Unpopular Opinion
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I haven't read the book in a while, no. But I'm not above disagreeing with Orwell.
I just do not believe it works this way.
Think about the implications of this: how does our language have this concept of identity now when it didn't used to?
What I see Orwell gesturing at in these paragraphs you've shown me is an intentionally poor education. A poor vocabulary would be a component of that, an important vector, but it's not of the same kind as the colloquial usage of 'literally'.
What you're suggesting (charitably, I think) is that the corrosion of 'objective' and 'subjective' leads to a person's inability to distinguish lies, not to be able to rediscover the concept—and rediscover it quite easily, I might add—which I find ridiculous. You don't need the word 'lies' to identify that something that was said is not something that was, even if you have trouble expressing it.
Or more to the point, people who believe that freedom is slavery do not believe so because they think those words mean the same thing. Either, they have never been taught what freedom is and don't care to invent it, or they have been convinced that freedom is only the power to choose sin intentionally, which is a sentimental lesson, not a linguistic one.
The only thing that bothers me is the idea that words carry this moralistic baggage themselves, or the vague suggestion that a person unaware of the Orwellian state could still be led by the phrase "freedom is slavery" into the same lobotimized world view that its people have.
I mean you can think what you want, or even write a dissertation about it and have it published. But what I'm saying is established fact among people who dedicate their lives to this.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379404191_The_Semiotics_of_Newspeak_Language_Power_and_Thought_Control_in_Orwell's_1984
https://journal.ijarms.org/index.php/ijarms/article/view/757
https://www.academia.edu/721095/Orwell_and_the_Power_of_Language
And here's Orwell himself defending his use of language as a means of control in the novel:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
This last one is actually really interesting, I recommend reading the entire thing.
Oh, it's that essay. I love that essay.
However, Orwell does not actually make the case for this in it:
He certainly makes the case for a lack of intellectual hygiene, like having bad posture, leading to a lack of critical thinking, or clarity, but that's not something I disagree with.
Think of it like this, okay: We haven't invented wave-particle duality yet and I think, like a stupid person, that light is only a wave. How do you explain to me that a person, tragically, does not know what "literally" means, and so also cannot differentiate embellishments? Like, how does that process happen in the mind?
When a mom tells her daughter she was so hungry she ate "literally 50 cheeseburgers," what is stopping this person from knowing about exaggerations? Do they forget? Do they never learn it? What is the actual mechanism?
In 1984, the answer I'm looking for would be the police.
1984 did feature people afraid to use their imagination for anything, but that was not solely the product of language. Some of it was the electric chair.
I just don't like the confusion of Orwell's ideas here—and he might disagree with me, smack me with a ruler and scold me for my lack of 'gerunds'—this confusion of Orwell's ideas with the very normal tides of our linguistic ocean. "Literally" has not actually gone anywhere.