Do you love Big Brother? Ben Shapiro discusses what is arguably the most important dystopian fiction of our century: “1984” by the great George Orwell. - - - Today’s Sponsor:ExpressVPN - Go to https://expressvpn.com/ben and find out how you can get 3 months of ExpressVPN free! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Hey, hey, and welcome, folks. This is The Ben Shapiro Show. So, we have something behind the paywall over at Daily Wire Plus. It is called Ben Shapiro's Book Club. It's precisely what it sounds like, a book club. Well, one of the books that we analyzed over the course of the last year was George Orwell's 1984. Here's what it sounded like. Hey, everybody, and welcome.
I'm very pumped because this month, we read 1984 by George Orwell. You can see how I keep tabs. Literally, I put tabs in the book. We're gonna go through this book. We're gonna answer some of your questions. First, I'm gonna give sort of a brief intro to the book. I think, honestly, there's no better way to introduce this book
than just to read the first couple of lines, because it just is fantastic. I mean, George Orwell is an extraordinary writer. He writes with actual clarity. One of the things I really appreciate about Orwell is that he's not hiding the ball at all. He's not attempting to be obscure. He's not attempting to play around with language. He's just going to give it to you straight.
It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13. So right away, you know you're in a different world in which everything is going to be changed, the facts are going to be subsumed to something different.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of victory mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. And so you're immediately immersed in Winston Smith's gritty world. This is not going to be a positive future.
This is not going to be a place with gleaming towers and wonderful flying cars or anything. This is going to be a very dark and gritty place. And the first thing that we notice is Big Brother is watching you. This giant poster of Big Brother, who clearly is described in the way that Stalin is described. He's a mustached figure with these piercing eyes, and he's constantly watching.
And this is the constant theme of Big Brother. If you actually look at all of the covers for 1984 over the course of its publication history, nearly all of them look like this one. Nearly all of them have a human eye on them because the basic idea, of course, is that a state that is omnipotent and omnipresent can twist you into something that is not you.
And that is the real danger, a state that is so in control of everything surrounding you that you don't even have the ability to think anymore. You don't have the ability to be anymore. And then, of course, there are the three big slogans that are introduced on page 16 in this particular edition. This, I believe, is the Signet Classics edition.
The three slogans of the party, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. In a moment, I'm going to go through what each of those means. First, I kind of wanted to go through a little bit of the iconography that has been associated with 1984 that's become so much a part of how we think about 1984. Of course, you all remember this commercial, right?
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