=Because 1984 was a novel first and published 35 years before the real 1984 came around everyone could joke how much the real 1984 seemed like the novel written 35 years before & that encouraged people not to take what was happening very seriously & to unconsciously think of the reality of the creeping everyday totalitarianism that was steadily erasing their freedom & privacy as a fiction since they'd already read about it in a novel & therefore it was not to be taken seriously & if you did you sounded like some sort of crank who believed stories they read in books or something they saw in a movie was real.=