OPINION:
As the country moves past COVID-19 and the emergency powers that local, federal and state governments created, one begins to wonder if the dystopian worlds created in books such as “1984” and “Anthem” are becoming a reality.
For many, reading these texts was compulsory in middle or high school. The events of the past few years have seemingly mirrored the worlds many thought were based solely on the imagination of authors like Ayn Rand and George Orwell.
A closer look, however, reveals connections between the fearful fictional societies that plagued our adolescence and the stark realities of today. With mandates that governed COVID-19 painting a background with emergency powers and executive control in many states, is it really that far-fetched for people to see the worlds Rand and Orwell created collide with the world we live in today?
In “Anthem,” Rand introduces readers to a society ruled by a collective mentality. The protagonist, Equality 7-2521, starts the novella by saying: “It’s a sin to write this. … It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own.”
Equality’s world has a One World Council and believes in collective thought. The pronoun “I” is never used. While that may sound far-fetched, there are people who think a “One World Order” is entirely possible.
Similar to “Anthem’s” World Council, David Rockefeller discussed the possibility of singular world rule in a 1991 speech in Baden, Germany. He thanked several publications for not sharing the story with the country, stating they couldn’t have created a “plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity.”
At a U.N. dinner in 1994, Rockefeller also said that we are one crisis away from “nations accept[ing] the New World Order.” Was COVID-19 that major crisis?
While it has finally come out that COVID-19 most probably originated in a lab, some wonder if the lab leak was a “planned crisis” or a test run to see how the public responds to a global crisis. Doesn’t this speech allow people to question the intentions of the government and its likeness to novels that promote a singular rule?
To showcase how the World Council functions in Rand’s “Anthem,” Equality 7-2521 presents an “invention” to the council. But instead of earning praise for finding a source of power, he is met with disdain as the council says, “What is not done collectively cannot be good.”
The council further points out that what Equality 7-2521 brought to the table would ruin “the Plans of the World Council.” While this may be an extreme fictional example to some, those who opposed the status quo during the pandemic faced the sort of opposition Equality does in the novella.
For example, Meryl Nass, a doctor in Maine, had her medical license suspended after the medical board received “at least two complaints that Nass was spreading misinformation about the virus.” Further, the physician was required to undergo a psychological evaluation.
Not only was she one of the first doctors to question the origin of COVID-19, but she was also one of the few who had concerns early on about the safety of its vaccines. Like Equality, Dr. Nass paid a price for not going along with the collective ideology about COVID-19 and questioning protocols. To those who believe in increasing governmental control, her fate is but one example of free speech control.
A One World Council isn’t the only fictional means to authoritarian dominance.
According to George Orwell, harnessing people’s thoughts and limiting speech is also mandatory. In “1984,” through Winston Smith’s eyes, we see a world where Big Brother surveils everyone’s actions. To help control thought, Orwell introduced the virtues of newspeak, with the sole purpose of “cutting the language down to the bone and narrow the range of thought.”
While that may seem far-fetched to some, the Department of Health and Human Services is seemingly attempting to cut words and narrow thought with its most recent proposal to replace “gender-specific terms” in child support regulations.
HHS is offering terms such as “parentage” as a replacement for paternity, removing the words “mother” and “father” and replacing them with “parent,” and taking the pronouns “he” and “she” out and using plural pronouns instead. Does this proposal echo Big Brother’s plan to eradicate “thoughtcrime”? When did shrinking the vocabulary and controlling speech become a function of the government?
Adults aren’t the only ones to question the government. High school students, because they were so severely affected by the pandemic lockdowns, also have many questions. Between remote learning, mask mandates and frequent quarantines, most aspects of education were touched in some way by COVID-19.
Having taught “1984” since former President Donald Trump’s election, I have witnessed a change in students’ response to the novel. In a post-COVID world, they seem to relate more easily to Orwell’s totalitarian world. They readily make comparisons between Winston Smith’s telescreen monitoring his every move and our cellphones essentially doing the same to us.
They wonder whether our government controls how the news is disseminated to the public as they read about the perceived change in chocolate rations or a new enemy in an ongoing war in “1984.” And most importantly, they see, through their many individual quarantines, how important it is to understand how government functions and really affects their lives.
There have always been conspiracy theorists. But COVID-19 lockdowns, the inability to question anything about the pandemic, and the repercussions many were subject to when they went against the status quo have taught students and others to look at the government’s role in our lives in a different light. If the leap from the fictional novels of our adolescence is so great and there is nothing to the theories people bring forward, why have so many been silenced?
Why were people canceled and shut down for bringing up different views, as Equality is in “Anthem”? Is there a connection between “1984’s” newspeak and the language changes HHS is making? And most important, is our government testing its boundaries in the same way writers tested the governmental control in their books? Only time will tell.
• Katherine Prange is a high school English and accounting teacher in Gillespie, Illinois, who obtained her Master of Arts degree in Holocaust and genocide studies.
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