Why does Winston feel that the man sitting next to him in the cafeteria is not a real human being but some kind of dummy?

The man in
the cafeteria at 's workplace, who is about 30, is sitting in such a way that the light hits the
lenses of his glasses so that his eyes are obscured. He looks as if he has "blank
discs" behind the glasses. However, the most dehumanized aspect of him is his speech: he
goes on and on, endlessly pouring forth language, but Winston can't distinguish most of the
words:

Just once Winston caught a phrase"complete and
final elimination of Goldsteinism"jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one
piece, like a line of type cast solid.

The man is
frightening because he talks and talks and but says nothing of substance. He is merely stringing
together phrases of propaganda that have been brainwashed into him by the state. He is saying
words without any real meaning, and he certainly isn't thinking or evaluating what he is
saying.

One of the things that I love about is that
this man, who sounds like a robot ("dummy" today might be an offensive word to the
deaf, thoughdoesn't mean it that way) is a real type: Orwell nailed it. Every time I read this
passage, I think of a man I sat next to on plane in 2006: he was loudly insisting to the man
beside him that there would be no real estate crash (just before the great recession, which was
caused by the housing bubble). There was just no penetrating his mind with critical thought. He
was like Orwell's robotic man, simply spouting propaganda that didn't make any sense and wasn't
connected to rational thought processes, and it seems to me that while our situation isn't
Orwell's dystopia, many aspects of the book can be related back to our own lives in ways that
are worth contemplating.