The Party's Order in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

By DaRabbit, Student

In 1984 George Orwell is interested in the order that he has created as it and its workings represent his political views. The control that the Party has is held through power structures, social structures and the manipulation of language.

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

Often, a novelist is interested not only in the complications and sheer untidiness of experience that they have represented in their novel, but also in seeing what order can be detected in the confusion of the lives of the characters. In 1984 the author, George Orwell, is interested in the order that he has created as it and its workings represent his political views. This control that the Party creates in 1984 is held through power structures, social structures and the manipulation of language.

Orwell stated in Why I Write that “Every line of serious work that [he has] written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism”. In 1984, the overriding control establishment is the Party and Big Brother; a totalitarianistic enigma that stands for everything that Orwell hated. 1984 was Orwell’s view of what the world may become, and the power the Party holds over the citizens of Oceania was something Orwell feared would occur in the future.

This order is created partially through the power structures that exist in Oceania. Big Brother and the Party obviously have control, and this is kept through ideological cant and psychological manipulation. Living in Oceania, and more importantly Airstrip One, a citizen is constantly bombarded with ideological grandiloquence and lies, such that they are forced to believe all that they are told, as they are told nothing to the contrary. This manipulation of the beliefs of the populace – mainly through the changing of history at the Ministry of Truth – allows the Party to keep a sense of awe and veneration about it so the people would not revolt.

One such example of this is Julia’s belief over the origin of the aeroplane:
“She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes.”
The production of goods with quotas that are always overfilled, and yet there are never enough shoelaces, or razor blades, or whatever it is that has just been overfilled is but another example. By constantly bombarding the masses with what they claim to be true, and with no other reference to disprove it, the Party is able to easily manipulate the beliefs of these people and thus assert the order they impose.

The shortage of essentials is another form of power structure order imposition - through the psychological manipulation of people. The party wishes to impose an order where it knows and controls everything; however no technology can see into the human mind. Thus they invent the concept of “thoughtcrime”, and through Freud’s superego, the people effectively police themselves.

Freud’s id operates on the pleasure principle and is the person’s desire to have their basic social drives (food, family, sex, etc.) met; to gain control of this the Party suppresses it with the “Thought Police”-like superego, and the energy that would normally go into sex and other basic desires can be redirected into war fever, the Two Minutes Hate, and further activities that help to keep the Party in power.

However, the greatest of all of the Party’s psychological tricks to keep the masses subservient is the total invasion of their privacy. Somewhat like in the Panopticon concept, the people who live in Oceania can be, at any time, monitored, recorded and controlled by the Thought Police. This permanent surveillance forces all to adjust their conduct, requiring almost constant behavioral regulation and leaving no time for subservient thoughts or actions.

The Party’s imposed order is also created through social structures. With the annihilation of the family structure, young children can be turned against their parents and towards Big Brother…
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that be means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatsoever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything concerned with it.”
… and even the name Big Brother itself connotes to children a sense of companionship and kinship – a replacement for the family that has been destroyed by the Party.

In Oceania men and women are seemingly equal, and could be considered to have the reverse roles to the common ideas of today’s gender prescriptions. Julia is a technician who works on the book machines, whereas Winston works with the speakwrite as basically a secretary; the party members all wear the same uniform, unisex blue overalls. This gender equality is a form of control: males are disempowered and are thus less of a power threat, and there is less chance of feminist views among the Outer Party existing as they are all equal anyway.

Opposed to this idea of equality amongst the sexes is that the society is incredibly segregated. The Proletariat, Outer Party and Inner Party all have clear distinctions from one another, an arrangement contrary to the nature of the society (socialism: implied by such things as the rationing of food and working for the good of the people in government sectors). Thus a communistic social structure is formed, something Orwell was completely against. The poor living conditions, wages, food and more of everyone but the one percent who make up the Inner Party is Orwell’s warning to us about the hazards of communism.

One other thing that Orwell was politically aligned against was the bastardization of the English Language that was occurring around him all the time. Thus, another form of control that the Party uses in 1984 is the manipulation of language to work for its own ends. We are first fully introduced to the extermination of language in Oceania in the canteen:
“You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day… it’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…”
Syme’s enthusiasm over the destruction of words is a satirical device used to position readers to challenge this destruction of language.

Apart from furthering Orwell’s political ideals, the destruction of language in Oceania also helps to keep the public in line under the Party. Syme sums it up perfectly when he states:
“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.”
Thus since the language is so meaningless and can be duckspoke without any thought, the party can control thought because it would not exist. An unthinking people, that is a people who cannot formulate thoughts, will be less able to query or criticize Big Brother or the Party.

By showing the Party as an all powerful beast that holds power through the deprivation of a person’s privacy, language and desire for life, Orwell positions the reader to disagree with the totalitarianistic point of view, thus furthering his own political ideals.