Originally Published 11.04
Revised 12.01
"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power".
--George Orwell, 1984
"Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new shapes of your own choosing."
--O'Brien, (Richard Burton), 1984 (1984)
"KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!"
--Schoolhouse Rocky, School House Rock
Power is as power does--it is, according to George Orwell, its own object, a means to its own end; power is only as good or bad, real or imagined, as it is allowed to be: power--the power of people, places, systems, governments--can take no greater hold than it is given.
That is, until it becomes powerful enough, in and of itself, to take.
Such is the issue at the center of Orwell's 1984 : Big Brother, a power so great, so terrible and foreboding, takes and creates an essentially co-operational, comprehensive power where none but the most individualistic, rudimentary powers should exist; the power allowed by the population has been extended from that of a typical government (more on that in a bit) to a totalitarian, vaguely socialist dystopic thing wherein all but the most useless, typically observational nonsense is controlled and manipulated as those in power see fit: Big Brother shapes and creates "truth" as a means of asserting near-total power.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the implementation and use of Newspeak; in basing language on concepts, instead of conceptual knowledge (e.g., in substituting "unwhite" for "black"), concepts themselves are eradicated--limiting what should be essentially limitless, conceptual knowledge: language becomes, instead of a series of representative sounds and symbols, a symbolic ideology (Todorov 82).
By limiting the overall ability for knowledge, the capacity to learn, too, diminishes; man becomes what he is told. This is certainly evident in Radford's film adaptation of Orwell's novel, wherein Winston, upon being tortured, submits to Big Brother's gospel, admitting that “2+2=5,” when, throughout the film, he has been adamant about the fact that the correct answer is, indeed, four; as his will is broken, Winston becomes an extension of the system he so loathes; as he is tortured into submission, he becomes a part of Big Brother and totalitarianism.
Indeed, by the end of Orwell’s novel, Winston has become everything he has despised.
Bibliographia
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish (1975), Panopticism. November 1, 2008.
http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html.
Howe, Irving. 1984 – Utopia Reversed: Orwell’s Penetrating Examination of Totalitarian
Society. November 1950. November 1, 2008.
http://marxists.anu.edu.au/history/etol/writers/howe/1950/11/1984.htm.
Orwell, George. 1984, New York: Signet Classic, 2004.
Orwell, George. Why I Write. London: Gangrel, Summer 1946.
Rorty, Richard. The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on cruelty. University of Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Todorov, Tzvetan. Symbolism and Interpretation, (transl. by R. Carter). Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1982.
