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TRUE OR LIE

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TRUE OR LIE Empty TRUE OR LIE

Post by PDAcostaD11B Tue May 30, 2017 6:40 pm

George Orwell's novel 1984 covers many social issues and is based on the narration of a dystopian society, and a future society that shows how totalitarianism subdues a population, how the power of a government through fear and terror achieves the absolute control of a community, and how it can be managed and be implanted things in the mentality of the people to deprive and subdue them; all these points lead to the fact that despite the fiction found in the novel, in the background it is shown a very real story, a story based on real and common facts of the daily life.
The subject to be covered in this essay is the meaning of truth; what is the concept of truth, which is the reality, and what can be believed; during the development of the story the main character in several times ask the question of what is the truth, if the things he knows are real or if on the contrary everything he knows about the world is a well-constructed lie, with the passage of the narration Winston knows little by little the truth that the government was hiding, knows all the lies and the deceit on the part of its government, realizes practically that the world and the life that he supposedly knew never existed. Winston finds himself at a lost point because he was making and playing the role of truth while the government and virtually the whole society played the role of lying, it was a fight that he was willing to take but he knew his enormous complexity and the enormous probability of losing it; "Ignorance is strength" (Orwell-1984)1 the ignorance of the people thanks to the lack of knowledge of the past of its society make that its present and the direction of its future would be full of oppression and submission, no one refuted, argued, revealed nothing because the only thing they knew as correct and true were the rules implanted by the government through a figure that meant power and obeying called "Big brother", this figure exerted a mental and psychological force so strong in people that they are not able to question it or question themselves about things, such as if for example the "Big brother" was real, and if it were not real, the rules, the order, the laws that were being handled, then did not have to be exercised, no one was bent on seeking the truth because simply no one knew its meaning.
What is the truth? "Truth presupposes the concordance between what we affirm with what is known, felt or thought. Likewise, truth refers to the real and effective existence of something, that is, to reality, to concrete existence at the level of facts."(Https://www.signified.com/ truth / ); Taking this meaning into account the truth embodied in the story was hidden under a hoax but what it meant for society within the novel was the total reality, they based their reality on the facts that they lived, saw and knew , these people from birth until they left the world were only conscious of obeying the supreme figure, they did not recognize the difference between a lie and a truth, they simply conformed to what their government told them, and this is only a basic example of our society today; In certain parts of the book the author talks about how the government show images and published things like "the big brother is watching you", and this only was a form of publicity of the government to continue implanting in people the control over them, it is exactly the same of what we live in our world where the sources and the means of publicity are becoming bigger, the technology, the internet, the television create doors to be even more involved and exposed to the manipulation of the truth and thus to the manipulation of our mentality and what we believe; a clear and common example is the news from all over the world, the information presented in these programs is most manipulated and transformed to the convenience of government and those who have power, and our function is to see these programs to believe all lies that they say and turn them into truths for us, so if we take all this into account we live in a world where we do not know and are not aware of what is real and what is not, we are part of the deception for our lack of knowledge, for our ignorance.
This manipulation that led to a distorted reality came from the past, the government not only managed and controlled the present and the future but also the past, people were subjected to lose all their memories and past experiences for only be aware of what suited the state, it was a constant manipulation that was developing, and here comes a big question and a big query: from what moment and since when has this manipulation of truth existed? It is a very complex and virtually impossible question to answer, not only in the novel but also in life and in the world in which we live; In the novel we can identify that in m any ways is questioned what is the truth and the reality, but it is never questioned or asked of where and from when it can be said that what they discover is true. A demonstration of this fact is the bible, in addition to being a religious book and sacred to many people, is also a historical book that tells important events in the history of humanity, but can we believe everything that is embodied in the bible or in any other text that tells this kind of events? How do we know that what it says has not changed over time? They are questions that we cannot solve, we do not know if it has been modified and if so from what point, now speaking of these events, they are narrated through memories, memories of those who lived those events or are also narrated by people who heard the memories of others, taking this factor into account another question that is based on whether the reality that we live apart from the facts that make the things real is also based on the memories that we are forming, so apart from a general reality we also have our own reality, which is made with what we remember although what we remember is confirmed by lies so it would not be a truth and complete reality but it is what we perceive, this is a problem that is found in the novel because the society had no memories , they were taken away all the memories of their past so they did not have the opportunity to create a reality of their own, the government had them in a level of submission and control that was even forbidden to create from their mind their own reality, is a fact that still does not exist today but that can happen in the future, is not something inconsistent if we think well, is something that with evolution of technology and with the growth of ignorance can happen.
All these ideas about all the possibilities that exist about the truth, how it develops, its meaning etc, are facts which we can use them to realize that everything that happens within the novel has a relationship and is linked to our way of life; our situation can be seen from a worse point of view because in the novel they are stripped of all their memories and we can see that they are not able to become aware of what is happening to them, they have no knowledge to refute their government, besides having an omnipresent leader, who is everywhere at all times but they cannot see him, is considered as a god, and something that is not seen, something unknown is always scary, so its only solution is to obey its government and its leader, while we have in our power our memories, we have more knowledge and we are aware not of everything but of the majority of our problems and of the deceits that exist, only that we accustomed to them and that becomes the worst lie of all, we know, we can see those who lie to us but we prefer to be part of that.
The last and most important question to begin with the conclusion, which contains all that has been explained in the course of the essay, is: Is there truth? Or has it ever existed? Taking into account all the above, we can observe that no complete truth was ever found either in Orwell's novel or in our reality, there was not any way of proving that the facts that were shown were completely true; If there is truth? We can identify that pitifully at present there is no such complete truth, that on the contrary we live in a world full of deceit, hypocrisy, and falsehood that even promote it on television, and that we are so involved in it that we think that our only solution is to contribute in the lie; if it ever existed? It is a question that does not have an answer, it is impossible to know if there ever was pure truth, if there was a complete truth without any touch of deception or lie, it is like talking about the origin of our planet and the origin of the universe, or origin of life, many investigations have been carried out but there are only hypotheses not a proven and correct answer, the same thing happens with the origin of the truth, you will never know if it ever existed, there are things that simply have no explanation and only each one of us we can give a possible solution or answer according to what we think and our point of view.
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.” (George Orwell, 1984)
To finish with the conclusion of this essay is based on the fact that the truth with all that entails and what it means does not exist in its entirety, there is truth but it will never be complete, George Orwell's 1984 book shows us with a story of how a society can be deceived and can live in the midst of deceit and lies, and unfortunately society today is surrounded by more lies than truth, we live in a distorted reality, in a world of lies and truths that complement each other for their convenience, we will never have a complete reality or an absolute truth, we will never get pure truth, our ignorance took us and even leads us to live in the conformity of things, no matter if we are deceived, cheated, manipulated so long as we live mediocre well; We are masters of our life and of our own reality so we have the power to be part of the deception or otherwise to get rid of it, simply the truth can be the beginning of the creation of reality.
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” ― (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Brothers Karamazov).

PDAcostaD11B

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