Is it? Is it really happening?

Do you have a one-party system? Is your party subdivided into two parts - the lower lever folks and the upper level bureaucrats? Do you have a completely disenfranchised, poor, uninformed category of people who live outside this party system entirely and have no say - no do they care to? Is there a telescreen in your house? Not a phone that can be tapped - an actual interactive device used by the government to talk to and actively watch your ever move. Are you forced to do exercises daily and afraid to show the slightest displeasure? Is alcohol rationed?

How about criticizing the government? Will you disappear if that happens? What about sex? Outside of some vocal religious fanatics, is it really being discouraged? Having an "affair" with someone based entirely on pleasure or lust... does that result in death?

Let's not forget the memory hole. When there are news stories unfavorable to the one party, do they get destroyed and forgotten forever? Do our enemies change so frequently that our leaders change the subject of our hatred mid-speech? Are people afraid to criticize or question when this happens?

Are people so emotionally repressed that it requires the government to sponsor a time of day where everyone screams hatefully at an image of an enemy of the state? Is the government changing our language so that we can't complain easily?

I see this tired old rhetoric all the time. Laws being passed that appear to infringe your right to privacy or that favor big business over the individual, and the kneejerk reaction is "this is just like 1984!" with the subsequent argument that no, "Brave New World" was more accurate, and maybe someone else who is a little better read might chime in and say "Zamyatin's We" is better than either.

Maybe you've learned to draw parallels between roving wiretaps and telescreens. Wars you don't understand - maybe rightfully so - with "We've always been at war with Eastasia." Is the shrinking middle class really an argument for the rise of the Proles?

Context is important here. 1984 is, if anything, a dystopian view of the world controlled by what Orwell saw as the inevitability of the rise of Communism.

Let's talk about those Proles. It's impossible to divorce the concept of - even the term - "Prole" from Marx's Proletariat. In 1984, the Proles are 85% of the population. They don't work for the Party. This is the class most of us would belong to, if we were to try to draw some parallel between actual economic/social structure in the West and 1984. There are upper, middle, and lower classes, just like we have today. And these folks have a lot of privacy. No telescreens. Hell, the Party even creates porn for the Proles to keep them happy.

I'd argue that we're pretty far from the world imagined in 1984. What we have isn't ideal. Our politicians don't always have our best interests in mind. There are economic forces at work against the average person. Civil liberties are often curbed in trade for the idea that we're a little safer. All of these deserve criticism and discussion. But to say that any of it is simply a precursor to a 1984 reality betrays the context of the novel itself.