"A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street. In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting, jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons. Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed."
The reason there are no private cars in Orwell's dystopia is the same reason there are none in North Korea, for the same mix of ideological and economic factors.
And Orwell was an Englishman writing in bombed-out, austerity-ridden, digging-itself-out-from-an-apocalypse England. Even today, they don't have the car culture that we have here, and I've seen a lot of pictures of horse and carts wending their way around the ruins of post-war London. I'm sure there were plenty of cars around, driven by dignitaries and princes and whatsorts, but I don't think they were used daily to get to work by your typical file clerk, or your typical village farmer, etc.
It wouldn't even have occurred to him to write about a character's relationship with their car, or their even owning a personal car that wasn't tied to their profession (milk truck, taxicab, chauffeur), anymore than he would write about their tractor if the characters were agrarians; as much as the industrial revolution was in the distant past, the age of ubiquitous personal technology and obscene consumption had yet to be born.
I am reminded of something from way deep in my brain's cellar, some sort of quasi-fascist screed by a Futurist artist or writer from the 30s about a marvelous "race-automobile" or something, but it was something completely different from the 50s-diner drive-in-movie car culture that is the background mythology we live with. More of a "let it all burn and bring the future forth!" kind of nihilist thing. I tried to google it but this was literally a class I took in high school in the 80s, sorry.
Anyways, 1984 is an incredibly pessimistic novel about the future he saw coming, so any of his characters enjoying the sort of expansive freedom that I have, where I could literally walk out my door right now and be thousands of miles from here in a couple of days with nobody saying boo about it... even if it was a story of a personal struggle against a totalitarian state, it would be a different story than one where he runs the risk of being denounced by name in front of his entire society if he doesn't work hard enough at his morning exercise under the state's watchful eye. One that it would have been fairly magically prescient on his part to be able to extrapolate from his lived experience.
Great post on this: “Why Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car”
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/why-agatha-christie-cou...
Option 1: In a world of severe rationing, cars are such a luxury item that they're rare or nonexistent.
Option 2: Personal transportation represents a level of freedom and autonomy that is not supportive of the goals of The Party, where employment and living space are centrally planned anyway. Thus they aren't part of the world. Trucks, rail, and so on serve the Party's interest, so they do exist.
He also mentions trucks when Winston was young and had to scrounge for food and would get some grain that fell off a truck driving on bumpy roads.
They do talk about tubes and Winston takes the train to the country.
So I'd say the world Orwell imagined didn't have many cars
(Edit, I see when I was typing, idlewords also remembered another passage about trucks)
1.) George Orwell didn’t think private cars would catch on in any significant way. He did write this in the 1940s so that’s a possibility.
2.) He wanted to convey that the government controlled everything, even transportation.
3.) The government wants to control attention so they can broadcast propaganda (and expect rapt attention) at will.
4.) George Orwell wrote scenes with cars, they were poorly written and didn’t make an edited manuscript.
https://youtu.be/8uK5y8YjJTM?t=309
One from 1952, less of a big overview though.
In fact, that type of mobility would have been considered a threat to "national security". Everyone would live near where they work, and the food would be rationed and delivered to where it was needed. Everyone would provide only the necessary things in service to the state.
Fun fact, for the majority of the year I don't travel further than 5km from where I live. And I don't own a car. Yet, I live in a democratic society. I have all the basic necessities within 2km, and everything else can be "delivered". We're only halfway there!
For the majority of the world, a car is a luxury and not always necessary. In the US, they built their infrastructure around having a car and thus, a car is necessary.
In 1949, a society where everyone has their own car would have been seen as a utopian vision of the future. We see it differently today, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
I think O'Brien says every member of the inner party has either a car or a helicopter. It's also stated that Oceania has a deliberate policy of discouraging technological advancement, except in the fields of military arms and mind control.
The "generally envisioned future[s] of the 40's," were optimistic, 1984 is an extremely pessimistic dystopia. Once down to deliberately engineer grinding poverty for its population.
At least that’s my interpretation.
Communist countries like the Soviet Union or Poland were at $3K. The level of Kenya, Syria, and Nepal today. $1K poorer than Bangladesh now which comes in at $4k per person.
Just soviet union: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1073160/ussr-gdp-per-cap...
The rest: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2...
https://www.newsweek.com/will-why-liberals-love-trains-68597
As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. […] In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. […] 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.
[…]
By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter—set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’.
[…]
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.
———
This implies that only member of the Inner Party have cars, and that inequality is seen as beneficial, and general access to technology as detrimental. This would explain why there are only few cars.
There are two more mentions of cars with reference to the past:
———
His [Big Brother's] exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides.
[…]
And at the same time [before the Revolution] there were a very few people, only a few thousands—the capitalists, they were called—who were rich and powerful. They owned everything that there was to own. They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they rode about in motor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne, they wore top hats——’
That said, it makes sense a Stalinist regime would permit its ordinary subjects neither the private ownership of property nor the liberty of physical movement embodied in having a car. As in the USSR, the nomenklatura would have limousines and drivers, and everyone else would take the train or walk.
“Why aren’t there any pringles references in Star Wars?”
It’s fiction, the author does what they want, and it doesn’t matter beyond supporting the story. It’s not like Orwell was after a “hard world-build”. You get that, right? He was trying to express opinions on the danger of allowing too much power to be centralized with one entity.
In some ways the last 60 years of freedom of motorized personal travel in the western world have been a brief anomaly. The aggressive elites actions to control everyone and everything by electrification only plus digital centralized controls is greatly helped by people experiencing climate change anxiety urging every faster restriction, ironically highly Orwellian.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2091351/under-hood-big-brothe...