have you read the book?
no
shareYes. One of the best books ever. The movie - not so much.
shareMore than once. I like them both.
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MovieChat Forums > Nineteen Eighty-Four (1985) Discussion > have you read the book?
Yes. Read it in c1980/81, & somehow even then, I pictured Winston as looking & sounding like John Hurt.
shareA couple of times over the years, several of his other books as well.
shareYes. You should read it.
But Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" is probably a more accurate depiction of a dystopian future - a technologically advanced society where people are sated by sex, drugs and entertainment.
Oceania of "1984" is more like the old Soviet Union. That's not really the future of totalitarianism.
I think of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 as a kind of trilogy, and each book has important lessons for us to learn.
I think you're right about sex, drugs and entertainment, but on the other hand the kind of fascist crackdown on free speech and the information manipulation that we see in 1984 is spot on. We don't have to speculate about the future to know that will be reality; we are already seeing it in nascent form right now.
I love all three books and recommend all three to everyone.
Excellent point. Those three are like a trilogy and each explores aspects of where we are headed.
I especially like the parody of political correctness, or "woke", in Orwell's "1984".
If you don't even have the words for something, it makes it more difficult to think it. Newspeak is woke.
There is no word for "bad", only "ungood".
In "1984" there is also a move towards "Duckspeak" where people make sounds which mean nothing at all. Lol.
https://study.com/learn/lesson/1984-george-orwell-newspeak-definition-examples-quotes.html
That's an interesting link and a useful summary of Orwell's idea.
One could argue that we have entered into the era of "Newspeak" with terms like "birthing people." That goes along with the Ministry of Truth telling us that men can get pregnant and other nonsense.
You're 100% correct and you can literally see all three of the books being manifested in reality right now.
As you mentioned, the crackdown on speech as showcased in 1984 is happening on every major social media platform to limit how and what we communicate to one another (including the President of the United States being mass censored, which is absurd to even type out).
The overt sex and inundation of entertainment is ever-present too from Huxley's Brave New World. The rise of OnlyFans, the easy and prevalent access of pornography everywhere, the push to sexualize children at younger and younger ages and encourage them into polyamorous relationships has even reached the point of being a prime target for being taught in schools for kids as young as pre-school (a link for those who don't believe me):
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/sexual-health/in-depth/sex-education/art-20044104
And obviously Fahrenheit 451 is as present as ever; Amazon, schools, and libraries have been recently removing "harmful" books that contain "dangerous" or "outdated" "norms". Lots of book about history or non-fiction written in specific historical periods have been banned from the aforementioned outlets. As usual, a history people aren't informed about is a history they don't know they shouldn't repeat.
Good post. I agree with all of that.
Big Tech has essentially become the moderators of the Internet. This takes overt forms, like Twitter banning someone like Trump (and anyone else who has inconvenient ideas), and Google curating their search results so that you only see what they want you to see.
It's interesting that you bring up porn because this is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. In the 80s and the early 90s, if you wanted to see porn then you needed to actively go out to a physical store and buy that shit. The closest thing that was easily accessed was sex scenes in movies and the softcore stuff that the premium channels would show late at night.
Today, however, it's available in every flavor on-demand on the Internet 24 hours of the day. Anyone can find anything that they want, no matter how extreme or bizarre. Furthermore, it's even finding ways to invade outlets where that are supposed to be porn-free. For instance, sometimes I listen to ASMR and I've noticed that a lot of the ASMR girls have OnlyFans links in their video descriptions. And I'm like, what in the actual fuck?
Since you mention books, one thing I've explicitly noticed has changed dramatically just in the past 20 or so years is that, when I was growing up, the Bible was still a respected and revered book. Even unbelievers would be careful to not attack it publicly. That's all changed. Now you're likely to get assaulted--at least verbally, if not physically--if you start speaking highly of the Bible and a future is probably coming where the powers-that-be have deemed it simply too dangerous to read.
Wow even the ASMR content creators have an OnlyFans? Really sad.
I discovered how pervasive it all is when I found out WhistlinDiesel's wife had one. Completely random thing that some of the comment section were talking about in one of his videos, and whether or not he was okay with her having an OnlyFans account.
But you're absolutely right about how back in the day you had to jump through hoops to access porn. These days everyone and their mother is addicted to it given how readily prominent it is, or how there's a bleed-over effect with them promoting porn-like content in streaming movies-content that are geared toward mainstream audiences. Before the most mainstream sex scenes got was Basic Instinct and Femme Fatale. And now it's everywhere.
And you're also spot on about the Bible... they're already censoring and canceling people who don't support the alphabet soup propaganda put out by the Rainbow Reich. And the Bible is clearly against it, so either they will have to reinterpret the Bible (which I've seen a few new-age "Christians" do) or they'll just have to cancel it for good, which is probably the more likely scenario.
There's definitely a sexualized wing of the ASMR community. Of course it's not all like that, but there's a segment of that population that is, and most of them have OnlyFans pages. I suspect many of them actually started out doing sexual shit in other forms and then saw in ASMR an opportunity to make money. I know that not everyone involved with ASMR is happy about it.
In regard to to the Bible and Christianity, I definitely think that we're going to see greater and greater persecution come the Church's way. It seems obvious that western society as a whole is driving more and more toward secularism, and that hatred of Christianity is growing, and Christians who want to remain loyal to God and to the Bible and to traditional expressions of the faith are going to be attacked and are going to be made more and more uncomfortable.
I actually read a book recently that is relevant to this subject. It's called The Harbinger by Jonathan Cahn. Quite interesting and thought-provoking. There's also a follow-up to that first book, but I haven't read the second one.
“It's interesting that you bring up porn because this is something I've been thinking a lot about lately.”
Haven’t we all.
Yes, and it's an excellent book and should be not just read, but studied, by everyone. We are already seeing today the kind of mistakes a society makes when they don't heed the lessons of a book like 1984. It is almost as if our political and corporate leaders HAVE read the book, but they got confused and thought it was supposed to be an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale.
I recommend reading 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 back-to-back.
Yes. Excellent novel.
shareYes. It’s a classic.
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