This is exactly what Big Brother did, they took the people of Oceania and brainwashed them. They forced them to do things they didn't want to do. He forced them to believe what Big Brother wanted them to believe. They punished them for thinking, reading and writing. Big Brother has turned citizens into robots. The adults in this society have been brainwashed, the children have been completely manipulated to think exactly the way Big Brother wanted them to think and needed them to think. Starving, beating, torturing people for doing normal everyday things that Big Brother was against was a strictly dehumanizing act of these citizens. When an individual is unable to think or act on his own he is not human but only operates under the control of another. So the citizens of Oceania were not human at all, rather they were players in a game like Big Brother was