THE CRIME OF THOUGHT
The ascendancy of the powers-that-be over the masses is dazzling. Poverty, ignorance, alienation and many other symptoms of social malaise are required so that a powerful minority can keep the deceived people with the noose around their necks. It seems that the fate of the world is the brutalisation of the people; the most obvious sign is the way in which the citizen is guided not to think. Many are hypnotised, without free will — if they ever had it!
In this sense, language could be a target. A target of a future regime whose aim is to achieve a community that does not think, that does not reason and that, on the contrary, lets itself be carried away.
This change in language, according to George Orwell’s prophetic 1984, will be NEWSPEAK. A new language reconstructed by philologists and other specialists. Newspeak is not about creating new words, it is about dismantling them. These philologists have the sole function of stripping meanings from words, from hundreds of words.
The motto is “cut the language down to the bone.” “Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year,” says one of the Newspeak engineers. What might one want to achieve with Newspeak at the collective level? To limit the scope of thought. To narrow the radius of action of the mind. For example, in a totalitarian regime — the subject of 1984 — it will be impossible for any member to commit what is called the CRIME OF THOUGHT, or to mentally reject the regime.
No one, if Newspeak was established in the future, would have the capacity to rebel against the overwhelming control system.
The ‘idiotization’ of the world will be perfected when Newspeak is established. Analyse it yourself! How can the citizens of a country oppressed by a totalitarian system betray said system with their thoughts if each concept — after the launch of Newspeak — is clearly expressed with a single word whose meaning has been rigorously decided and all its secondary meanings removed and forgotten forever?
Every year there will be fewer words — and our range of consciousness will be smaller and smaller!
