To George Orwell, by far that century's most influential dystopian prophet, technology was a means to an end and the end could be found in developments in international power politics. The danger lay in the rise of autocracy, whether from the right of the political spectrum or the left — Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is anti-totalitarian rather than exclusively anti-Communist — the creation of anti-democratic elites and the suborning of large amounts of the population to what was presented as a collective will, but in reality was nothing more than a kind of concentrated oligarchism.
These tendencies, Orwell believed, were exacerbated by the principle-political consequence of the Second World War. The division of the world into three ceaselessly contending landmasses — Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia — in Nineteen Eighty-Four mirrors the negotiations of the war-time Tehran conference (1943), in which the allied leaders — Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin — effectively divided up the planet into areas of influence and established the foundations of the post-war world, overriding questions of sovereignty and local self-determination in favour of the territorial bloc. The moral implications of these geographical divides were profound. The nations subsumed into them might find themselves described as parliamentary democracies or as liberty-suppressing one-party states, but at every turn their autonomy was ripe to be overridden by the demands of a collective agenda.
— Read on engelsbergideas.com/essays/george-orwells-idea-of-civilisation/
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