Two and Two Makes Five
How dystopia exploits the repressed mind in George Orwell's 1984.
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
- George Orwell
Dystopia is a concept that feels far away from where our country is presently, and although there are aspects to it that relate to today’s society, it is difficult for us to understand how one truly dystopian world can come to fruition; therefore, we turn to fiction.
One of the most admired authors to acknowledge this idea is George Orwell. In his novel 1984, Orwell narrates the life of Winston Smith—a man who has begun seeing through the cracks of his country’s questionable actions and desires to take a stand. Unfortunately, the government of Oceania is too powerful, and Winston is soon to realize just how influential they are.
There is a moment when Winston states, “In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it” (Orwell 80). How can this be viewed as truth? Or better yet, how can an authoritative figure convince its people that it is?
In dystopian societies, such as the one Orwell creates, those in charge force these citizens to conform, squeezing them into perfect cookie-cutter images of submission. However, they do not rely on physical strength alone—the violent aspect of this only comes into play when people have already begun revolting. Instead, these figures aim to repress its citizens, and this level of repression Winston endured prevented him, and everyone else, from ever succeeding in their efforts of overturning Big Brother.
Total Abolition of the Sex Instinct
The most obvious sense of repression in the novel is through sexual means. The Party aims to create a sense of loathing toward sex, and literary critic Gorman Beauchamp describes this as “the total abolition of the sex instinct” (294). Beauchamp explains how “the rulers of Oceania have grasped the threat to utopianism posed by man’s sexuality,” so eradicating it is the only way to gain total control (294).
To do this, the Party enforces the idea that sex is one’s duty to create more Party members. They claim it is unpleasant and despicable, and through organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, there is a sense of individual superiority and loyalty for those who are celibate.
The Party also recognizes they can harness these sexual frustrations’ power to create a culture of leader-worship and war fever. Julia encapsulates this concept, saying, “‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that… If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother’” (Orwell 133).
This notion reaches one conclusion: removing sex from the equation leaves more room for individuals to express love and gratitude toward their government. In essence, these sexual desires and the sense of devotion that comes from such close relationships are continually competing against one’s loyalty to the State, so terminating these emotions allows all this admiration to fall on the metaphorical Big Brother.
Since anti-sex propaganda is exceptionally prominent in this society, there comes the nature of using sex to revolt. In “The ‘Dark Power of Destiny,’” Martha Carpentier argues that “Winston has discovered that chastity is orthodoxy and sexual repression is thought-control, so he sees [Julia’s] erotic love as the enemy of the state” (188). Winston’s whole ploy is to defy the Party, and holding an illicit affair with a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League is just one way to do so. This relationship acts as a metaphor for rebellion while simultaneously throwing the proverbial middle finger to Big Brother.
In the novel, there is also a blatant connection between violence and sexual repression. At the very beginning, when Winston first sees Julia, his thoughts already illustrate this:
“Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him... He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax” (Orwell 15).
Winston recognizes that he feels this way because he knows he cannot have Julia—not only is it against the law, but she is also wearing a Junior Anti-Sex League sash, falsely proclaiming her virginity. With this connection between sexual repression and aggression, there comes the idea that sex is a part of human nature; therefore, if someone were to eradicate it, there needs to be some other way to release this energy. In most cases, individuals learn to do so through violence.
The end of the novel also reveals this as Winston is being tortured and betrays Julia, proclaiming, “‘Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia!’” (286). This was Winston’s breaking point—if someone can wish suffering upon the person they love most, the physical and psychological pain they face has completely shattered them as a human being.
Knowledge and Power
Sexual repression is not the only way the Party takes utilitarian control over its people—it also does so through the repression of knowledge, individuality, and speech. To solidify these senses of repression, the government of Oceania designed itself so that no one would be able to overpower it, doing so through Michel Foucault’s relationship between knowledge and power: regulation, surveillance, police, and discipline.
In the novel, history is malleable—Winston himself works as a Propaganda Officer at the Ministry of Truth, whose job is to alter historical records to align with the Party’s official version of past events—and because of this, there is no truth other than what Big Brother preaches. These alterations maintain the illusion that the Party is absolute, so if something said in the past no longer aligns with the Party’s current ideals, it is rewritten.
Foucault believes that “power produces knowledge,” and this power the Party holds over its citizens prevents anyone from questioning the information it spews out, no matter how absurd or contradictory it may be (Parker 270). To enforce this notion, the Party slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” comes into play (Orwell 248).
The Party utilizes this falsifying of the past to continue tearing apart its people’s mental independence, adding to the censorship of identity. This represents one way that the Party regulates its people through knowledge—if they only believe whatever history Big Brother permits them to, their sense of individuality is repressed because they cannot think for themselves.
Another literary critic, James Tyner, digs deeper into this concept of control:
“Orwell developed a hyper‐repressive society… predicated on control for control’s sake. Neither Winston nor the reader is given anything more rational than this—the irrational side of totalitarianism and the eradication of humanity in the name of the State” (139).
Through this exploitation of history, the Party succeeds in manipulating thought—history plays a vital role in one’s collective identity, and by controlling this, the Party polices its citizen’s psyche.
An additional example of regulation lies in the Two Minutes Hate—a daily event where the Outer Party watches a film of Oceania’s enemies and is encouraged to express their hatred for them in an outward manner. Similarly to the tailoring of historical events, the Party indoctrinates these citizens to despise these “enemies,” teaching them that this is the only way to react.
With this, the Party is also projecting itself as the “good guy,” thus creating a sense of community that morphs their subject’s national identity into something akin to pride. If they only learn that their leaders are good, they believe it. Also, as mentioned before, these members have been sexually repressed—which tends to go hand-in-hand with violence—and there needs to be a way for them to expel this aggression:
“What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship” (Orwell 133).
By enabling this, the Party redirects the member’s negative sentiments toward a non-existent, external threat rather than these emotions focusing on themselves, further suppressing its members into this mentality of being on the right side.
The Birth of the Prison
These regulations alone do not entirely repress the citizens of Oceania, so surveillance and police get involved. This constant surveillance is the most significant contributor to repression—if the people believe they are always under watch, they will never rebel.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault presents this phenomenon through the Panopticon prison designed by Jeremy Bentham. In this architectural figure, there is a single guard tower at the center of the prison cells, having a clear view of each one. The trick is that the prisoners cannot see into the guard tower—they have no way of knowing whether someone is inside or if it stands empty—and so they surmise they are always under watch.
Foucault explains how this set-up “induce[s] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power,” meaning that, since these prisoners believe they are under constant surveillance, they begin governing themselves (201).
In 1984, this sense of supervision comes in the form of the telescreens. The people of Oceania know these screens allow the Party to surveil their every move; however, there is no way to know precisely when those authoritative figures are watching. Winston references this as he considers his journal:
“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized” (Orwell 3).
With this supervision, the chances of one rebelling are drastically cut in fear of being caught. The whole “Big Brother is Watching You” propaganda promotes this notion of persistent surveillance, too—the citizens begin regulating themselves in the potential threat of punishment, making it easier for Big Brother to remain in control and for them to continue as submissives.
The Thought Police are also used to enforce these regulations, acting as the police in Foucault’s model. These officers serve one purpose in the novel: to detain those suspected of committing “thoughtcrime” or having unapproved thoughts. In Oceania, thinking outside of the strict parameters the Party sets is a crime, and the Thought Police are there to bring in the reigns of defiant vocabulary.
Even a subconscious thought is punishable by force—as illustrated by Parsons’ arrest executed by his children who caught him muttering disloyalties in his sleep. His children are members of the Junior Spies, which is an organization comprised of minors whose duties involve monitoring adults for betrayal to the Party, and his daughter was the one to capture him. Despite this, though, Parsons is so devoted to the Party that he was not upset with his daughter:
“‘I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact, I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway’” (Orwell 233).
These Junior Spies also act as the police in this model, implementing the repression of individuality through speech suppression.
After all these elements come discipline, which rears its ugly head in the novel’s final part. Foucault defines discipline as “a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology” (215).
After being caught by the Thought Police, Winston arrives at the Ministry of Love, where he faces punishment for his crimes through different means of torture—starvation, beatings, threats, and manifestations of his fears. This sense of disciplinary action highlights the power the Party holds over its citizens in that they know the most effective way to beat its people into submission, pushing them so far into their repressed minds that all they know is what the Party allows them to. The only way for the torture to end is by conforming, and although Winston fights back, struggling to grasp for just a sliver of his own conscious thought, Big Brother always comes out on top.
Final Thoughts…
Dystopia is impossible to overcome, and George Orwell perfectly illustrates this. Winston and everyone else in Oceania faced a level of repression that is detrimental, stripping them of their fundamental human rights of individuality and expression in an almost mechanical manner.
There is no humanity in this society, only the Party’s way, and these rebels never stood a chance—even Winston himself recognized this false sense of hope glimmering inside him. He understood Big Brother’s influence and that he could never overpower it, yet he still fought, desiring to lose with some semblance of dignity.
No matter how hard one fights in this society, when asked what two and two makes, they will have to say five, and in the end, they will start to believe it.
Beauchamp, Gorman. “Of Man’s Last Disobedience: Zamiatin’s ‘We’ and Orwell’s ‘1984.’” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 10, no. 4, 1973, pp. 285–301. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40468020.
Carpentier, Martha C. “The ‘Dark Power of Destiny’ in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, vol. 47 no. 1, 2014, pp. 179–194. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mos.2014.0010.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995. WordPress, www.selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/foucault-panopticism.pdf.
Orwell, George. 1984. New American Library, 1961.
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2015.
Tyner, James A. “Self and Space, Resistance and Discipline: A Foucauldian Reading of George Orwell’s 1984.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 5, no. 1, Mar. 2004, pp. 129–149. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/1464936032000137966.