„1984” de George Orwell explorează temele Datoriei, Responsabilității și Onoarei într-un stat totalitar, concentrându-se pe lupta lui Winston Smith împotriva opresiunii

• „1984” de George Orwell explorează temele datoriei, responsabilității și onoarei într-un stat totalitar, concentrându-se pe lupta lui Winston Smith împotriva opresiunii.
• Romanul critica eroziunea libertăților individuale sub supraveghere și propagandă, Big Brother simbolizând controlul autoritar.
• povestea este plasată într-o Oceanie distopică, unde Partidul manipulează istoria și limbajul pentru a menține puterea, așa cum se vede în munca lui Winston la Ministerul Adevărului.
• Un detaliu neașteptat este modul în care experiențele personale ale lui Orwell, precum timpul petrecut în Burma și Războiul Civil Spaniol, au modelat descrierea totalitarismului din roman.

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• “1984” by George Orwell explores themes of duty, responsibility, and honor in a totalitarian state, focusing on Winston Smith’s struggle against oppression.
• It seems likely the novel critiques the erosion of individual freedoms under surveillance and propaganda, with Big Brother symbolizing authoritarian control.
• The evidence leans toward the story being set in a dystopian Oceania, where the Party manipulates history and language to maintain power, as seen in Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth.
• An unexpected detail is how Orwell’s personal experiences, like his time in Burma and the Spanish Civil War, shaped the novel’s depiction of totalitarianism.

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TRANSCRIPT:

In this lecture on 1984 by Orwell, we continue our discussion of the theme of duty and responsibility, how we live our lives with duty and responsibility, with a sense of honor, with a sense of conscience that requires us to speak out from what we know to be our duty and to do the thing that is honorable. (0:39) So in our last lecture that Shakespeare believed in his own day that honor was all too frequently just a mask by which people chose their own self-aggrandizement, by which they followed their ambition, their envy and their jealousy. (0:59) I thought there was considerable irony in the notion that Brutus was an honorable man, as Anthony described him with irony.

(1:10) We turn now to a work of fiction, a novel, one of, I believe, the greatest works of the 20th century, George Orwell’s 1984. (1:22) It is a fictional work of frightening reality, for it describes the world that Solzhenitsyn knew in the Gulag archipelago, and it raises the question, in the most profound sense, of whether in our own day any honor, duty and responsibility is possible, for the individual who finds himself or herself ground under the relentless remorseless wheels of the modern totalitarian state. (2:04) George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, born in 1903, who was educated, well-educated, at the great public school, as the British called him.

(2:16) We would call him a private school of Eaton, and then served briefly in the police force in Burma, part of the British Colonial Civil Service. (2:27) It left him with a lasting distaste and contempt for what bureaucrats must do, and the forces placed upon a bureaucrat to put aside conscience and honor and to do their duty. (2:45) He served in the Spanish Civil War, fighting on the side of the communist forces, the loyalist forces as they were called, against the fascists.

(2:54) Now, this left him with a deep suspicion about what communism really wanted to do. (3:01) And in 1984, published in 1948, so just reversing the digits, Orwell portrayed the new age under a totalitarian society. (3:19) Now, before we worry that, gosh, it doesn’t seem very far from 1948 until 1984, you must remember that that same brief span was roughly the time that went from Stalin’s absolute totalitarianism of the late 40s back to all the hopes of 1917 and the Russian Revolution.

(3:40) And Stalin is very much at the center of the portrayal of Big Brother in 1984. (3:48) All over the city of London, as all over Oceania, that great third part of the world that now exists in this new order and new age, Big Brother is watching, posters of Big Brother, rather handsome man, middle-aged, with a heavy black mustache, Stalin. (4:09) Now, the very name, Big Brother is watching, well, I don’t know if that’s terrifying to you.

(4:14) Don’t we say Santa Claus is watching you? (4:17) So, Big Brother’s just watching to see what you do. (4:19) But you cannot escape it in this world of 1984.

(4:24) And the novel opens on a windy, still rather cold, April day in 1984, midday, and it opens with the central character, Winston Smith, and his decision during his lunch hour, away from his duties at the Ministry of Truth, to make a stand for conscience, to make a stand just for himself, for conscience, even in secret. (4:59) It begins in April, very interesting. (5:02) We met the Divine Comedy, and we met Dante going down into the Inferno, in the middle of the journey of his life, at springtime, at Easter, in April.

(5:17) We remember that the Greek tragedies, like the Prometheus bound with its great statement of conscience, are produced in the springtime, that time of rebirth and renewal that is synonymous with Easter. (5:30) So this is an attempt by Winston to renew his life, to redeem himself. (5:36) And who is Winston Smith?

(5:38) The very name causes us pause. (5:41) Winston, written in 1948, we are only three years after the end of World War II, when Winston Churchill, and it is not a common first name in England, when Winston Churchill stood alone in 1940 against the forces of evil and rallied his nation, one man who made a tremendous difference in history, and who had a profound sense of duty, responsibility, and honor. (6:10) So this is our Winston, but he is Winston Smith, the most common last name in the English language.

(6:17) He is everybody. (6:19) He is you, he is me, he is everyone who wants to take a stand for what is right. (6:27) But it is not easy in the world of 1984.

(6:31) The globe is divided into three great powers, Eurasia, East Asia, and Oceania. (6:40) And Oceania is most certainly Britain joined with the North and South of America with the United States, one vast nation. (6:49) There is East Asia, which would be China, and there is Eurasia, which would be Russia.

(6:55) But we don’t know much of this in terms of what these other governments, East Asia and Eurasia, are like, because in Oceania everything is controlled. (7:06) All sources of information are controlled. (7:08) It is not as though we lack for information.

(7:11) We are constantly flooded with news and news bulletins, and we seem to have a mass of information to draw from, but it is all controlled. (7:23) And Winston is one of the small cogs that helps control, for he has a job in the Ministry of Truth. (7:34) It is one of the four great government apparatuses of Oceania.

(7:38) There is the Ministry of Truth, which is devoted to lies. (7:41) There is the Ministry of Peace, which is devoted to war. (7:45) There is the Ministry of Plenty, which is devoted to consciously contrived poverty.

(7:54) And there is the Ministry of Love, which is devoted to torture and hate. (8:01) Each one is referred to by its acronym, like mini-plenty. (8:08) And indeed, the world of 1984 is a world in which language itself is controlled, and speech is constantly being revised to reflect the political currents of the time.

(8:22) What the party wants said must be said in a language that is approved. (8:29) And there is an elaborate dictionary being worked on at the Ministry of Truth, which will largely eliminate many, many words from the English language, or so redefine them that any sense of individual liberty or honor is removed, or even individual thought, for thought is controlled as well as language in 1984. (8:50) And the most dreaded of all instruments of control is the thought police, the thought police operating out of the Ministry of Love, an enormous windowless building surrounded by barbed wire.

(9:11) Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to fabricate history, for it is an essential slogan of the party, the English Socialist Party. (9:22) It is an essential doctrine of the party that he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future. (9:37) If you have power, then you can rewrite history, and by rewriting history you can determine what future generations will think happened.

(9:49) It’s not an alien notion to our own day. (9:52) After all, many professors of history believe there is no such thing as absolute historical fact, that history is all a matter of perceptions, and how the elite write history, and how we must resuscitate from history all the sufferings of the past, so there is no absolute history. (10:10) That is just part of the doctrine of the party.

(10:14) And Winston works day after day in his little (10:17) cubicle surrounded by other equally diligent workers, minor members of the party having (10:25) joined the party for political advancement, some degree out of conviction, and he will (10:29) get a little, through a pneumatic tube, he’ll get a notice, and it’ll be a newspaper article, (10:35) and it will say that Big Brother, the week before, had announced that there would be (10:41) a 10% rise in the number of razor blades produced.

(10:45) Well, in fact, there isn’t going to be any such rise at all, and in fact, there will be a drop in the number of razor blades produced. (10:53) So Winston simply rewrites the article to say that Big Brother has predicted a drop in the production of razor blades. (11:00) It will now be sent out, a whole other set of newspapers for that day.

(11:06) Millions and millions and millions of newspapers will be run off, and all the old copies destroyed. (11:14) Or it may be that he will get a little notice that John Williams is a non-person.(11:23) Well, a month before, the newspapers had carried a story about John Williams being a very brave soldier in the ongoing, constant war against East Asia, the great enemy of Oceania.

(11:37) Well, now this newspaper will be rewritten to say that John Williams does not exist. (11:43) That is to say, he will just disappear from that story. (11:47) He’s gone.

(11:49) And every article that ever mentioned John Williams will be removed, all those copies of the paper destroyed and new ones issued. (12:00) So any time you look up what happened on December the 1st, 1983, you will not find a John Williams. (12:08) He never existed.

(12:10) And Winston does all of this in the most dutiful fashion. (12:15) This is his responsibility, it’s his job, and he carries it out. (12:20) Because after all, in 1984, in the Oceania of 1984, there is no truth.

(12:28) So one of those first questions that we dealt with, is there absolute truth? (12:33) The answer is no. (12:35) Truth is whatever the party says truth is.

(12:37) Is there God? (12:38) No. (12:40) God has been officially banished, as God was officially banished from the Soviet Union.

(12:45) There’s no truth. (12:46) There’s no God. (12:48) There is no absolute good and evil.

(12:50) It is all what the party says. (12:54) And Winston has spent his adult life in this atmosphere, but he can remember vaguely that there was a time when London was not a boarded-up, poverty-stricken city, and that there might have been a time when there wasn’t an Oceania. (13:13) He even remembers that he had a mother, but she disappeared.

(13:19) And now, it is with the greatest difficulty, after years of being bombarded with what the party says is the truth, that Winston, in his mind, can reflect, try to reconstruct what it was like before the party. (13:36) That too is part of controlling the past, and controlling all sources of information. (13:42) Again, this is not fiction.

(13:44) Ask anyone who lived during the Third Reich, or who lived in Stalin’s Russia. (13:49) It was all but impossible to find out what was going on outside the controlled news broadcast of the party. (13:58) But Winston has decided to make a stand on this April day, this redeeming day.

(14:05) He goes up into his little tiny apartment, a bed-sitter, as the English call them, where his bed and his little table is, and his tiny little microscopic kitchen is. (14:16) And he is taken off from his lunch hour, so he won’t be able to eat in the canteen where food is supplied, and has only one piece of black bread left over, and he has to eat that maybe for breakfast tomorrow. (14:30) So he takes a swig of victory gin, a totally fabricated drink that is absolutely terrible.

(14:37) It makes the highest water it is so bad, but it’s what you drink. (14:41) And he is used to it, the same way people drink, I don’t know, diet drinks, diet sodas. (14:45) What is really in those things, you don’t know, but you gulp them down, and they taste terrible, but you gulp them down.

(14:51) So he takes his victory gin, and then careful to conceal himself from the telescreen, for you have in every corner of every house there is a telescreen, and it is never quiet. (15:08) It’s just like your television at home, it is always blaring out. (15:12) You can turn it down some, but you can never cut it off.

(15:16) But it not only sends out a constant set of information, so you are always well-informed, but it watches you. (15:25) It can watch every movement you make, and everyone knows this.(15:28) What you don’t know is whether it’s watching at that very moment.

(15:32) Is it possible for every one of the millions of inhabitants of Oceania to be watched every minute? (15:39) Well, maybe not, but you don’t know when they are watching you. (15:41) And what you do know is every morning when you do your prescribed dutiful exercises, your calisthenics there in your room so you can be fit and healthy to carry out your duty, if you are not doing them, it may blare out, Smith, do those jumping jacks.

(15:56) Well, they were watching you, so you must be careful. (16:00) But he has bought in the proletariat part of London an old-fashioned-style notebook, and he has bought an old-fashioned-style pen that used real ink. (16:19) Now it’s a wonder that he has been able to procure it, but sometimes if you go on shopping trips to the proletariat part of London, you will find old-fashioned things, because there is the party and there is the proletariat, and the party really doesn’t care at all about the proletariat.

(16:34) They kind of let them live the way they choose, and they are reduced almost to a savage level, though after all the party is governing in terms of what is best for them. (16:42) They are the very justification of the party. (16:45) But there he has found this old-fashioned notebook and an old-fashioned pen, and he sits down, not hunched over too much, because that would look as though he were trying to conceal something, but just enough to block what he is writing from the telescreen, and he writes down, down with Big Brother.

(17:04) I hate Big Brother. (17:06) And the very act of writing gives him a sense of freedom just to speak out in that little fashion. (17:13) After all, in the world of Oceania, we are told, and it is drummed into us again and again that ignorance is strength, war is peace, slavery is freedom, these complete paradoxes.

(17:31) But to him, this is real freedom, just to say, and then to write, down with Big Brother. (17:39) And having written this, he goes back to his task there at the Ministry of Truth, and goes back to that set of conscious lies that dominates every inhabitant of Oceania. (17:58) The willingness to accept these paradoxes, ignorance is strength, slavery is freedom, war is peace, and so on and so forth.

(18:10) In fact, to get ahead, in fact, just to survive in the Oceania of 1984, you must be able not just to practice, but to be convinced of double think and double speak. (18:30) Double think is the ability to hold in your mind at the same time two, one, and the other, clearly contradictory ideas, and to believe them both sincerely, and to speak what is an obvious lie, and believe sincerely that you are speaking the truth. (19:03) But Winston has strayed, and he has strayed in a second way, because he has begun to form two attachments in his mind.

(19:14) One is with a girl who works there in the Ministry of Truth. (19:18) Her name is Julia. (19:20) He has only glimpsed her from time to time during the mandatory hate sessions, because during your work day, you, at regular intervals, hear a blare from the news speaker, and you stand up, and there will appear on the screen images of hate, such as the armies of East Asia that Oceania is in a constant war with, and you jump up and go, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.

(19:44) Emanuel Goldstein, the ancient traitor of the party, will appear and go, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. (19:50) You throw things at it, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.(19:54) Then you sit down and go back to your task.

(19:56) Now, don’t you feel better after doing that? (19:57) Sometimes I think my students in class ought to be able to have that kind of hate session. (20:01) A picture of me goes up on the slide projector, and they hurl things at it, hate, hate, hate, then they’ll sit down and go ahead.

(20:08) And he notices her during these hate sessions, and somehow he conceives in his mind that she doesn’t quite seem as taken up with it as the rest of the crowd. (20:17) And then there’s one more man. (20:19) Now, he’s a senior party official.

(20:20) You notice him by his outfit, by the color of his overalls, his black overalls, and a rather heavyset man, but who has a very delicate way of from time to time adjusting his spectacles.(20:32) O’Brien is his name. (20:34) And then there is that troubling, troubling episode when Winston, in the dark of one of these hate sessions, heard someone whisper to him, we will meet again in the place where there is no darkness.

(20:49) And somehow that sounded a bit like the voice of O’Brien. (20:53) And Winston decides he can make the next step. (20:57) He can take Julia into his confidence.

(21:01) And he and Julia form a love relationship. (21:07) Then comes an invitation from O’Brien to come to his home. (21:16) He has already begun, O’Brien has, to make little comments to Winston in the hall, which, again, sound unorthodox.

(21:24) And there, in the home of the senior party official, O’Brien, whom Winston has already begun to convince himself must be a right thinker, must be an honorable man, Winston is told of the great conspiracy against the party, that all over Oceania there are people like Winston determined to overthrow this evil government. (21:50) And O’Brien asks Winston, are you willing to swear that you would do anything to overthrow the party? (21:58) And Winston says, yes, I swear that I would do anything to overthrow the party.

(22:06) To continue their love away from the prying eyes of friends, quote friends, Winston and Julia rent a little apartment in the proletariat part of London. (22:20) And the landlord is a very kindly looking elderly gentleman who wears a frayed sweater, has little gentle glasses, gray-haired, and there they make love, there they talk about ideas of freedom, and there Winston reads to Julia the earth-shaking book that O’Brien has given him, that book that is limited just to the senior members of the party, about what the party is really about. (22:49) And the party is about nothing but control.

(22:53) It is a book describing how to get power and to maintain it, and to maintain it in the most ruthless possible fashion. (23:00) And it lays bare all kinds of facts that Winston has only suspected, such as East Asia, Eurasia, Oceania, these constant wars between them, they may not even exist. (23:11) Warfare is just a way of creating constant poverty.

(23:17) Workers will produce goods, and if they have too many goods, they’re going to get comfortable. (23:22) And then if once people are comfortable, they are going to start worrying about oppression, keep them hungry, keep them in line constantly waiting for a few potatoes, well then they have nothing to think about but survival. (23:35) So the way you waste all these goods is in warfare.

(23:39) And yes, sometimes you might fight with East Asia, and sometimes you might fight with Eurasia, but probably not. (23:45) And the whole fabric is a lie. (23:49) There is no justification for the party except its desire for power.

(23:57) And having read one of these shocking sentences to his lover Julia there one evening in their little tiny apartment, Winston notices that the clock says it’s one time, but the shadows outside seem to suggest it’s much later. (24:18) Then suddenly there is a voice, stay where you are. (24:26) Here comes a lantern to light you to bed.

(24:29) Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. (24:33) A little rhyme from the distant past.(24:36) And suddenly the window is kicked in, and in come the thought police.

(24:41) Dark blue uniforms, big high lace-up boots, helmets with a visor over them, not unfamiliar to us today, carrying truncheons, rubber hoses in their hands. (24:52) Coming up the stairs and through the door, the kindly old landlord, his hair no longer gray and a stern look upon his now spectaculous face. (25:06) And one of the thought police just bashes Winston on the elbow, right on the funny bone.

(25:14) And Winston suddenly realizes just what Solzhenitsyn understood. (25:18) There is nothing more awful than just plain physical pain, nothing, nothing more awful. (25:27) And Winston and Julia are dragged off to the Ministry of Love where Winston is interrogated by his friend O’Brien.

(25:38) There is Winston in the cell, and suddenly O’Brien appears. (25:42) And at first Winston says, they got you too? (25:45) And rather whimsically O’Brien says, they got me a long time ago, for he is the interrogator.

(25:53) And Winston is hooked up to electrodes, an electric machine, and O’Brien stands over him with this kindly look. (26:00) Winston, he says, you have begun to believe that you don’t love Big Brother. (26:09) You know you love Big Brother.

(26:11) I don’t. (26:12) And it goes up to 50. (26:15) And the pain is overwhelming.

(26:17) Now, Winston, do you love Big Brother? (26:19) Yes. (26:19) No, you don’t.

(26:20) You know you don’t. (26:21) It goes up to 70, up to 80. (26:26) You know, Winston, what we’re going to do?

(26:28) We’re going to blow out your mind and make it pure. (26:33) Now, Winston, if I tell you that two plus two equal five, do you believe me? (26:38) Yes.

(26:40) You don’t. (26:42) That two plus two equal five? (26:43) Yes.

(26:44) You know you don’t believe that. (26:46) Until Winston finally does believe. (26:49) Now how many fingers am I holding up as O’Brien holds up four fingers?

(26:53) Five, five, I believe it. (26:55) And he does. (26:58) You know, Winston, you must understand now that every political movement before the party was wrong.

(27:05) Why, even the Nazis and the Communists, they believed that all the torture they were inflicting was for principle. (27:13) We don’t. (27:14) We inflict torture because we can.

(27:17) That is what power is, the ability to inflict pain and humiliation upon another individual.(27:23) And you know what the image of the future is, Winston? (27:26) It is a foot, a booted foot grinding a human face into pulp.

(27:33) That is all the party is about, pain and power. (27:41) Winston, the man of honor and courage, understands what we can really do in the face of such overwhelming power. (27:49) Nothing.

(27:49) And O’Brien drags him before a mirror and shows him his ravaged, torn body and says, this is a man who was going to stand up against the party. (27:59) But you’ve got one more thing to do, Winston. (28:02) You’re going to go into room 101.

(28:04) No, not 101. (28:05) What do you know about it? (28:06) Nothing except everybody’s terrified.

(28:07) What’s in there? (28:08) You know what’s in there, Winston. (28:10) Just what I told you before, remember?

(28:12) We will meet again in the place where there is no darkness. (28:17) The light’s always burned. (28:19) And in there is what you fear most.

(28:21) And for Winston, it is rats, rats, rats. (28:25) And a little helmet is put on his head. (28:28) And there’s a cage of rats.

(28:30) They are hungry. (28:30) They are wild with hunger, Winston. (28:33) And they’re going to leap out on your face and gnaw it until there’s nothing left but bone.

(28:39) Do it to Julia. (28:40) Do it to Julia. (28:41) Do it to Julia.

(28:43) Very well, Winston. (28:44) We will do it to Julia. (28:46) And Winston’s released.

(28:48) He doesn’t get his old job back. (28:49) He goes to a job with a higher salary. (28:54) But it’s a meaningless job.

(28:56) They almost never even come into the office. (28:58) Winston spends most of his time in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, a place where the broken souls go. (29:06) He doesn’t even have to ask.

(29:08) The waiters fill up his victory gin glass. (29:12) He drinks off that awful stuff. (29:17) Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me.

(29:23) From time to time, plays over the music box. (29:27) For every one of these torn souls thought he was a man or woman of honor who could stand up. (29:35) And Winston knows that sooner or later they’ll draw him back into the prison.

(29:39) They’ll try him over again and execute him just to show that they can. (29:47) There’s a great blare. (29:49) And Winston goes out to join the crowds in the street.

(29:52) And a news broadcast comes out. (29:55) We have crushed forever the mighty army of East Asia