1984 is a particularly shallow book. It borders on being so simplistic as to cater to a teen equivalent crowd intellectually. It'd be deep for a 12 year old reading it for the first time, maybe. It's a cartoonish dystopia, laughably absurd in structure; although it gets his points across, which is obviously important. Orwell paints the kind of fantasy dystopia one might envision if one knew absolutely nothing about totalitarianism firsthand. Its popularity over the decades owes primarily to being shallow, simplistic. People that otherwise can't or won't approach complex ideas can read 1984 and get it. It's also not very original, even Ayn Rand took a shot at the premise a decade before Orwell with her book Anthem (1984 is a better book however).