There's a tweet thread on someone's journey with this that you might dig. Your comment reminded me of it:

"REALITY DISTORTION FIELDS & the HUMILITY OF ACCEPTING YOU'RE BEING INFLUENCED" https://twitter.com/CurziRose/status/1477788648812662784

This is the secondary theme of 1984, that gets lost because of the cultural relevance of the primary theme (govt surveillance, authoritarianism etc).

O'Brien, Winston Smith's foil, is presented as charismatic, rebellious seeming and importantly both smarter and better educated than the protagonist. The lesson I drew from this as a high schooler, was that someone can be all those things and still wrong, malicious, nefarious. That our values can be better guides than what seems like incontrovertible logic. And that following rationality blindly without empathy or heuristics (common sense), can lead to utter horror (the Stalinist purges that Orwell was explicitly referencing, and of course Nazism).