1984 by George Orwell is by far one of the closest books that we can connect to present day society. The surveillance, dehumanization, and tourture is a bit extreme, but there are other glaringly obvious parallels that are still prevalent today. The control of information and history from The Party is still happening today, with social media privacy laws and the public school curriculum.
On social media we might not think of how the app creators control us, but more how we control the app. Unfortunately, this is not true.
Google tracks our search history, which leads to an ad popping up on Facebook of the exact same thing you googled earlier. These social media platforms are buying your information in order to sell products. Another product that social media companies want you to pay attention to is politics, which is the same thing as The Party using a mental game of manipulation to control their citizens. When Big Brother tells their citizens “War is Peace,” they are using doublethink as a method of mind control, in today’s society this is also common with Facebook political propaganda.
When Donald Trump was running against Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential Election, he posed ads during the Black Lives Matter protests against Biden with jail bars saying “You Won’t be Safe in Joe Biden’s America.” This is an example of doublethink today because Trump was the current president in office, he was the one making the poor decisions.
The amount of “fake news” shaping today’s society is tremendous, and it will impact future generations in ways we will never expect. This is because of the censorship from our government, picking out specific historical events to place into our history books to make it seem like we are the best out of any other country. Elementary school social studies textbooks do not teach students that Christopher Columbus was the founder of a massive genocide against Native Americans, which is controlling the way we learn history.
Are future history textbooks going to accurately portray the January 6th riot? Probably not. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” is the most mind-wrenching form of psychological manipulation in “1984.” The citizens have no way of knowing what is really going on since the psychological control runs so deep.
Understanding the parallels between 1984 and today can help bring clarity and validation to the experiences students have today.
Social media privacy laws and the public school curriculum is how our government controls our history and information, creating similarities to 1984’s doublethink and changing the way people remember the past.
