'1984' at Seventy: Why We Still Read Orwell
It&#x27;s not a bad novel, but I wasn&#x27;t particularly captivated by Nineteen Eighty-Four(how the title is actually stylized) because the state it portrayed didn&#x27;t seem sustainable.  This isn&#x27;t to say there aren&#x27;t parallels to North Korean society, for instance, but the type of world in Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn&#x27;t seem like something that today&#x27;s world needs to be afraid of as a whole; there would be far too many suicides for such a system to be worth it to anyone who wants to maintain power and growth.(Countries like North Korea aren&#x27;t particularly large in size or population compared to freer nations)  Maybe it made more sense in a world that wasn&#x27;t driven by media and consumer culture.  Brave New World made a little more sense, but I also didn&#x27;t find it that compelling.  Maybe I need to revisit the both of them now that I&#x27;m in my 30s, as opposed to my early 20s.<p>I&#x27;ve found the &quot;Village&quot; portrayed in Patrick McGoohan&#x27;s &quot;The Prisoner&quot; to be a more profound message about the world that we actually live in.  If the viewer can get over it being a product of its time, as well as the confusing ending, there&#x27;s a lot of allegory packed into the show that reflects the direction our own societies are headed in:<p>- Surveillance is not only treated as a given but is incorporated into the conveniences of everyday life. (e.g. The door to Six&#x27;s domicile opens not automatically but because he is constantly being watched)<p>- The state wants your &quot;information&quot;, so much that it knows more about you than you know about yourself. (e.g.  The authorities predict precisely what Six would want for breakfast, right down to how many strips of bacon)<p>- The line between government and corporation are blurred so much that all food is produced and branded by the Village, which even has its own logo plastered on everything. (All of the food provided to Six is branded as &quot;Village Food&quot;)<p>- The inhabitants of the village all wear the same colorful(albeit ridiculous looking) clothing, almost all of which is unisex.  People come from all sorts of ethnicities, yet are made to comply with a single bland culture in under the superficiality of being &quot;international&quot;. (The push for gender equality and diversity, while laudable, can easily turn into its own opposite)<p>- Most of the village inhabitants(or inmates) are infantilized, are essentially adult children who wear child-like clothing and are even seen playing like children.  They have no responsibility or agency, but are perfectly content to live a pointless existence inside a resort-like prison.<p>- The village has a &quot;democratic&quot; system of electing &quot;Number 2&quot;, but this system is merely superficial as those who are <i>actually</i> in power and the media have already chosen who they want in said position, and the population is easily swayed to vote for the chosen one.<p>- Children are completely housebound, only every being seen in one scene of a single episode in the series.  Some have read into this as suggesting that the children of the village are always kept inside for safety reasons, much like how todays helicopter parents and governments overprotect children out of irrational fears like &quot;stranger danger&quot;.<p>- The veneer of the village is cheerful in a saccharine-sweet way, so as to drown out any of those negative thoughts or &quot;sudden attacks of egoism&quot;.  Much like how we are constantly bombarded by music when we are shopping or simply trying to have a conversation at public venues, the Village has a vast system of PA speakers that are playing cheerful or calming music.  The village only goes further in that it also plays music in people&#x27;s homes without their consent.<p>- The government of the Village is difficult to comprehend, and those who run it are really prisoners themselves, but work within seemingly indefinite layers of bureaucracy.  Nobody actually knows who is <i>actually</i> in charge.<p>- Those who don&#x27;t wish to participate in the society of the village, yet would be content on being left alone, are considered &quot;unmutual&quot; and made to be social pariahs.  Labeling someone with such a blanket term is an easy way to convince the dim-witted masses into agreeing with a position they might not even understand.<p>- The education system in the village, in the little glimpse that way saw it, is very interested in making &quot;learning&quot; so efficient as to sacrifice understanding for the sake of rote memorization.  A system called &quot;speed learn&quot; is used to give everyone an education in a matter of hours, yet all those who are &quot;educated&quot; can do is recite what exactly they were told without any insight or understanding of their absorbed knowledge.<p>A series called &quot;Tyranny of the Masses&quot; analyzes The Prisoner in greater detail, though anyone watching The Prisoner by itself without expecting it to be a spy-thriller should be able to figure out a lot of those things anyway.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL2pC1JKwn0Bi2y4v6D6fkrf9roSDrEgcx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL2pC1JKwn0Bi2y4v6D6fk...</a><p>Overall, I&#x27;ve found The Prisoner to be much more eye opening than even Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World, yet next to nobody I&#x27;ve told has heard about it.  It&#x27;s much more profound and in allegorical to our time, despite it having broadcasted in 1969.