Today in 1949, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
Orwell:
The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed–would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper–the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
Today, while certain type of government surveillance has been implemented with the help of technology more sophisticated (and less visible) than “telescreens,” Thought Police—what we now call political correctness, recently upgraded to woke correctness—does not require the use of technology to fundamentally change personal relations, people’s behavior, and society’s priorities.
In Fahrenheit 451, published seventy years ago, Ray Bradbury had a somewhat different take on the rise of a society devoted to conformity of opinions and behavior:
Chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.