Literature: 1984 Final Work

Caroni, Luciano Gaspar

Power and its fairly deep conjuncture

When it is talked about power, what usually emerges on the minds of most people is
the simple fact of possessing the ability and capacity of potentially performing a
particular action, sometimes over the thought of others. This last statement, however,
constitutes the one that, quite nearly, fits the concept of power illustrated in George
Orwell’s novel 1984, a power which comprises the most complex and obscure side of
the word’s own definition.
In this case, the idea of political power, although this being nowadays regularly
gained in a fully democratic way, is broken down by a government which tyrannically
imposes its ideals whilst bitterly punishing those who do not follow their same ideology,
inhibiting what is currently known as freedom of thought. On a present-day
government, as it can therefore be deduced, the social individual, not to say the
humankind itself, enjoys a global society in which the large-scale social interests no
longer represent just diverse groups awaiting a governmental party that propagates
such inclinations, but they cover the anxious desire of an every-day larger and more
resilient population, yearning for a rebellion-type culture that seeks the sense of
freedom in much deeper and metaphysical issues than before.
Language, as incredible as it may seem, constitutes a key element into the control
issue inside a tyrannically ruled community, because authorities, when imposing a new
language form to be spoken, have possibly designed that same tongue (see
Oldspeak’s transformation into Newspeak in 1984) in a way that people are inhibited
from expressing certain thoughts that might not be convenient for the government’s
reputation by suppressing adjectives or politically negative concepts.
Up to the present, it can be stated, individuals have acquired kind of a manifestation
ability that turns their personalities capable of gradually making the changes they want
to be emerged happen, unless the government presents the characteristics of a power-
abusing identity as the previously analyzed one, which in the past may have forced an
important part of the society to take notice to the other’s rules, taking into account the
former and pre-contemporary weakness position adopted by the ruled ones. The
mentioned portion of citizens, acknowledging their frailty identity, would have logically
remained helpless fearing the consequences of a party-betrayal in the clutches of a
panoptical government which, returning to the 1984 context, does not stop stalking its
governed sector by the use of technically privacy-breaking technology that in
nowadays’ reality would be chaotically refused by the average person, although it is
true that many micro-spying technological tools are existent in daily-usage virtual
dashboards and gadgets such as social media and mobile phones while their exposure
features are unknown, not believed, lessened, or simply ignored by most users.
Privacy, indeed, has now almost become reduced to its simplest and more irrelevant
expression. It seems that, in that specific sense, the common citizen has turned into a
prole, ignoring the strength of new technologies as well as its own strength to get over
with it.
In fact, media-controlling becomes well more powerful and noxious when its system
is managed under the whim of a governmental identity, bearing in mind that this has
the total ability and allowance to make whatever fact, ideological element, etc. massive
around the whole community. Therefore, also considering the powerful impact a
government itself carries throughout its length as an authority, especially when this
same authority reproduces the principles of an unreputable authoritarianism, the
spreading of political propaganda by the entity acquires a non-destructible character.
Additionally, at present, governments monitor their citizens’ actions mostly making use
of social media by taking as an input the personal information their users dump into
their profiles, hence gathering particular details on their specific interests.
Currently, it is worth mentioning, the powerful metaphor of the panopticon no longer
represents the way power works, this being due to the visible fact that we have gone
from a panoptic society to a synoptic one, taking into account that now there is a huge
sector dedicated to observing just a few ones. In other words, the synoptic contrasts
the way of the panopticon, since, from the current mass media, millions of people
actually register the behavior of a few. Consequently, people nowadays seem to be
much less worried about surveillance matters and practices since these have been
swamping too much into society in the last years and have even become unnoticeable
for some of its inhabitants.
As a conclusion, it is possible to assert that the concept of power has unstoppably
been involved in the surrounding of constantly-in-change societies which are every day
becoming more and more capable of transforming the meaning of the word into
interests that, at the same time, are turning into deeper and deeper claims that go
beyond the government’s precept –or, at least that is what the society’s members
believe-.