Living Orwell’s Story of 1984
There is something unsettling about rereading Orwell’s 1984 in our current moment. Not because we are goose-stepping through dystopian streets under giant posters of a mustachioed tyrant. And not because secret police are kicking down doors in the middle of the night. But because the mechanisms Orwell described – the subtle erosion of language, the quiet normalization of contradiction, the slow trade of truth for loyalty – feel less like fantasy and more like possibility.
Orwell did not imagine a world that collapsed overnight. He imagined a world that drifted, a world that adjusted, a world that justified itself, one compromise at a time.
And that is why his warning still matters 77 years later because the most dangerous tyranny is the one you don’t notice
In 1984, the Party does not merely control behavior. It controls interpretation, defines what words mean, and it rewrites yesterday to secure tomorrow. Citizens are not only required to obey; they are required to believe. And if belief does not come naturally, it must be trained through repetition, fear, and social pressure.
The genius of Orwell’s nightmare is that the citizens participate in their own manipulation. They learn to practice doublethink, which is to say, holding two contradictory ideas at once and accept both as true. They learn to cheer for slogans that dissolve under scrutiny, thereby learning to distrust their own memories.
That is the point where dystopia stops being theatrical and starts being psychological.
We comfort ourselves by assuming we would resist obvious oppression, almost like a state of political sedation. But Orwell suggests something more troubling: what if the oppression comes wrapped in patriotism and loyalty? What if it is framed as necessary for security, unity, or national greatness: a golden age? What if it flatters us while it limits us?
The greatest threat to liberty is not always the iron fist. Sometimes it is the open hand that asks for trust and never expects accountability. However, the act of supporting a leader without surrendering your mind is always a good posture.
I support President Trump. I believe many of his policies sought to challenge entrenched bureaucracies, confront cultural decay, expose corruption, and restore a sense of national confidence. I do not apologize for that support.
But support is not worship.
In fact, genuine support demands higher standards, not lower ones. If I claim to value strength, I must also value integrity. If I claim to value America, I must also value the truth that sustains a free republic. Otherwise, I am not defending conservatism; I am defending power for its own sake.
One of the most insidious temptations in modern politics, on both the left and the right, is the urge to excuse what we would condemn if the other side did it. We forgive exaggeration because it helps our cause. We overlook distortion because it energizes our tribe. We rationalize the bending of rules because “the other side started it.”
That logic is the seedbed of Orwell’s world.
In 1984, loyalty to the Party replaces loyalty to reality. The Party is never wrong. If it contradicts itself, the citizen is wrong for remembering it in the first place. Consequently, the ultimate crime is not rebellion it is the idea of independent thought.
If we are not careful, partisan loyalty can become a softer version of the same impulse by measuring truth by who said it. We dismiss inconvenient facts as sabotage and treat criticism as betrayal.
But in a free society, criticism is not betrayal. It is maintenance.
Orwell understood something many of us forget: language shapes thought. If you control the words, you control the limits of imagination. That is why Newspeak was so central to 1984. Reduce vocabulary, reduce complexity, reduce the possibility of dissent. More so, weaponize language itself. Perhaps Orwell’s influence was fresh in his mind just a handful of years after WWII and the way enemies and allies use language, I can only assume.
Today we do not have an official Ministry of Truth as Orwell did in 1984, but we do have an accelerating distortion of language. Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “rights,” and “security” are stretched to fit political agendas. Labels are used not to clarify but to silence and disagreement is reframed as danger.
And this is not confined to one party or one ideology.
When political leaders, or any leaders, manipulate language to inflame, obscure, or dominate rather than clarify, they weaken the public’s ability to think critically. When media ecosystems reward outrage over nuance, we drift further into tribal reflex and further from thoughtful discourse. As a result, truth becomes secondary to narrative.
The danger is not that one side wins the argument, but that argument itself becomes impossible.
Orwell’s world was saturated with surveillance – telescreens, informants, constant monitoring – but it was surveillance without shackles. Today, our surveillance is subtler and often voluntary. We carry devices that track our movements, preferences, conversations, and impulses. Data is produced and gathered by corporations while governments monitor threats and algorithms shape what we see. Most of this exists under the banner of convenience and safety.
But the principle is what matters: power grows wherever oversight diminishes. If citizens grow passive – if we trade privacy for ease without question – we condition ourselves to accept ever-expanding oversight. Again, this is not about panic. It is about vigilance. But we must not forget that liberty erodes not only through dramatic decrees but through comfortable indifference.
There is an old moral imperative: speak truth to power. Not scream at it, slander it, or undermine it for sport, but speak to it honestly.
If I believe President Trump – again, or any leader – is advancing policies that strengthen the country, I should say so. If I believe power is being misused, exaggerated, or shielded from scrutiny, I should say that too. Because the moment I decide that truth is less important than victory, I have already surrendered something essential.
Orwell’s protagonist, Winston (God bless him), does not begin as a hero. He begins as a man who senses that something is wrong: reality is being reshaped. His rebellion starts not with violence but with a diary. A private insistence that memory matters. I know something about this, and I will be writing about Fox v City of Austin soon.
In our time, the equivalent is intellectual integrity. The courage to admit complexity and the refusal to excuse dishonesty simply because it benefits our side. That is not weakness. It is citizenship.
Democracy requires adults, in fact, the republic depends on adults to be adult. It requires citizens who can distinguish between disagreement and treason, between rhetoric and reality, and between loyalty and idolatry.
When we reduce politics to entertainment, we infantilize ourselves. When we treat leaders as saviors, we weaken institutions. When we cheer for humiliation instead of substance, we train ourselves to value dominance over dialogue. There is one response to this: grow up!
Orwell’s warning was not that one specific ideology would conquer the world. His warning was that unchecked power, or any unchecked power, eventually seeks to control truth itself. And once truth becomes malleable, freedom becomes decorative.
We Are Not Doomed — Unless We Choose To Be
It would be melodramatic to say we are living in 1984. We are not. We still argue openly without the threat of our teeth being pulled out like poor Winston and we vote. We still publish criticism, as I am attempting to do this piece, and we still have the ability to question leaders without disappearing in the night, again like Winston.
To use a gardening adage, the seeds of Orwell’s world are not dramatic, they are incremental. They are planted when we excuse what we know is wrong because it is politically useful. They are watered when we silence dissent within our own ranks. Most of all, they grow when we decide that winning is more important than being right.
Supporting a president does not mean surrendering discernment and loving the country that adopted me does not mean ignoring its flaws. Defending conservative principles does not mean defending every action taken in their name. If anything, it demands more courage, not less.
The true antidote to Orwell’s nightmare is not cynicism, it is responsibility as citizenry committed to truth over tribe, principle over personality, and accountability over applause.
If we hold fast to that, we will not live the story of 1984. However, if we abandon it, we won’t need a Ministry of Truth.
We will have built one ourselves…now I’m off to vote at the primaries!