“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”― George Orwell, 1984

I decided to finish 2021 on a classic. The last time I read this was 20 years ago. This book is dated in many ways, but I still think that George Orwell's 1984 has never been more relevant than it is today.

It's deeply disturbing to think that a great number of the ideas he presented in this novel from 1949 are truths today. False news is everywhere. There is a war on language and free speech. The thought police are real. Individualism doesn't exist. The war on democracy and the chaos and confusion that we are experiencing in today's world is real.

It isn't hard to see why this book has been so popular over the last five years. When we look at political campaigns and events, marketing and advertising, social media, and how news is presented to us in 2021, it's all mean to elicit a response in a certain way.

70 years later and...

“Big Brother is Watching You.”― George Orwell, 1984

A nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face.― George Orwell, 1984

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”― George Orwell, 1984