Individualism In Big Brother

Register to read the introduction… The Party views individualism as the only force which could overthrow their system of governing, and in making resistance a pointless act, by maintaining ignorance within the masses, they become omnipotent. Through careful early conditioning in schools, clubs, in "lectures, parades, songs, slogans and martial music" all natural human, individual thought and feeling are stamped out of the general populace. They were not allowed to look unique either in clothing (When Parson's young daughter saw a man in the woods, "she spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes" she reported him to be arrested as a foreigner) or in corporal expression ("Your worst enemy [...] was your own nervous system. Any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom" ). The Party held everyone under the strictest regulations against permitting what in Newspeak they call ownlife, meaning individualism and eccentricity: all the time you were not performing the habitual human acts of existence like eating or sleeping, time alone could tempt the individual to have their own thoughts and ponderings, so all their time was to be governed by communal recreation. The Party is dedicated to the death of the individual, because the Party is immortal: Big Brother is immortal he is the God figure that allows space only for the communalism never for individualism. In this sense, Orwell is discussing how he believed communism would take over all sense of reality to create a true anti-utopian …show more content…
Winston had hope in them as they had not become and hardened and deadened inside like the Party members had. "They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort." Nevertheless, they had lost their conscious mental existence. The proles have individual lives, they have families and friends and preferences which are not held in strict check by the Party, and yet they are kept stupid and useless involving themselves in petty quarrels over saucepans and irrelevant, frivolous concerns. Winston focuses his attentions upon the large prole woman who hangs out washing in the courtyard under his window over the shop; he remarks: "the woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly." I believe Orwell regards individualism as a conscious sense, a reality which you believe in wholly and are possibly willing to die for - it is this that the proles do not have, that they are ignorant of and therefore cannot possess. As observed by Winston: "Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become