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1984 Concept Mind Map

The usage of control in the dystopian society of 1984 are present in current society through similarities in surveillance, denial of rights and usage of external enemies.
1. 1984
  1. Surveillance
    1. Thought Police: Thought police are secret police in 1984 that use methods of surveillance and psychological trickery to uncover. thought criminals. They are hidden in society as regular members and look for members of the public with beliefs that go against Big Brother. Significant members of the thought police are O’Brien and Mr. Charrington.
      2. National Security Agency: The NSA continues to monitor every American and many of its allies, they monitor your phone records, internet services and your devices. They can intercept cell phone calls, emails, phone calls and can track movement using GPS systems.
    2. Telescreens: Telescreens are two-way televisions in which the public can see the person on the screen but the telescreen can also be used to monitor everyone at any given time.
      2. Social Media Data Invasion: The NSA has also implemented the PRISM program which collects data from major US internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Data collected includes emails, messages, pictures, posts and documents sent on those social media sites.
    3. Microphones: Microphones are used in 1984 to record character voices and record noises in places where Outer and Inner party members should not go
      1. "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." 1984 Page 1
      2. "In general you could not assume that you were much safer in the country than in London. There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting attention. "
    4. Child spies was another program run by Big Brother which desensitized humans of family love. In this, children would be programmed and manipulated to the point where they themselves would become 24/7 telescreens to the parents. The children would look at subtle differences and any cues of thought crime on their parents and then would report it to Big Brother for public acknowledgement. This broke the parent-child love bond as many parents were scared of their children.
  2. External Hatred
    1. In 1984 the state of Oceania is constantly at war with either Eurasia or East Asia as long as the people can remember. With there being no reason to fight, the mechanism of war is solely used to scare people into trusting Big Brother for protection. For example, in the book the bombs are only seen dropped on prole territory not in the inner or outer party, this is just a way for the government to instill exterior fear into the public.
      1. "In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. "
      2. “At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. […] Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”
      3. The war on terror is the military campaign that was instilled after the 9/11 attacks. It’s a crackdown on terrorist organizations with a goal to defend allies, abolish terrorism and protect civilians. This sees the external enemy being terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Queda.
    2. In the book, Goldstein is another figure used by Big Brother as a means of creating a persona for the people of Oceania to hate. By channeling all their hate towards this external enemy during the 2 minutes of hate, they view the Big Brother as wholesome for fighting it off, and do not think about the actions of Big Brother himself.
      1. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.
      2. The war on drugs was a movement elected after the late 1970’s in which the US government cracked down on drug usage. They instilled things like life sentence and prolonged punishment in all drug cases, even if it seemed unjust. The war on drugs saw drugs and drug users identified as the external enemies.
  3. Dehumanization of Public and Denial of Rights
    1. The anti-junior sex league is a group that’s goal is to get rid of sex for pleasure and only use it for procreation. It is mostly run by women and promotes abstinence. This is the Big Brother’s way of ridding the human emotion of pleasure so that people don’t have romantic relationships and have nothing to bond over. This denies humans of right of assimilation and right of freedom.
      1. The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.
      2. With the increase in number of violent games being played by kids, we are getting a society where kids are becoming desensitized towards violence and losing our human trait of empathy. This has resulted in many kid killing other kids expecting the same result as the game.
    2. 1. With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it.
      2. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations.
    3. Out of fear of being turned in for thought crime, people are scared into following the orders of Big Brother without putting any thought into it. Assimilation is illegal, love is illegal, human emotions are supressed to the point where people forget how to feel them anymore. This brings people into solidity like Winston for example who lives alone and communicates with a limited amount of people on a daily basis.
      1. Another thing in today’s day is discrimination and denial of rights of the women in Saudi Arabia. Similar to the proles they are considered inferior. Some of these things include driving a car, wearing revealing clothes or make-up, interacting with men, swimming and trying on clothes while shopping.
    4. Newspeak is a language created in the book which has a primary goal of reducing words and constricting thought to the point where thought crime is impossible; reduce the number of words so that there aren’t words to convey and assimilate ideas in. Double speak is the linguistic feature of changing words to display them in positive light.
      1. "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten."
      2. Similar to newspeak, today’s day texting over calling reduces human communication. For example, over text, with the variety of abbreviations it can often be difficult to deduct meaning from the message. Also, it is very difficult to sense sarcasm and sarcastic humor, this often can cause disputes between people
    5. The government of Big Brother is allowed to interfere with anyone’s goods, belongings and can make anyone disappear at any given moment. They are also allowed to make people confess to uncommitted crimes and display them on a large screen without consent. They conduct the executions of these thought criminals in public.
      1. The indigenous people of Canada are similar to the proles living in the book 1984, they are being denied of rights, are not treated on par with the rest of the public and are given and dangerous living conditions. The aboriginals live in reserves, that resemble slums, with limited access to clean drinking water and abundance of problems like alcoholism and domestic violence.
2. In current society and in past years
  1. Surveillance
    1. National Security Agency: The NSA continues to monitor every American and many of its allies, they monitor your phone records, internet services and your devices. They can intercept cell phone calls, emails, phone calls and can track movement using GPS systems.
    2. Social Media Data Invasion: The NSA has also implemented the PRISM program which collects data from major US internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Data collected includes emails, messages, pictures, posts and documents sent on those social media sites.
    3. Patriot Act: The Patriot Act allows Foreign Intelligence investigation, interception of calls and other electronic communications on anyone in suspected terrorist investigation cases.
  2. External Enemy
    1. The war on drugs was a movement elected after the late 1970’s in which the US government cracked down on drug usage. They instilled things like life sentence and prolonged punishment in all drug cases, even if it seemed unjust. The war on drugs saw drugs and drug users identified as the external enemies.
    2. The war on terror is the military campaign that was instilled after the 9/11 attacks. It’s a crackdown on terrorist organizations with a goal to defend allies, abolish terrorism and protect civilians. This sees the external enemy being terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Queda.
  3. Dehumanization of Public and Denial of Rights
    1. Similar to newspeak, today’s day texting over calling reduces human communication. For example, over text, with the variety of abbreviations it can often be difficult to deduct meaning from the message. Also, it is very difficult to sense sarcasm and sarcastic humor, this often can cause disputes between people.
    2. With the increase in number of violent games being played by kids, we are getting a society where kids are becoming desensitized towards violence and losing our human trait of empathy. This has resulted in many kid killing other kids expecting the same result as the game.
    3. The indigenous people of Canada are similar to the proles living in the book 1984, they are being denied of rights, are not treated on par with the rest of the public and are given and dangerous living conditions. The aboriginals live in reserves, that resemble slums, with limited access to clean drinking water and abundance of problems like alcoholism and domestic violence.
    4. Another thing in today’s day is discrimination and denial of rights of the women in Saudi Arabia. Similar to the proles they are considered inferior. Some of these things include driving a car, wearing revealing clothes or make-up, interacting with men, swimming and trying on clothes while shopping.
As readers of 1984 it was evident, Big Brother was a persona that a totalitarian state was operated under. The population had limited rights, were everlastingly exposed to propaganda and were constantly under surveillance. The minds of the public had known nothing but that kind of society, as cause of this, it was nearly impossible to escape because there was nothing to compare the escape to. In a way, the members of our society are not aware about the eerie similarities between our society and those of a dystopia because of our orientation in space and time. Imaging our lives as books, with a reader in an unobservable universe, would they associate our society with one dystopian? For this mind map, I decided to take a step back and compare our society with Oceania. Being of this society, we are often blinded to the methods of control used by the government. I set three methods of control, surveillance, dehumanization of public and denial of rights and usage of external enemies. I use

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1984 Concept Mind Map

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	Created by Adi Chha almost 8 years ago