To Orwell Today,

Dear Jackie,

Is the unemployment crisis Orwellian?

As the author of IN THE YEAR TWENTY-FOURTEEN, I never once suspected that this country would go so far as to favor cheap labor AT ANY COST -- even the cost of NOT hiring its own citizens. Being unemployed for going on six months now, I am shocked and appalled that nearly one in ten Americans is out of a job. Unemployment figures are in the double digits in some areas.

What I'm wondering is: what does Big Brother plan to do with us people who have been forced out of work due to government budget cuts, outsourcing, downsizing or "restructuring"? It's inefficient, stupid, and counterproductive to keep jobs OUT of the USA and IN foreign countries -- unless you are more concerned about profits than people. Orwell would rage against this.

In the name of true freedom,
Amy Walker

Greetings Amy,

In "1984" Orwell explains why BIG BROTHER wants everyone out of work:

9. Keeping Masses Down (...It was clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society....For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance....From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say; is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.... The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and were kept half alive by State charity....)

15.Life in Oceania (...The world of 1984 was a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people used to look forward.... Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to....Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?....He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side. And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever?...)

It's also explained in the 70s song BYE, BYE AMERICAN PIE

All the best,
Jackie Jura

IN THE YEAR 2014