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The present paper aims at bringing into discussion the system promoted by the Big Brother institutionalized totalitarian icon and to prove that this system’s subliminal purpose is to destroy any trace of human feelings, sensibility and self-sacrifice. The first part of the essay attempts to analyze the differences between the work provided by the proletarians and that provided by the mid-class integrated to the External Party, and to analyze the institution of the Ministry of Truth. The second part focuses on the relations between parents and children, husband and wife, emphasizing the idea that The Four Ministers’ goal is to transform people into machinery that submits and does nothing but obey commands, to turn human bodies and human minds into metallic cog wheels whose only purpose is to ensure the functionality of the great diabolical system of totalitarianism.

To begin with, people aren’t supposed to think. They only have to work; moreover, they are trained not to think, they are urged into achieving an overwhelming incapacity for producing any original thinking. They have lost this capacity because the system promoted by Big Brother is very efficient, and it uses both external (the telescreens, the TWO-MINUTES-HATE program) and internal re-education methods (individual tortures, vaporization, and language control).

There is a very clear distinction between the proletarians and the working class. Let’s take for example Mrs. Parsons, a proletarian washer-woman, and a working–class washer-woman. Mrs. Parsons is “a woman with a lined face and a wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with the waste pipe, an infuriating person always in the slough of a housewife’s ruinous mess.”(New Casebooks, George Orwell-Contemporary Critical Essays, pg 69) The working class washer woman is presented like “solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, (...) her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded”. She’s as strong as a horse, an image which has echoes in Animal Farm, where as Raymond Williams reminds us, “the speed of his figurative transition from animals to the proletarian interesting-showing as it does a residue of thinking of the poor animals: powerful to be stupid. (“New Casebooks, George Orwell-Contemporary Critical Essays, pg 70).

Winston reflects on this washer-woman:” the woman down there had no mind; she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly (“New Casebooks”, George Orwell- Contemporary Critical Essays, pg 70). The contrast between the two women is easy to grasp, one still presents the attributes of a human being, made of flesh and boiling with human passions and the other is only a solid, contourless block of granite, it’s has turned amorphous, lifeless, de-humanized . One’s appearance betrays subliminal processes of personal thinking which may remain silenced, but which however exist, meanwhile the other has no individual thinking to expose, it’s a mere empty vessel filled with the totalitarian doctrine of Big Brother. This reflects the differences between the two systems: the old system allowed people to possess consciousness and self-reflexivity, and to put forth personal ideas, whereas the Big Brother system does not, it only empties people out of their interiority and transforms them into mere vehicles for totalitarianism, fanatic behavior and political propaganda.

The “two-minutes-hate” is another element which “educates “people in the very same way. People are trained to hate a person who was never seen by them, and who was known only from the stales presented by Big Brother. Goldstein is presented like the top enemy of the party, a person who committed crimes and betrayed the party. People don’t know him, and more important, they never ask question about him.

The Four Ministers and the slogans which represent the party - War is peace, Liberty is slavery and Ignorance is power - have their own contribution in destroying any trace of common sense and sensibility.

The Ministry of Truth where Big Brother tries to compose a new dictionary with very simple words and doesn’t allow a clear expression of thoughts is well organized and serves very well the purpose of the party. The double thinking and newspeak system composed here is meant to bewilder people and not to help them express their thoughts. People forget what they had to say and change their thoughts in an instance: “ Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so, a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point that where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and to begin the diary today. – The writing of the diary can only begin when the reason of writing it’s forgotten. The ignorant writing of the diary leads to the discovery of another memory which was the origin of the intention to write the diary. So the past here is really created (recreated) by writing, it is not a matter of recording it at all. (“New Casebooks”, George Orwell- Contemporary Critical Essays, pg 79-80).