“Double think, practice it if the party says the earth is flat that’s true the party says two and two make five true no not no forget and forget that you’ve forgotten crime stop ignorance is strength.”
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The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, proclaims freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and links them to a framework of universal rights by birth for every human being. Already then, there was a widespread perception in the free world that freedoms not only protect privacy, but also help society to develop more rapidly – free debate, free thought, free business foster innovation and wealth creation. Separation of powers and transparent governance subject to public scrutiny prevent government abuses.
Only a year later, in 1949, George Orwell’s novel 1984 is published. The best-known cautionary tale in history depicts totalitarianism without restraint: a society where the very thought of freedom is a death sentence. It is a work that is often referred to and quoted, but especially recently, Orwell’s central message – that freedom is a value in itself, and that it is up to each citizen how he or she chooses to use it, so long as he or she respects the freedom of others – seems to be disappearing.
We live in a world of over-regulation, increasing restrictions and control of public debate. The two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall were characterized by a triumph of freedom. Today, that consensus has disintegrated. Human rights, too, are becoming a political playground, where both the autocrats measuring their strength against the democratic world and the conscious or subconscious agents within democracies themselves are twisting the meaning of concepts formulated in 1948.
This again brings to mind Orwell’s dystopian novel, in which the authorities were engaged in imposing “Newspeak” – a language in which hostile thoughts could not even be expressed.
In the West, we are not yet in such a situation. But we face a world where many autocrats are fond of this kind of thinking. The desire to build a better and safer world that exists in our own societies also unfortunately often goes hand in hand with fear. The interplay of the two – utopia and fear – creates the temptation to use tools that lead people to think in the “right” way. Be it social media algorithms that influence what we see or read, “cancel culture” or the banning of certain words or concepts. The latter is just one step away from Orwellian Newspeak…
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ROOM 101
* In George Orwell’s novel “1984”, Room 101, the most feared place in the Ministry of Love, represents the Party’s absolute control and psychological terror, where people’s deepest fears destroy their will, individuality, and loyalty. It is a tool of the totalitarian regime that subdues all dissenters and keeps society in fear and obedience.
By exploring the psychological dimensions of fear and control, Orwell emphasizes the far-reaching impact of totalitarianism on the human psyche. The concept of Room 101 encapsulates the reality of fear and control in a dystopian society, serving as a cautionary tale about the consequences of totalitarianism on human experience.