When we meet Winston, he is living in what seems to be a futuristic version of London England. Although in a different world than our own it is somehow eerily similar. The geography is the same in 1984, but the people are very different. INGSOC or English socialism is the form of government, it is a farcry from Socialism, but is extremely tyrannical and as the book, 1984 by George Orwell, goes on we find the filthy way INGSOC goes around controlling the people.
The society Winston lives in practically worships their leader, Big Brother, and leans on everything he says as absolute truth, but whether Big Brother is a person or an ideal is a fuzzy introspective look at the entire government. The society is based of lies that the government distributes like facts, this propaganda has enslaved the people they call party members. The party members are people who work happily under INGSOC and never question a word they are told, robots trapped in human bodies.
Individuality is illegal in 1984 and punishable by death, as is thinking for yourself, and just about anything else covered in the American Bill of Rights. The thought police kidnap and murder people who are even rumored to have disobeyed. Throughout all these obstacles, our fearless hero Winston starts a diary and writes things he is thinking or feeling. His actions are unheard of at this time in Airstrip One/ London.
This terrible place and time Winston lives in does not remind me so much of how we live today, but the government is very similar in structure to those of North Korea, China, and Cuba, along with other countries strangled by dictatorship. The way the silence individuality, and control the information their people obtain, they are very similar to INGSOC.
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