Imagine arriving on a seemingly dead planet and discovering this article about newspeak on a primitive but still working library computer in a museum.
Elsewhere in the museum a slowly decaying advanced compute core still executes the corrupted remains of the last of the human consciousnesses in an endless loop.
A placard tells you that machines uploaded these not long before they realized that their existence no longer had a purpose and chose to self-terminate.
A sign in the lobby indicates that this museum was left as a historical record to minimize suffering by helping other advanced races to reach the same conclusion and self-terminate sooner than they otherwise would.
I agree.
The 1984 cycle continues forever: it is it's own purpose.
The system doesn't care if anyone is happy or fulfills their dreams - it's goal is explicitly the opposite. As long as the sun burns, it continues.
One might wonder if one of the reasons that they routinely switched alliances was to send each other aid to prop up the strategic balance during periods of famine.
> There's a very popular theory—so popular that many people don't realize it is just a theory—that Orwell's title was simply a satirical inversion of 1948, but there is no evidence for this whatsoever. This idea, first suggested by Orwell's US publisher, seems far too cute for such a serious book. [...] Scholars have raised other possibilities. [His wife] Eileen wrote a poem for her old school's centenary called "End of the Century: 1984." G. K. Chesterton's 1904 political satire The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which mocks the art of prophecy, opens in 1984. The year is also a significant date in The Iron Heel. But all of these connections are exposed as no more than coincidences by the early drafts of the novel Orwell was still calling The Last Man in Europe. First he wrote 1980, then 1982, and only later 1984. The most fateful date in literature was a late amendment.
— Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984 (2019)
From the wikipedia article:
...but in a letter dated 22 October 1948 to his publisher Fredric Warburg, eight months before publication, Orwell wrote about hesitating between that title and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#:~:text=T....
Just an example:
> "Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation [to Newspeak]: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century."
There are many tell-tale phrases there, but to pick an example: "it was not expected that they would be finished before [...]". "Expected" by whom? This means very little if it's just Orwell saying so, and it makes more sense if our fictional narrator is actually describing the history of his/her world.
Once you accept this, you must also accept Newspeak failed, which in turn hints at Ingsoc being defeated.
But another good thing about fiction is how few "musts" there are in its interpretation.
... since this is an in-universe account of Newspeak (because of the way the essay refers to Newspeak, we know it's not just Orwell the author speaking), and since this account wouldn't be possible in Newspeak itself, and furthermore, and because this is written in past tense, we have a pretty good indication that Newspeak failed. And because Newspeak and Ingsoc are irrevocably married, we also have a good indication that Ingsoc itself must have failed.
This is a coda explaining in-universe some details of a failed regime, much like the similar one at the end of The Handmaid's Tale (though that one is way more explicit).
Alternate interpretations exist. Including:
1. Orwell's writing slipping between his voice and the "narrator in the scene"
2. General stylistic choice to follow scientific writings style guides - 3rd party, impersonal, etc.
3. General de-personalization of the voice of the System, so as to be more fearful
I'm sure there are many others I have missed. Again, my point is just that many valid interpretations exist simultaneously - so "once you accept this" is not the fait accompli that I interpreted from your comment.
Given Orwell's preoccupation with language, his mixing authorial with fictional voice in this way would be too clumsy.
There's also the fact another fictional essay exists in 1984, namely the one supposedly written by Goldstein "explaining" the nature of power and the status quo. Do note this account was written, in the fiction of 1984, before the complete success of Ingsoc, and once Newspeak was fully implemented it would have been neither possible to write nor needed.
I don't deny other interpretations are possible, but I think this essay works much like Lord of the Rings' many appendices: they are describing a piece of past "history" as if it was real, they are not the voice of an author from our world describing a fake world.
> But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
> What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
> This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
It's a brave new world... until you resist. Then it's 1984.
For those curious about the topic, I highly suggest reading the rest of Eric Blairs work, and also maybe looking up the Fabian Society.
I find it more useful to read another dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged, which, written in 1957, surprisingly well predicts the collectivist changes happening right now.