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Orwellian is an adjective which is used to describe a situation, an idea, or a societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. [2]
In the course of his work life at the Ministry of Truth, Winston approaches O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, believing him part of the Brotherhood, Goldstein's conspiracy against Oceania. [3] Initially, O'Brien appears as such, especially in arranging to give Winston a copy of "The Book", the possession of which is a crime in Oceania.
Orwell then quotes an essay by Burnham entitled "Lenin's Heir" which posits a continuity between Lenin and Stalin's policies and appears to pay homage to Stalin "a great man". Again Burnham makes false predictions. Orwell identifies the reason for such errors to be the expectation that events will follow the course on which they appear to be set.
Orwell's doublethink is also credited with having inspired the commonly used term doublespeak, which itself does not appear in the book.Comparisons have been made between doublespeak and Orwell's descriptions on political speech from his essay "Politics and the English Language", in which "unscrupulous politicians, advertisers, religionists, and other 'doublespeakers' of whatever stripe ...
The Orwell Archive at University College London contains undated notes about ideas that evolved into Nineteen Eighty-Four.The notebooks have been deemed "unlikely to have been completed later than January 1944", and "there is a strong suspicion that some of the material in them dates back to the early part of the war".
In the year 1984, the government of Oceania, dominated by the Inner Party, uses the Newspeak language – a heavily simplified version of English – to control the speech, actions, and thought of the population, by defining "unapproved thoughts" as thoughtcrime; for such actions, the Thinkpol arrest Winston Smith, the protagonist of the story, and Julia, his lover, as enemies of the state.
One of the themes that Orwell discusses is the effect of nationalistic sentiment on human thinking. Nationalism causes dishonesty within people because, he argues, every nationalist, having chosen one side, persuades himself that his side is the strongest, regardless of the arguments against the faction.
Characteristics that regularly recur in the work of Lebensphilosophie thinkers, although not in every writer, can be summarized as follows: [14] [15] Life is central: in contrast to empiricism and materialism on the one hand, which place matter central, or idealism and rationalism on the other, which place intellect central, the philosophy of life wants to explain the world from the ...