Literally 1984: A Progress of a Satire
It is surprising that in 1949, an English author George Orwell managed to write the first dystopian social science fiction novel, 1984, shaking the world of literature of mid-20th century. The novel is a bleak and scathing criticism against totalitarianism and its government that was mainly adopted by Stanilinist Russia and Nazi Germany. For more than seventy years, the novel still managed its position as one of the most important English-language novel of all time. It is often used as an entry read into literary study as well as once made a must-read curriculum among the United States public high schools. But, as important as the commonly associated achievements given to the novel, one of the most important internal achievement that the novel achieved was its ability to coin the phrase ‘1984’, as part of the larger adjective of ‘Orwellian’, as a warning against the mass having to put up with a similar socio-political landscape possibilities alike the regime of Big Brother, which includes but not limited to totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression.
As the years progress, the inclination of what is ‘Orwellian’ or ‘1984’ progress as well. What is thought as ‘Orwellian’ would not be limited anymore to the faraway and far gone place and time of Stalin and Hitler rulership. Society took the messages from the cautionary tales of 1984 into reviewing the actions of their own government, albeit if it is even possible to compare those governments one-to-one to Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. For that reason, the usage of ‘Orwellian’ or ‘1984’ as an adjective commonly used as critique against the government’s actions that may be able to be deemed as totalitarian of various degrees and natures often falls flat as they can be seen as exaggerating those problems that are far from delivering them to a totalitarian dystopia.
For most people who have grown up having wide and easy access to the internet, a ‘meme’ is nothing uncommon. Conceptualized by Richard Dawkins back in 1976, the word means as an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture through primarily intrinsic agreement by those people to accept and continue to spread that sense. ‘Memes’ have evolved for more than a decade now, there are many iterations and branches that one person may remember a specific amounts of ‘memes’ differently from another. ‘Literally 1984’ is one of them, a humorous satirical iteration toward the forced and needless usage of those ‘Orwellian’ adjectives through a presentation of forced and needless usage.
The origin of ‘Literally 1984’ came from a tweet by former US president, Donald Trump Jr., exclaiming that freedom of speech no longer exists in America because Twitter suspended him from their platform. Many people throughout the internet have long turned to Donald Trump Jr. for ‘meme’ materials, mostly through his outrageous behaviors. If outrageousness is what often sparks ‘meme’ from him, this comparison to 1984 was like striking gold. The misuse by Donald Trump Jr provided a platform for satire to take place. With the addition of irony, the negative outrageousness became a sort of positive outrageousness. For example, the expression is used to express how it would feel to be told to follow rules like ‘No racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.’. The setup for that ‘meme’ mirrors how the associated expression to the origin (outrageous, humorous, unserious) carries throughout its consecutive imitations.
Even though ‘Literally 1984’ detract from what ‘Orwellian’ was supposed to be, the essential fault lies in a part of society which made it vulnerable to have the holes for mockery and satirization. The progress of satire which started from the novel 1984 up until the meme ‘Literally 1984’ was all in a perfect formula of how a satire could be developed. A product of its time, stemming from good intentions, encountering falsifications that immediately and strongly backlash everything it stands and could stand upon. Like Voltaire’s Candide attacking Leibniz’s situationally ironic optimism – “The best of all possible worlds” – in times of war and natural disaster.
If we look farther upon the world of literature for what satires they have produced that are still relevant as well as have came out in the recent years, nothing come close to ‘Literally 1984’. It is a strange achievement to say that one of the best novel in the English canon, a very important critique to the socio-political situation of its century, would star as a form of satire more than seventy years later that likely nobody from its time would have thought of, not even Orwell, and some may turn in disdain over its twisted usage. And with the speculation that we might never know when any satire can have the same monumental progression as this one, it is literally 1984 having to bear that thought.