Orwell Was Right: the ‘1984’ Dystopia Is Already Here

“How many fingers do you see?” Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, answers what his eyes tell him: there are four. Only the Party agent who directs his re-education insists that there are five. By means of electric shocks and various forms of torture, he begins to doubt his own perception, until at the end of the book he also distinguishes them: there are five, there is no doubt. That passage from George Orwell’s great dystopic novel, in whi…