Dangers Of Conformity In 1984

Alex Drews
Mrs. VandeMoortel
Sophomore Honors English Period 9
Faceless
“To die hating them, that was freedom” (Orwell 281). This is the goal of Winston Smith from the novel, 1984, by George Orwell. The book takes place in the dystopian society, of Oceania, in the year 1984, and the character Winston Smith narrates and tells the story. A totalitarian government governs Oceania, the Party. The Party controls all aspects of life and forces everyone to love the leader of the Party, Big Brother. The reader watches as the ordinary man, Winston Smith, attempts to rebel and construct his own individuality in a world where everyone is forced to act and think the same. Throughout the novel, Orwell warns the reader against the dangers of conformity and

In the book, the Party creates a new language with fewer words called Newspeak, and the “‘whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought’” and make it so that thinking as an individual is “‘literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it’” (Orwell 52). By removing vocabulary from people, people literally can not do anything else but conform. The Party effectively has control over how people think and talk making it so they can force everyone to conform. Consequently, everyone will think and talk the same causing there will be no more individuality. Another example of how the Party controls its people and makes them conform to their liking is by using technology to make citizens fear being an individual. All over Oceania there are telescreens and hidden microphones. These allow the Party to keep constant surveillance on every single person at all times. The telescreens could hear “any sound” that someone “made, above the level of a very low whisper” and as long as someone was in front of one, the person “could be seen as well as heard”. Worst of all, a person had “no way of knowing whether [they] were being watched at any given moment” (Orwell 3). With the constant surveillance of all citizens, it is easy to know who is conforming and who is

Due to this, people fear to be their own individuals because the Party will find out, and they will subsequently be punished. By conforming and abiding by the telescreens, people all act the same and lose their individuality. The most powerful way that the Party controls its citizens and makes them conform is by the removal and alteration of the past. The Ministry of Truth is one of the parts that make up the Party, and its task is to rewrite history to be however the Party wants it to be. Furthermore, this means that there is no real way to know anything that actually happened in the past. At the beginning of the book, Winston is