[Boomer]

In Orwell's 1984, 'Doublespeak' was the method of communication. In the language of doublespeak the meanings of words were deliberately obscured -- or reversed.

The government of Oceania held 4 ministries. The Ministry of Truth was one of those. But those who worked for the Ministry of Truth had the job of writing propaganda. They did this by rewriting history and changing word meanings to fit Big Brother's hold on power.

The only reason the book was titled 1984 was because Orwell wrote it in 1948 and needed a title. Orwell missed it by about 30 years -- and that it is getting more egregious every day.

My high school classes read 1984 in 1984. At the time, my assignment for the essay at the end (always not to exceed two proofread, edited pages) was to look around the current (1984) world and to cite examples of things that were happening around us that seemed to foretell events that were in Orwell's work of dystopian fiction.

At the time (1984) violence in movies was becoming quite common and more graphic. In the book, Big Brother kept the Proles amused by producing extremely violent movies, with the goal of saturating the people with violence to make them immune to the violence used by Big Brother to remain in power and to use more power to take over other countries in their world.

The Proles in 1984 were the class of citizens of Oceania who had no real power for themselves, but could be easily manipulated and used by those whose goal was to remain in power forever.

There were two other things the government provided for the Proles, besides the violent movies. The other two were cheap gin and lotteries. The lottery winners were not real. Propaganda news made them real to the Proles. (As I recall, they very rarely threw in a real winner just to keep it "real." All the rest were fake winners.)

Most of the short essays the students wrote about 1984 were about movie violence. But that was in 1984 real-time.

Fast-forward to now, it would not be possible, in a two-page essay, to cover all the things being done by power-grabbers that we are seeing all around us. It would have to be a dissertation.

But. . .my point is moot (or is it?) because teachers would not be allowed to teach 1984 in many schools across the country now because digging into the book might cause critical thinking skills.

As far as the discussion in this thread of where is Truth and Google v. DuckDuckGo goes, I am sadly summing it up by paraphrasing that famous philosopher Mick Jagger who wrote, "You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.".................

To paraphrase Jagger, for that "do your own research" routine, "You can't always get what you need. But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you want."

Boomer

PS: Dare I say -- think about it?