Comparisons between the Party in George Orwell’s 1984 and the Democrats currently ruling the U.S. are becoming more frequent, e.g., referring to the Silicon Valley censors as the Thought Police (from 2016), the new Disinformation Governance Board as the Ministry of Truth (WSJ), etc. Democrats are now apparently about to receive comprehensive data on which Americans support their opponents (see “Judge rules January 6 committee can obtain RNC and Trump campaign email data” (CNN)).
There is at least one area where today’s Progressives diverge from Orwell’s Party. From the appendix to 1984:
[a Party member’s] sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words SEXCRIME (sexual immorality) and GOODSEX (chastity). SEXCRIME covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by GOODSEX—that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was SEXCRIME.
Regarding sexuality, in other words, 21st century governments that decide how to allocate an ever-larger share of GDP and thus occupy an ever-larger role in an individual’s life went in exactly the opposite direction predicted by Orwell. Orwell was correct in predicting that church-established moral rules would be dead, but he thought that even more strict sexual morality would be imposed by the state.
(Note that, in 1984, the Proles enjoyed more freedom of all kinds, including sexual, than Party members, but their sexual freedom was pretty similar to what was available in 1940s England not what we have in the U.S. right now. Contraception is never explained in 1984, unlike in Brave New World. The only women who have babies are married women, despite the existence of some sex outside of marriage, and family sizes seem to be small.)
Wrong Philip! The definition of sex crime have changed and there is a new clergy defining it.
“Orwell was correct in predicting that church-established moral rules would be dead, but he thought that even more strict sexual morality would be imposed by the state.
“1984” Publication date 8 June 1949
Orwell didn’t properly predict the technology advancements in antibiotics , birth control, and dating apps. Now there is no way for the state to impose strict sexual morality on the proles. It’s much easier to establish a new government bureaucracy named Ministry of Truth to sit around and data mine the proles emails for the words RNC, Trump and January 6.
The widespread availability of birth control pills had a great deal to do with the “Free Love” ’60s. I still think that abortion itself was not as common, but with more people screwing, some who don’t have access to The Pill, then you need free and easy abortion to take up the slack.
We have better contraceptives now than ever – and it’s not difficult anymore for *anyone* to find information about them.
It’s really interesting because in a past life, I had an -ex girlfriend who didn’t want to take contraceptive pills – because she didn’t want her hormones being messed with by pharmaceutical companies. Of course, today she is passionate about children having access to hormone therapy without consulting their parents so they can change their sex!
Addendum: In an essay I wrote in high school, I noticed the same thing, basically. Of course, Orwell never knew that in truth, the United States would just want much better surveillance of every person to prequalify them as Thought Criminals, but allow them to smoke lots of weed, stay on the government dole, and have as much sex of as many varieties as they wanted.
The United States has realized that it really doesn’t want a nation of abstemious, hard-working, God-fearing people who practice delayed gratification: it wants a nation of bloated, fucked-up, polysexual weirdos who are easy to keep tabs on.
There are only a few “taboos” that haven’t been shattered yet in the USA, and those aren’t going to last much longer, either. There’s still some residual distaste for bestiality and pedophilia, but all of that has to end when humans start altering their genomes with animal DNA and pressing on with attempts to live forever.