Panic

----I'm on page forty-seven and already terrified. In the confused dusky world, Winston Smith (the main character) has a job at the so-called Ministry of Truth. He gets paid to rewrite history to make the government seem more accurate and the disappeared people seem like they never existed. All the edited newspapers replace the old ones on file, which are destroyed. "...minute by minute, the past was brought up to date." No one can prove what did and didn't happen, and they're okay with that. They're conditioned to be.
----And Newspeak, their language. It feels like slang at first, but then we realize that's their official tongue. So many of the words as we know them have been eliminated- "excellent" and "malevolent." They've all become variants of a root- good can become "ungood", "plusgood", and "doubleplusgood." The language is deteriorating, rather like the digest-digest-digests of "Fahrenheit 451."
----And suddenly I'm breathing hard, because this book is about to happen, it's poised to begin, and it starts with me. I intentionally use bad grammar and spelling, I don't use advanced words when I can. I'm starting the Newspeak. I chose to begin this dead man's spiral. And chances are you helped too. We all brought Big Brother into power, we all made our choice. Now I sit in the bubblegum-pink library, terrified to turn the page.
----Reality control is another cherished Ingsoc belief. The Newspeak word for it is doublethink, and it means convincing yourself to forget something, then bringing it back when necessary, editing the truth for yourself, creating your own reality. The author put it best: "consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious to the act of hypnosis you had just performed." Reality is moldable, editable and optional.
----Feelings are dulled in the imagined 1984. The psychology term "learned helplessness" seems to describe it best; each person knows their efforts are futile, so they don't even try. Their emotions have become faded over time from tolerance. I cringe at this, remembering being ten and crying when I learned what abortion was. Now I dimly register that this is bad, but do nothing. Sadness, even, is gone. "Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, when there was still privacy, love, and friendship..." Gone.