“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all the evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

Having witnessed the totalitarian regimes set forth by Hitler and Stalin, Orwell depicts a perfect totalitarian society in his startling dystopian novel, 1984. It is a world dominated by incessant scrutiny, tampering with history, and psychological manipulation, completely eradicating individualism and free thought.

The novel portrays a haunting vision of a world under the oppressive rule of the Party, where “you have to live in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” The story revolves around the protagonist, Winston Smith, an outer-Party member working in the Ministry of Truth. He is primarily responsible for rewriting historical records to align with the Party's current reality. Winston is disillusioned with the Party's control over every aspect of people's lives. He secretly harbors rebellious thoughts by taking the role of “the sole guardian of truth and sanity in the world full of lies.” 

The illicit affair between him and Julia, a fellow Party member, becomes his first rebellious act against the Party's restrictions. He deepens his hatred towards the Party by reading the book written by the leader of the resistance movement, the supposed enemy of the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein, which reveals the true nature of the totalitarian regime. He then becomes a steadfast member of the Brotherhood, a subversive organization, and seeks to overthrow the Party's oppressive rule and restore freedom to society. However, O’Brien, an inner-Party member Winston believed to be a member of the resistance, betrays him, and Winston and Julia are arrested by the Thought Police, the most morbid rule enforcers of the Party. In the Ministry of Love, Winston is subjected to intense physical and psychological torture to piecemeal his spirit and force him to love Big Brother. Under relentless torture, Winston eventually betrays Julia and confesses to crimes he did not commit. He is crushed, and his rebellious thoughts are replaced with complete devotion to Big Brother and the Party. He learns to love Big Brother and embraces the Party's twisted version of truth. Likewise to his ironic scoff, “we are the dead,” Winston, in the end, devoid of all independent thought and hope, merely exists as a loyal subject of the Party. He has become a living example of the Party's control over the human mind and spirit, an eminent orthodox: he adores the Party and everything connected with it.

No matter what time of the day it is or where the location is, “Big Brother is watching you.” With Big Brother being the ultimate authority, his posters are omnipresent on every corner of the streets, engulfing all its citizens with piercing eyes that stare right into your soul. As a complementary tool for the Party, their advanced surveillance system, including telescreens and hidden microphones, captures every movement and every conversation of its citizen, digging for any minuscule signs of disloyalty, which instills a sense of constant fear and paranoia among the populace. At the same time, “the children were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations.” The surveillance system and the constant blabbering from the telescreens leave people with no privacy, “nothing was our own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” The fear of being betrayed by people around you, including intimate ones, creates a pervasive atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion, forcing obedience from its people, thus enhancing the Party’s power. In addition, the elimination of individuality — wearing the same outfit, eating the same meal, smoking the same cigarette, and drinking the same alcohol — attenuates the sense of individual identity and self-consciousness as no anomalies are allowed; long, exhausting working hours accompanied by obligatory group activities eliminates personal time which also diminishes the sense of self and reinforces the idea of collectivism, each indispensable of another. By blurring identity, the loss of uniqueness, and relentless activities, so that they do not have spare time or energy for personal business, the Party successfully destroys individualism and independent thinking, modeling all its citizens into faceless puppets that praise the Party so that the Party stands forever in power. The Party’s implementation of extreme inhumane control exquisitely demonstrates Orwell’s emphasis on the erroneous lifestyle that may be created as a result of totalitarianism. 

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” The Party controls every source of information and does not allow individuals to keep records of any kind of events, such as documents or pictures. The morbid power that the Party has — rewriting the content in books and newspapers without obstruction — makes the citizens’ memories, and they may fall into self-doubt. Consequently, the truth becomes meaningless as nobody is sure whether their memory is correct, making them perfectly willing to accept whatever the Party tells them. “Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.” The Party obtains the power to alter historical facts by taking control in the present. The Party can manipulate the past for its benefit by eradicating any evidence of the Party's previous mistakes or inconsistencies, making up palpable reasons from the historical record to justify its actions in the present and decisions for the future, which corroborates the firm belief in the people’s mind: the Party is always right. Sequentially, the strengthened support from the fellowship ultimately secures the Party’s grip on power, perpetuates its ideology, and suppresses any potential challenges to its authority. The devastating consequence of falsifying records presents a caution about the dangers of allowing institutions to manipulate historical truth for their benefit, emphasizing the importance of preserving accurate historical records and protecting the freedom of information.

Apart from surveillance, another tool that the Party uses to secure its power through citizen loyalty is the enforcement of Newspeak. Newspeak narrows the vocabulary range to an extreme where “every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” The deduction in the range of consciousness prohibits complex ideas that individuals can formulate and express, ultimately making it impossible even to conceptualize any disobedient or rebellious thoughts because there would be no words to think of them. 

The most horrifying part of the novel is the psychological brainwashing that the Party implements. The concept of doublethink — the power of simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind and accepting both — manifests in the Party’s motto: “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” The Party applauses orthodoxy; in summary, “orthodoxy means not thinking— not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” Whenever you possess any sort of disobedience, such as thoughtcrime, you will be reeducated through relentless torture in the Ministry of Love. The Party grasps that “reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else. Reality is inside the skull.” Through torture and Room 101 — the epitome of psychological torture where an individual's deepest fears and phobias are used against them to induce complete submission and betrayal of their principles — the Party can achieve its goal: obtaining untrue confessions or information while breaking the individual's spirit entirely. Torture is, in some sense, the most effective tool to crush any form of independent thought or resistance, leaving the victim psychologically conditioned to accept the Party's version of reality without question, to wholeheartedly believe “whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.” By completely changing individuals’ perceptions, they tend to exercise orthodoxy and process doublethink unconsciously, undoubtedly accepting all the Party’s absurd statements, such as “Oceania is the world. The Earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go around it. Two plus two is five.” As a result, people will unwaveringly support the Party and be safe if this gratuitous stupidity protects them. Or else, they will be wiped out of history and become somebody that just never existed. 

Overall, Orwell’s utterly captivating and gripping narrative pulls readers into a world of distortion, fear, suspicion, and despair, where every action and thought is scrutinized, emphasizing freedom's fragility and the importance of safeguarding democratic principles. The allusion to the menaces of Nazism and Stalinism serves as a chilling reminder of the potential dangers present in a totalitarian society in the near future. Despite being a dystopian novel that exposes the dark facets of human nature, Orwell also portends the possibility of creating a better future by people realizing all the possible consequences and eliminating it. The novel's publication was in 1949, not long after WWII, which Orwell may think is a great opportunity in the long process of world history to call out for a change that may benefit humanity overall.