Undermined human development

George Orwell’s 1984, as we know, works on the basis on “how a tyranny is set up, how it stays in power, how it treats its people, and what life is like living under such a system. "1984" is in fact a coded blueprint for world tyranny, laying bare its structure and exposing its components”. 

Extracted from: (1) http://www.orwelltoday.com/whyorwell.shtml

It is in the context of inhumane facts that the world has been through, that is world wars, genocides, tortures, impositions and so on; that we, human beings, have found a big portion of history that has allowed us to build our own identity and hence, understand society’s idiosyncrasy. In that sense, it is widely known that as a country we have not been exempt of these dystopian events that impinge population on every possible aspect of human development, limiting them from their free will up to the heartbreaking extent of controlling their thoughts and free expression; where their dignity is terminated with means of achieving both their submission and functionality towards the operating system. 

As a premise, I reckon that human development is a process, in which a person achieves a balance between himself/herself and his /her surroundings, and throughout time, he or she is understood as a person that is able to adapt himself/herself to an environment, to develop autonomy and to participate inside a community; this development depends therefore on the social organization of this environment. (2)

However, I firmly believe that the current human development in our country has been deeply undermined by impositions of the past, namely the 70’s. These impositions created a sort of submitted society that was told what to do and what not to do; that society that in 1949, Orwell imagined possible (again) in “1984”; that society that was promised to get “democracy back” in the 90’s and still, currently, goes through social inequality and fragmentation issues. 

Indeed, what we are shown in the novel is written by a war-witness point of view, but still, the resemblance is undeniable to our own history when we analyze, for instance, the different ministries in which the power was divided, all of them serving the absolutist ideology of Big Brother that oppressed human development through fear; firstly, with the Ministry of Love and the Thought Police that reminded me of CNI and DINA organizations that tortured and killed thousands of opponents of dictatorship’s ideology only for following a different ideal, only for protecting the ones you love. Families were broken down instead. Books were burned instead. Artists were exiled instead.

Secondly, it also struck my attention to draw a parallel between the Ministry of Truth and the power of media control; for instance, the image of El Mercurio arguing once that there was no such thing of “Detenidos Desaparecidos” and explaining then, that people disappearing was a normal phenomenon in every society; boasting also that Chile was going through an economic and lifestyle welfare by privatizing human rights such as health and education. Moreover, official television by those times showed “concentration camps” in which political prisoners marched singing military songs as a way of demonstrating population that the predominant ideology had eliminated, in this case, the Marxist one. (3)

                                                                      (movie adaptation)

Accordingly, as dictatorship was able to extend its ideals in 1980’s constitution into current times, our society has had to cope with the same model imposed by those times with regards to private education, private health, insufficient working conditions and wages, few instances of political participation, etc. Thus, we are still subjugated as human beings to live subjugated to fear, subjugated to the traces of old, sharing hence Orwell’s feeling of pessimism. 

Finally, we have achieved low progress in aspects related to realization of human beings, aspects that cannot be conceived as segregated privileges since they are human rights that affect society directly. All in all, are we really autonomous? do we actively participate as political beigns? can we really affirm that human development has been achieved during "democracy"?

References:


(1)http://www.orwelltoday.com/whyorwell.shtml - "Why Orwell Wrote 1984"

(2)http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0250-71612004009000003&lng=es&tlng=es.10.4067/S0250-71612004009000003 -Boisier, S. Desarrollo territorial y descentralización: El desarrollo en el lugar y en las manos de la gente.

(3)http://www.probidadenchile.cl/ver_articulo.php?cat=8&art=70 - Orellana, P. "Homenaje y defensa de George Orwell"