By Bert Olivier - December 16, 2025

To some readers it may seem like a rhetorical question to ask whether the narrative of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984), first published in Britain in 1949, has somehow left its pages and settled, like an ominous miasma, over the contours of social reality. Yet, closer inspection – which means avoiding compromised mainstream news outlets – discloses a disquieting state of affairs.

Everywhere we look in Western countries, from the United Kingdom, through Europe to America (and even India, whose ‘Orwellian digital ID system’ was lavishly praised by British prime minister Keir Starmer recently), what meets the eye is a set of social conditions exhibiting varying stages of precisely the no-longer-fictional totalitarian state depicted by Orwell in 1984. Needless to stress, this constitutes a warning against totalitarianism with its unapologetic manipulation of information and mass surveillance.

I am by no means the first person to perceive the ominous contours of Orwell’s nightmarish vision taking shape before our very eyes. Back in 2023 Jack Watson did, too, when he wrote (among other things):

Thoughtcrime is another of Orwell’s conjectures that has come true. When I first read 1984, I would never have thought that this made up word would be taken seriously; nobody should have the right to ask what you are thinking. Obviously, nobody can read your mind and surely you could not be arrested simply for thinking? However, I was dead wrong. A woman was arrested recently for silently praying in her head and, extraordinarily, prosecutors were asked to provide evidence of her ‘thoughtcrime.’ Needless to say, they did not have any. But knowing that we can now be accused of, essentially, thinking the wrong thoughts is a worrying development. Freedom of speech is already under threat, but this goes beyond free speech. This is about free thought. Everybody should have a right to think what they want, and they should not feel obliged or forced to express certain beliefs or only think certain thoughts.

Most people would know that totalitarianism is not a desirable social or political set of circumstances. Even the word sounds ominous, but that is probably only to those who already know what it denotes. I have written on it before, in different contexts, but it is now more relevant than ever. We should remind ourselves what Orwell wrote in that uncannily premonitory novel.

Considering the rapidly expanding and intensifying, electronically mediated strategies of surveillance being implemented globally – no doubt aimed at inculcating in citizens a subliminal awareness that privacy is fast becoming but a distant memory – the following excerpt from Orwell’s text strikes one as disturbingly prophetic, considering the time it was written (1984, Free Planet e-book, p.5) . . .

[SNIP]