Covid-19/84: are we entering an Orwellian dystopia?

From ‘Big Brother is watching you’ to ‘Big Pharma is watching you’

The celebrated novel 1984, by the committed anti-fascist George Orwell (the pseudonym of Eric Blair), is a dire warning about totalitarian government

Published in 1949, 1984 is the great modern myth of a dystopian future, of the hell of totalitarianism. Encapsulating its horrors, such terms as Big Brother, Thought Police, doublethink, thoughtcrime and Room 101, have become embedded in our culture.

Imagining the ordeals of disillusioned citizen Winston Smith in a despotic world where extreme repression ensures absolute obedience, Orwell (1903–50), in this the last work he completed, had Stalinist Russia in mind. Although Orwell was a socialist, he made a withering critique of communism, as in his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), as well as of far-right totalitarianism. Both 1984 and Animal Farm were banned in the Soviet bloc.

Orwell was influenced by the novel We (1924), by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937), which imagines a scientifically-managed future society in which people have numbers, not names. But 1984 has had a much greater impact on world readership; indeed, the adjective ‘Orwellian’ entered the language due to…