1984

what is perhaps the most grotesque sign of the desensitization that has taken place in Oceania that the reader notices Syme's conversation with Winston?

Its from the novel 1984 by George Orwell.

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Syme and Winston have a conversation about what Syne is working on. Syme is quite excited about the prospect of the English language being shortened into an emotionally void set of word-phrases,

"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten."

Essentially there will be no way of expressing the individual self. Everything will be desensitised to its most base vacuous form. Syme, of course, is much too excited about this. When Winston looks at Syme he sees a "dead man".

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1984