wrote a post on my alt account detailing the reality of the Soviet repressions in Spain.
Also, being anti-Soviet in 1949 is extremely suspicious too. The Soviets had just saved Europe from Nazism, regardless of his thoughts about Catalonia if one is antifascist in 1949 one supports the Soviets, period. It’s not until a few years later as you say that anti-Soviet propaganda starts to be widespread in the west out of fear that the revolution will spread to the rest of the capitalist world.
Interesting, I appreciate you adding additional context. I dont know how or if it changes my perspective on things but having more info to consider is helpful :)
From a google it does seem like the second red scare (I didn’t know there were two of them) was right around the late 1940s through the 1950s according to Wikipedia. I described it him that way cause thats how one of the people listed in the Wikipedia article on his list described it reflecting on him and I felt it was apt, but if I’m missing about what happened when something I’d welcome additional info and correction ☺️ I’m honestly really ignorant about history and have been trying to learn more lately.
If you wanna share anything more you know about the subject please feel free (no obligation or anything of course)
He grew up in the British Raj, with his father supporting the opium war in China. He also worked as a radio host for the British government to spread propoganda (insisting that him not doing it would mean someone worse would). This makes his assertion that things like 1984 media influence of opinion a little insane, with him saying it wasn’t happening then, but it could happen soon. He was literally a part of it.
A lot of his views seem to come from when he went to Spain to fight in their civil war against the Fascists. He ended up joining the Anarchists (not by choice, but because this was the option available), and the Communist faction treated them poorly, saying they weren’t really leftist enough (as usual). This is why he ended up focusing almost all of his energy on anti-USSR/anti-authoritarian stuff, rather than anti-empire or anti-capitalist. He was a leftist, just one with a massive grudge against “the wrong leftists”.
https://redsails.org/on-orwell/