Don’t you think the future looks pretty bleak if we read Nineteen Eighty-Four? The Orwellian vision is so dark and horrible; most of us couldn’t bear to watch the film. And even though some of us weren’t able to follow the film, we were all able to see the struggles that Winston Smith faced, with being watched by ‘Big Brother’ 24/7.
Who is ‘Big Brother’? It’s just the idea of your own big brother looking out for you. But in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell uses it as an idea of surveillance and someone always watching you to the point in which a person loses control of every aspect of life and the so called ‘Big Brother’ takes control of what you say and think.
Melbourne itself isn’t at the stage that Orwell created in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But it is on its way, considering in the city they have just added more surveillance cameras. Which, yes they might be there for our own safety and protection, but does everyone want to be watched 24/7 without knowing it? It is also adding more greenhouse gases to the world, destroying the beautiful environment that we have. Maybe Orwell’s vision for Nineteen Eighty-Four is starting to come true.
Now that our government has taken away our privacy, what’s next? Creating the perfect person is most probably what they plan on doing with genetic engineering. Genetic engineering was created with good intentions of helping partners with a family history of chronic disease have children that don’t have to suffer what they had. But when scientists released this data, people’s first thoughts were to create their own version of a ‘perfect child’, in altering their genetic make-up to change their appearance. This would end up leading to no individuality, and for those children whose parents didn’t genetically alter them to be the excluded and discriminated against.
This seems oddly familiar, most probably because this is what happens in Gattaca to Vincent who is titled as an ‘invalid’. This society created in Gattaca is depicted by genoism, the discrimination of your genetic code. But as Eugene said “There is no gene for fate” meaning that even if a child is created genetically perfect, does not mean that they cannot make mistakes and change the course of their life due to small life choices.
If genetically altering your