Manipulation_Techniques_in_Orwell’S_Nineteen_Eighty_Four___the_Power_of_Language

Manipulation Techniques in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four : The Power of Language    My thesis statement is that George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four carries a well-founded warning and exhibits the numerous methods by which the political leaders in a totalitarian regime use power to manipulate and control society. The aim of my essay is to show what are these manipulation techniques and what effect they have on individuals. I will try to achieve my bourne by exhibiting and explaining how language can shape people’s sense of reality, how it can be used to conceal truths, and even how it can be used to manipulate history, as seen in Orwell’s novel. First, it is necessary to explain why and show how the fictional society in George Orwell's“1984” stands as a metaphor for a Totalitarian society. A Totalitarian society is one with limited freedom of expression, and although it provides control for the people, it can deny them a great deal of freedom to express themselves. Communication, personal beliefs, and individual loyalty to the government are all controlled by the Inner Party, which governs the people of Oceania in order to keep them from rebelling. The dystopian society of Oceania is maintained through the use of many control measures, including the falsification of the past, streams of constant propaganda and organizations for children. However, the most powerful and central method of control is not just the ongoing manipulation of language in the development of Newspeak, but also the thought process of doublethink. Orwell’s novel paints a frightening picture of a totalitarian system gone to the extreme, but it is a novel that is fundamentally about psychological control of the public. Of course, the Party does employ torture as part of its control regime, but the psychological control tactics are the dominant ones in the novel. While physical punishment is difficult to administer, psychological tactics (manipulation of people through language) can be continuously applied to the general public without raising great public opposition or fear — and that is where its strength lies. It is for this reason that Newspeak rather than torture is planned as the way to erase thoughtcrime (Stansky 88). However, while Newspeak is a very significant method of mind control through language, it is just a part of a greater Inner Party scheme. It is, in fact, the Party-controlled media in the novel that uses Newspeak as well as other linguistic trickery to spread its propaganda and brainwash the public. Language becomes a mind-control tool, and George Orwell, like many other literary scholars, is interested in the modern use of language and, in particular, the abuse and misuse of it. He realizes that language has the power in politics to mask the truth and mislead the public, and he wishes to increase public awareness of this power, given the fact that the ultimate goal is the destruction of will and imagination. As Friederick R. Karl explains, Orwell recognizes that language, whether used by the poet, the journalist, or the dictator, suggests the quality of a society. And a manipulation of language, particularly at present, affords a manipulation of the society itself(Karl, 165). Orwell accomplishes this by placing a great focus on Newspeak and the media in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Demonstrating the repeated abuse of language by the government and by the media in his novel, Orwell shows how language can be used politically to deceive and manipulate people, leading to a society in which the people unquestioningly obey their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality. The Party uses children’s organizations to control the minds of its youth from a young age. They explain to children that their loyalties lie only with the Party. They are also encouraged these various leagues and organizations (eg. Anti-sex league, Junior spies) to reject relationships of any kind and spy to on their surrounding individuals, even their own parents. The extent of the indoctrination is shown by Orwell through the inclusion of the Parsons children in the novel; they are desensitized to violence and clamber to attend a public hanging. The children are ruthless in their quest to weed out the unorthodox and, as a result, even their mother lives in fear of being denounced by her own children: What stuck Winston most was the look of helpless fright on the woman’s grayish face.(Orwell, 63) Another example of the effect that this kind of education has on children is the case of Winston’s neighbor, who shouts in his sleep “Down with Big brother”, although he seems perfectly adapted to the system. The children denounce him, he is thrown in prison, and yet he is very proud of their education; his son, while playing, once shouted at Winston: You’re a traitor!(…) You’re a thought criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines! (Orwell, 74) Noticing such a behavior, one can only conclude that Orwell is a master at creating images for lives wastes from the cradle to the grave ( Vianu, 25). Another method used by the government in Oceania is the introduction of Newspeak, as I have previously mentioned, which narrows the range of thought and shortens people’s memories. It is therefore ideal for a totalitarian system, in which the government has to rely on a passive public which lacks independent thought and which has a great tolerance for mistakes, both past and present. Such narrowed public thought is what the Inner Party prefers, because a public that lacks the ability to think vividly poses less of a threat than one that can realy criticize the government and defend itself from harm. The goal of the political leaders is reached successfully, as seen in the scene where Syme and Winston, the two middle-class workers in Oceania, discuss the concept of Newspeak. Syme reveals that he supports the system, demonstrating how he has been brainwashed by the Inner Party who enforces the system. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words... You haven't a real appreciation for Newspeak, Winston...Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought' In the end we shall make thougtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it(Orwell, 46). One can detect from this quotation that the people of Oceania, as a group, have been brainwashed by the Inner Party to use only Newspeak. Syme, for one, understands the purpose of it, and he still complies with the system because he has been trained to do so. The concept of Newspeak is designed to control personal beliefs of the citizens by limiting their form of expression, as Syme explains. Moreover, there is another method of influencing the way people think, strictly connected with Newspeak; it is the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs, called Doublethink whose purpose is to provide a frame of thought to the public so that they can accept whatever the Party releases as truth. The flexibility of mind that is afforded by doublethink reduces the chance of a member of the public to realize that the majority of information provided by the Party is in fact contradictory and hence a lie. Further on, it is to be shown how the main control device in Oceania is the media; this is powerful as a tool for manipulation both because the public is widely exposed to it, and also because the public trusts it. The telescreens continuously shout bursts of news and propaganda throughout the day, and the people listen intently and cheer at ‘good news’ (victories) and are driven to rage by ‘bad news’. The characters in Orwell’s novel are slaves of the media; they revere it as an oracle. When the telescreens initiate the Two Minutes Hate, for instance, the people are roused to a frenzy: People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices . . . [a girl] had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ (Orwell, 16). Certainly, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, media information does control some of the ways in which people think about and assess the world (Lewis and Moss, 47). The Party is interested in masking the truth, and so the media manipulates language to present a distorted reality; as Paul Chilton explains, the media is relying on the principle that a piece of information that is repeated often enough becomes accepted as truth (Chilton, 27). This brainwashing is done through the words of the telescreens, newspapers and magazines. Furthermore, Orwell says in his essay Politics and the English Language, Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind .In the novel, these lies are quite obvious. For example, the media (controlled by the Party, of course) continually refers to the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love, and Plenty. In reality, however, the Ministry of Truth is concerned with the falsification of records, and the Ministry of Peace deals with warfare. The Ministry of Love is “the really frightening one” (Orwell, 6) as it is essentially a place for the questioning and torturing of suspected criminals. The Ministry of Plenty makes up economic figures to convince the public that the economy is in good shape, even though there are great shortages of all commodities due to the war. Although the irony in the titles is blatantly obvious, Orwell is making a point about how the media can use language to mask the truth. The totalitarian state of Oceania is in a constant state of war, and part of the Party’s ongoing struggle is to keep the public satisfied with this warfare. If the public were dissatisfied, they would resent the shortage of food and other commodities and possibly rebel against the Party. The Party therefore has to distract the public’s attention away from the negative side of warfare, and they use the media to do this. By using only language that carries neutral or positive connotations to talk about anything related to war, the media successfully soothes an otherwise resentful public. For instance, the media never reports on the twenty or thirty [rocket bombs] a week falling on London (Orwell, 28), but rather inundates peoples’ lives with good news about victories. Winston’s telescreen announces: Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end (Orwell, 28). Similar reports follow throughout the entire novel, constantly celebrating the capture of enemies and the conquering of new territories, but never admitting any kind of defeat. The media is skilled at engineering ‘truth’ through language, and one of the most disturbing consequence of this, developed in the novel is that the Party has ultimate control over history, for language is the link to history. Winston’s job in the Ministry of Truth is to modify news items and other documents that in one way or another make the Party look bad; after he replaces an original document with the modified one, all the originals are destroyed. The fact that even the main character, who knows exactly what is going on with the falsification of documents, has trouble recalling who Oceania is really at war with at the present(Eurasia or Eastasia), and he cannot be sure because the Party keeps changing history, is a vivid example that the tactic works. Orwell describes the process: This processes of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets . . . Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. (Orwell, 42) The actual purpose of the Ministry of Truth is to spread lies and to have control over its citizens using memory-erasing techniques, as it can be seen in Winston’s case. The distinction between true and false in their usual meaning has disappeared. This is the great cognitive triumph of totalitarianism: it cannot be accused of lying any longer since it has succeeded in abrogating the very idea of truth (Stansky, 127). Orwell’s novel proves that if all available evidence shows something to be true, it is believed to be true. Winston struggles with this idea of Reality control (Orwell, 37) as he works at the Ministry of Truth. The frightening thing, Winston thinks to himself, [is] that it might all be true. If the Party [can] thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened – that, surely, [is] more terrifying than mere torture and death (Orwell, 36). As well as altering the past by manipulating written language, the Party has an ingenious plan to break the link with the real past by introducing a language barrier. When “all real knowledge of Oldspeak [disappears] . . . the whole literature of the past will have been destroyed” (Orwell, 56). After a few generations, when people are no longer capable of decoding information from the past, there will no longer even be a need to censor the history that has the potential for breeding unorthodox ideas — it will be completely out of the public’s reach. Thus, the manipulation of language and text not only effects the present, but also the past and future in more than one way. A Party slogan in the novel reads, Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past (Orwell, 37). To conclude, I have shown in my essay how Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell demonstrates that language, when used in a maliciously political way, can become a method by which the political leaders in a totalitarian regime use power to manipulate and control society. I have shown how Orwell’s novel depicts a totalitarian system gone to the absolute extreme, in which psychological manipulation is realized by introducing language and thinking norms( Newspeak and doublethink), by educating children in favor of the political doctrine, by propaganda on telescreens and by altering reality and changing history. Simultaneously, I have shown how the individuals respond to such a governing and how they can be controlled and taught into thinking according to the political views of their leaders. Bibliography Books Chilton, Paul. Orwellian Language and the Media. London: Pluto Press, 1988. Lewis, Florence and Peter Moss. The Tyranny of Language in Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. London: Comedia Publishing Group, 1983. Karl, Friederick R. A Reader’s Guide to The Contemporary English Novel, Toronto: ***, 1961. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Stansky, Peter. On Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1983. Vianu, Lidia. British Literary Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millenium, Bucharest: All Educational, 1999. Online sources Billingsley, Brittany. An Essay on George Orwell's "1984". August 20, 2002.*** April 24, 2009 . < http://www.lit.org> Bryson, Michael. Let's talk, eh' A contemporary response to Orwell's 1984. January, 2004. The Danforth Review. April 24, 2009. Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language. Posted: 2003. The complete Works of Orwell. April 24,2009.