oked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becuase they have no intellect.”This division of society into Party members and proles in 1984 was clearly modeled on the division which was coming into focus in the Soviet Union in 1948, in which Party members were closely monitored while proles were less controlled. Both Esslin and Howe, however, point out that Orwell’s vision of the powerlessness and inertia of the proles did not bear out, given the evidence of history. In fact, numerous uprisings against the Soviet machine, from the Hungarian Revolution to the student uprisings in France, from the Prague Spring to the rise of Solidarity in Poland, to the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall, demonstrate that the proletariat, and even party intellectuals, were not completely crushed by Party ideology, and that, in Esslin’s words, “the totalitarian manipulation of popular feelings and ideas by the mass media is far less effective than Orwell had imagined.”Nonetheless, by the novel’s end, Big Brother is ultimately victorious, having won over the last man in Europe. In today’s world, Big Brother is still a force, especially to those who worry about the continued possibility of the rise of totalitarianism today. However, there is another face to Big Brother, which is precisely that “manipulation of popular feelings and ideas by the mass media” about which Orwell warned. If people find in government endless new reasons to be vigilant about the incursions into personal liberties which 1984 depicts, they would do well to remember, as Neil Postman claims in the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, that there is a very different version of the dystopian universe presented in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love t...
