The book 1984 was written by George Orwell in 1948. It was an instant success. When George Orwell lay dying one year later, 400,000 copies of his book had been sold. Sales have not slowed since. 1984 has become an essential part of the modern consciousness.

The year 1984 has also become, in the words of Peter Jenkins of The Guardian, “an almost mythical date in human history.” Now that date has arrived, people have taken to comparing the situation postulated by Orwell, with that which exists in the world today. Mrs. Thatcher, for instance, was reported as saying that “Orwell was wrong.” We do not, she asserted, have a totalitarian state of the kind that Orwell predicted.

But the picture that Orwell depicted for 1984 was not meant to be taken literally. It is a symbolic expression of the course that evil in the world of man might take. George Orwell saw ominous trends in the political system of 1948; he projected those trends to 1984, and described the society that might result.

Orwell saw that man is in the middle of a perfect world. Everything in nature is exactly as it ought to be. There is no exploitation, prejudice, tyranny or corruption in the world around man. His own world, however, is fraught with evil. The world of nature, in all its beauty, proclaims that there is a path of perfection that man too can follow. The world of man, in all its corruption, cries out that man has failed to follow that path. The purpose of 1984 is to warn man off cultivating his potential for evil, and cultivate instead the good that is latent in him.

But the pessimistic tone of 1984 shows that Orwell did not see human society reaching a state of perfection in this world. “It is quite possible that man’s major problems will never be solved,” he wrote in 1944, “but it is also unthinkable who is there who dares to look at the world of today and say to himself, ‘It will always be like this.’”

Indeed, if one looks at the world of man, there seems to be no end to the evil that he perpetrates. Yet if one looks at the world around man, its perfection tells one that there must come a time when man also merges with the perfect world around him.

The only way out of this paradox is to accept the coming of another world when reality will be enforced on man, as it is already enforced on the world of nature; when God’s will shall prevail in the world of man, as is already the case in the rest of the world. The only ones who will be fit to inhabit that perfect world will be those who had consciously become a part of it in this world; those who bowed to the will of God when they had the power to rebel. □