1984 and V for Vendetta

Either way, the way to change the world is to wake up a minority to the fascist state and it's oppression of the populace, focusing on our collective ability to remove those people from power who inflict harm on others through the government's monopoly over the use of force. We need to find that hundredth monkey.

Tea Parties, Occupy protests, Anonymous, Transition, Zeitgeist, and other movements are the first step to addressing the problem, but they need to come together for the common goal of creating a liberated society which casts down those methods of control of a population for the benefit of those in power. We must work toward a voluntary society, not one with a government which mandates how we express our freedoms.

A lot of people compare world events to 1984, and sometimes it's frightening how similar they appear to be. After finally reading it, though, I'm inclined to say the level of oppression present in the book just isn't possible. In piecemeal, it serves warnings, but the aspects outlined are required to be present all at the same time, some of which just seem so unlikely as to be impossible (such as the reduction to 3 nation-states, the rounding up of all first generational dissenters, the acceptance of lack of privacy, doublethink, the technological infrastucture necessary for the telemonitors, the tracking and changing of all literature, etc...).

1984 posits that power is its own goal, but I have a hard time believing that there is even one person that wants power for only power's sake; that there is a person who would be wholly satisfied lording over his fellow man while living in filth and squallor (does anybody remember the line "my kingdom for a horse"?). In that sense, 1984 does address something that I've pondered, and that's the need for stratified goods and services between the classes. Hopefully I'll write on it at a later date, but the basic idea is that there's no point to being rich if it doesn't get you something better than someone who's poorer. Taken down the logical path that 1984 itself proposes, even the highest class citizens would eventually have a very meager quality of life. True, a better one than their inferiors, but a poor one by the standards of what could be.

However, more than anything, and probably because of V for Vendetta, I'm inclined to think like Winston did: that people won't live like that. That someone would eventually notice, and then more and more. The peasants would become incapable of accepting an even lower standard of life, and then the higher classses. Or perhaps the higher would no longer think that merely being able to fill one's stomach was such a grand high thing. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed, maybe it didn't. But I would think something like the Brotherhood would exist. And maybe 1984 would have its own V. Maybe not an untouchable superman, but perhaps a Claudius, willfully cloaked by seeming innocuousness.

Not Quite Somewhat: 1984, V for Vendetta