Every Move You make Every Breath you take
The air in the country is changing. It is a hard thing to see, but you feel it in the way people move and the way they stay quiet. It is the feeling of a hunt where everyone is the prey.
First, there is the watching. They call it surveillance. It is in the glass in your hand and the glass on the buildings. The telescreens do not blink. They watch you eat and they watch you sleep and they watch you work. It is a clean kind of watching, efficient and cold. There are microphones in the places where people used to talk. Now, they do not talk. They look at the ground and they keep their hands in their pockets.
Then there is the policing of the mind. The Thinkpol do not always need to break down your door. They are already inside. You think a thought that is not the right thought—a thoughtcrime—and you feel the fear. It is a cold fear that sits in the stomach. You learn to kill the thought before it breathes. You do it because you want to live. It is a hollow way to live, but it is a way.
They take the words and they shave them down. They call it Newspeak. It is a language made to make the world small. If there are no words for freedom, then no man can be free. You learn Doublethink. You hold two ideas that are not the same and you tell yourself they are the same. It is a trick of the mind. It is a way to stay safe when the regime is heavy.
The trend is there, growing like weeds in a field no one cares for. It is a fascist thing, and it is very quiet.
