"1984" is a wonderful book and a landmark of modern literature. I would say however, that, at least in the West, perhaps due to that book's influence, we have actually move far more in the opposite direction, raising the God of the Market and the Cult of the Individual to create a world where forms of shared moral and social values are almost viewed with suspicion. This IMO, creates its own problems, and leads to the alienation of the individual from what it is to be fully human, and a metaphorical "return of the repressed" in the from of the rise of religious and ideological fundamentalism, and identity politics in general. I think Kafka is closer, i.e. the dehumanising "Iron Cage" of bureaucracy, rather than the explicit use of power to dominate.
"It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt." ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
