Part
Two
Chapter
9
Winston
was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It
had come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have
not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. He felt
that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light
through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him
by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure
of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified.
His overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet,
even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made
his joints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone
else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally
nothing to do, no Party work of any description, until tomorrow
morning. He could spend six hours in the hiding-place and another
nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked
up a dingy street in the direction of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping
one eye open for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that
this afternoon there was no danger of anyone interfering with
him. The heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumped against
his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down
the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he had
now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened,
nor even looked at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches,
the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films,
the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets,
the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of
tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns -- after
six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax
and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium
that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian
war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of
the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces
-- at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was
not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
Eurasia was an ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place.
Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere
at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston
was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London
squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the
white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The
square was packed with several thousand people, including a block
of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies.
On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small
lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull
over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd.
A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped
the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous
at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his
head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth
an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,
rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda,
unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible
to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened.
At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the
voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring
that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage
yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been
proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried
on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's
hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing
altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was
saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said,
a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was
at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion.
The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were
all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It
was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There
was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls,
banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed
prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting
the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two
or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the
neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free
hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech.
One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting
from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that
the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the
speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence,
not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.
But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was
during the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn
down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the
shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, I think you've dropped your brief-case.'
He took the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking. He knew
that it would be days before he had an opportunity to look inside
it. The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight
to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three
hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The
orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to
their posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war
with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five
years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all
kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs
-- all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive
was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department
intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia,
or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.
The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes
that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone
in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four,
with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought
up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals
consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys
by attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off
for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear
of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching,
it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered
the desk like a snowdrift, half burying the speakwrite and overflowing
on to the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them
into a neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst
of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often
it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any
detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even
the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the
war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles
needed wiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some
crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse
and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish.
In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by
the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every
stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious
as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect.
On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed
down. For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube;
then one more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the
same time the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret
sigh went through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never
be mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any
human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with
Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly
announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till tomorrow
morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing the
book, which had remained between his feet while he worked
and under his body while he slept, went home, shaved himself,
and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water was barely
more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the
stair above Mr Charrington's shop. He was tired, but not sleepy
any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove
and put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia would arrive presently:
meanwhile there was the book. He sat down in the sluttish
armchair and undid the straps of the brief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title
on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages
were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the
book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title-page
ran:
THE
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein
Winston
began reading:
Chapter
I.
Ignorance
is Strength.
Throughout
recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High,
the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways,
they have borne countless different names, and their relative
numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied
from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never
altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable
changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as
a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it
is pushed one way or the other.
The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...
Winston
stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that
he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no
telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance
over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer
air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated
the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no
sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper
into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss,
it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of
which one knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every
word, he opened it at a different place and found himself at Chapter
III. He went on reading:
Chapter
III.
War
is Peace.
The
splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an
event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle
of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia
and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three
existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively
in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit
after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between
the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others
they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general
they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of
the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from
Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas,
the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia,
and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the
others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China
and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and
a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently
at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War,
however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that
it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a
warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy
one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided
by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that
either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards
it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary,
war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and
such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction
of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners
which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon
as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and
not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves
very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists,
and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there
is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the
average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses
which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of
civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption
goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause
a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character.
More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed
in their order of importance. Motives which were already present
to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth
century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized
and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war -- for in spite of
the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the
same war -- one must realize in the first place that it is impossible
for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be
definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They
are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable.
Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width
of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and
industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer,
in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment
of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption
are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was
a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition
for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In
any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can
obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries.
In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war
for labour power. Between the frontiers of the super-states, and
not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a
rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville,
Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the
population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated
regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are
constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls
the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly
changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment
by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes
of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and
some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber
which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively
expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve
of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or
the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian
Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds
of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants
of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves,
pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended
like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments,
to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn
out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely.
It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond
the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow
back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern
shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and
the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania
or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia
and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers
lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely unihabited
and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly
even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state
always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited
peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's
economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever
they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging
a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another
war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of
continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist,
the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains
itself, would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles
of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and
not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is
to use up the products of the machine without raising the general
standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century,
the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods
has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human
beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial
processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today
is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that
existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary
future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the
early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably
rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic
world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of
the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and
technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed
natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed
to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long
series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and
technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought,
which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a
whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years
ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices,
always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage,
have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely
stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties
have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent
in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine
first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people
that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent
for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used
deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy,
and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And
in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort
of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes
impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living
standards of the average human being very greatly over a period
of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning
of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened
the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction --
of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked
short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom
and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane,
the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality
would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth
would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine
a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions
and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power
remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice
such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and
security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings
who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and
would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done
this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority
had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run,
a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty
and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers
about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing,
was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency
towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout
almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained
industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was
bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced
rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty
by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent
during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and
1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land
went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great
blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept
half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military
weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously
unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how
to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the
real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must
not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving
this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human
lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering
to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the
depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to
make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too
intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed,
their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour
power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating
Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would
build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as
obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody,
and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is
built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to
eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs
of the population. In practice the needs of the population are
always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic
shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on
as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured
groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general
state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges
and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member
of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless,
the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed
flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of
his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his
private motor-car or helicopter -- set him in a different world
from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer
Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged
masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that
of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh
makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same
time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger,
makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the
natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction,
but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle
it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world
by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling
them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and
then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic
and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is
concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is
unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the
morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is
expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within
narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous
and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred,
adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary
that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.
It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and,
since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether
the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state
of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the
Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved
in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher
up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely
in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are
strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary
for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item
of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the
entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being
waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such
knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.
Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical
belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously,
with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest
as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually
acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming
preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable
weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and
is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive
or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at
the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased
to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical
method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of
the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles
of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its
products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.
In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going
backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while
books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance
-- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage -- the empirical
approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims
of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and
to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent
thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party
is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will,
what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to
kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving
warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues,
this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a
mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary
minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones
of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock
therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist,
or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special
subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories
of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden
in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost
islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably
at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics
of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs,
more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable
armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for
soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as
to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of
disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others
strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the
soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent
of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities
such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands
of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes
and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization,
and none of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead
on the others. What is more remarkable is that all three powers
already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful
than any that their present researches are likely to discover.
Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the invention
for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the nineteen-forties,
and were first used on a large scale about ten years later. At
that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centres,
chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America.
The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries
that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society,
and hence of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement
was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three
powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store them
up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will
come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war has remained
almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters are more
used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largely
superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movable
battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress;
but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the
submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the
hand grenade are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters
reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles
of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions
of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which
involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation
is undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally.
The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to
themselves that they are following, is the same. The plan is,
by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes
of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling
one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship
with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years
as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded
with atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots;
finally they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so
devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be
time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power,
in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary
to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover,
no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the
Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken.
This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between
the superstates are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily
conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe,
or on the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push
its frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would
violate the principle, followed on all sides though never formulated,
of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer the areas that
used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be necessary
either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical
difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred million
people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly
on the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super-states.
It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should
be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with
war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the
moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners
apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen
of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge
of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners
he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and
that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed
world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred,
and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.
It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia,
or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers
must never be crossed by anything except bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood
and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three
super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing
philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism,
and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated
as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration
of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything
of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught
to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common
sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable,
and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable
at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the
same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing
by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the three super-states
not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage
by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict
they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn. And, as
usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously
aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated
to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that
the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile
the fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the
denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its
rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what
has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally
changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that
sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory
or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments
by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality.
All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the
world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage
any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long
as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result
generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat
had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy,
or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five,
but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make
four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later,
and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover,
to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the
past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened
in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always
coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised
today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of
sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was
probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could
be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be
dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military
necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable
facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches
that could be called scientific are still carried out for the
purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming,
and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency,
even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient
in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three
super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe
within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised.
Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday
life -- the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing,
to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows,
and the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure
and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all.
Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past,
the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who
has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.
The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the
Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers
from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient,
and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military
technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved,
they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous
wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain
ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they
are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal
it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods,
and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a
hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely
internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries,
although they might recognize their common interest and therefore
limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another,
and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day
they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged
by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object
of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but
to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war',
therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate
to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The
peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the
Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared
and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would
be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting
one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate
within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be
a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence
of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be
the same as a permanent war. This -- although the vast majority
of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense -- is
the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.
Winston
stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket
bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden
book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude
and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the
tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of
the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The
book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense
it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction.
It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him
to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of
a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more
systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are
those that tell you what you know already. He had just turned
back to Chapter I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair
and started out of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown
tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was
more than a week since they had seen one another.
'I've got the book,' he said as they disentangled themselves.
'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest, and
almost immediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make the
coffee.
They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed
for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it
worth while to pull up the counterpane. From below came the familiar
sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the flagstones. The
brawny red-armed woman whom Winston had seen there on his first
visit was almost a fixture in the yard. There seemed to be no
hour of daylight when she was not marching to and fro between
the washtub and the line, alternately gagging herself with clothes
pegs and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down
on her side andseemed to be already on the point of falling asleep.
He reached out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and
sat up against the bedhead.
'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the Brotherhood
have to read it.'
'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it aloud. That's
the best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.'
The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or
four hours ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees
and began reading:
Chapter
I.
Ignorance
is Strength.
Throughout
recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High,
the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways,
they have borne countless different names, and their relative
numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied
from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never
altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable
changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as
a gyroscope will always return to equilibnum, however far it is
pushed one way or the other.
'Julia, are you awake?' said Winston.
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous.'
He continued reading:
The
aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim
of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle
is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they
have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low
that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently
conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish
all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be
equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in
its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods
the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there
always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves
or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then
overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by
pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice.
As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust
the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves
become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from
one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle
begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never
even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would
be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been
no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline,
the average human being is physically better off than he was a
few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners,
no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre
nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change
has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern
had become obvious to many observers. There then rose schools
of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and
claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human
life. This doctrine, of course, had always had its adherents,
but in the manner in which it was now put forward there was a
significant change. In the past the need for a hierarchical form
of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High. It
had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests,
lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had
generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary
world beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling
for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice,
and fraternity. Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood
began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions of
command, but merely hoped to be so before long. In the past the
Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and
then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was
overthrown. The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny
beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth
century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching
back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected
by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism
that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing
liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new
movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc
in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is
commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating
unfreedom and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew
out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service
to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest
progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum
swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As usual, the High
were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the
High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be
able to maintain their position permanently.
The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of
historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense,
which had hardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical
movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so;
and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal,
underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth
century, human equality had become technically possible. It was
still true that men were not equal in their native talents and
that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some
individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need
for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In
earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable
but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With
the development of machine production, however, the case was altered.
Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different
kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at
different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point
of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power,
human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but
a danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and
peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly
easy to believe it. The idea of an earthly paradise in which men
should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and
without brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands
of years. And this vision had had a certain hold even on the groups
who actually profited by each historical change. The heirs of
the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed
in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech,
equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their
conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth
decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political
thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited
at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political
theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy
and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that
set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned,
in some cases for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial,
the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture
to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation
of whole populations -- not only became common again, but were
tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves
enlightened and progressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions,
and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc
and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories.
But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally
called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century,
and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the
prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would
control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy
was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians,
trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers,
journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose
origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades
of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by
the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government.
As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were
less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power,
and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more
intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal.
By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the
past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were
always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content
to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and
to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even
the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern
standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no
government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.
The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate
public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process
further. With the development of television, and the technical
advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously
on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen,
or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching,
could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the
police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other
channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing
not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete
uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first
time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society
regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the
new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct
but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long
been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.
Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed
jointly. The so-called 'abolition of private property' which took
place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the
concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but
with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead
of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party
owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively,
the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything,
and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. In the years following
the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position
almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as
an act of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if
the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow:
and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories,
mines, land, houses, transport -- everything had been taken away
from them: and since these things were no longer private property,
it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew
out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology,
has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme;
with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic
inequality has been made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper
than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can
fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs
so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it
allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being,
or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern.
These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of
them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard
against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately
the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class
itself.
After the middle of the present century, the first danger had
in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide
the world is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable
through slow demographic changes which a government with wide
powers can easily avert. The second danger, also, is only a theoretical
one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never
revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they
are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never
even become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic
crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now
permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations
can and do happen without having political results, because there
is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As for the
problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society
since the development of machine technique, it is solved by the
device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which is also
useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From
the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine
dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed,
power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism
in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational.
It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both
of the directing group and of the larger executive group that
lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs
only to be influenced in a negative way.
Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it
already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex
of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and
all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory,
every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness,
all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and
inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on
the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably
sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable
uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in
which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function
is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions
which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards
an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party, its
numbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per
cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes
the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the
brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below
that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the
proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. In the
terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for
the slave population of the equatorial lands who pass constantly
from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary
part of the structure.
In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary.
The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the
Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination,
taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination,
or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes,
South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest
ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always
drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania
do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population
ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and its
titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except
that English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official
language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not
held together by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine.
It is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified,
on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is
far less to-and-fro movement between the different groups than
happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age. Between
the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange,
but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from
the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party
are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, in practice,
are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among
them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply
marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state
of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of
principle. The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word.
It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as
such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people
at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire
new generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the crucial
years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a
great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist,
who had been trained to fight against something called 'class
privilege' assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent.
He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be
physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies
have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such
as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands
of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son
inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a
certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling
group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors.
The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with
perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important,
provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that
characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique
of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society
from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move
towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians
nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue
from generation to generation and from century to century, working,
breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but
without the power of grasping that the world could be other than
it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial
technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but,
since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important,
the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions
the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference.
They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no
intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the
smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject
can be tolerated.
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the
Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that
he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting,
in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and
without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does
is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour
towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when
he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic
movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only
any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small,
any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly
be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected.
He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever. On the
other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly
formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts
and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally
forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments,
and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which
have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of
persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future.
A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions,
but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded
of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without
laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a
person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker),
he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what
is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an
elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping
itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite,
and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think
too deeply on any subject whatever.
A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no
respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous
frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph
over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom
of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying
life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices
as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly
induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance
by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest
stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children,
is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means
the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold
of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping
analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding
the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of
being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable
of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short,
means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the
contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's
own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over
his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that
Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But
since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is
not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment
flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is blackwhite.
Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory
meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently
claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.
Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say
that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it
means also the ability to believe that black is white,
and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that
one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous
alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought
which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak
as doublethink.
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of
which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary
reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates
present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison.
He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from
foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe
that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average
level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the
more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the
need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely
that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly
brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the
Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine
or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change
one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness.
If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is
the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy.
And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered.
Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day falsification
of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary
to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage
carried out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past
events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive
only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever
the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is
in full control of all records and in equally full control of
the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever
the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the
past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance.
For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at
the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different
past can ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often
happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several
times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession
of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been
different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control
of the past depends above all on the training of memory. To make
sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the
moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to
remember that events happened in the desired manner. And
if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with
written records, then it is necessary to forget that one
has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other
mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party members,
and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox.
In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality control'. In
Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink
comprises much else as well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must
be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with
reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies
himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious,
or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but
it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling
of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the
very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is
to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose
that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while
genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw
it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny
the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account
of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably necessary.
Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise
doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one
is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases
this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one
leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink
that the Party has been able -- and may, for all we know, continue
to be able for thousands of years -- to arrest the course of history.
All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they
ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid
and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances,
and were overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made
concessions when they should have used force, and once again were
overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness
or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party
to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions
can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis
could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to
rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the
sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a
belief in one's own infallibility with the Power to learn from
past mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink
are those who invented doublethink and know that it is
a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have
the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are
furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater
the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent,
the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact that
war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social
scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational
are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these
people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to
and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning
is a matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that
a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing
the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the
same manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers
whom we call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of
the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies
of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable
of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is
in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that
the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in
most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar
linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with ignorance, cynicism
with fanaticism -- is one of the chief distinguishing marks of
Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions
even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party
rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement
originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism.
It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries
past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one
time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason.
It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and
it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the
sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries
by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their
deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns
itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry
of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.
These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from
ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be
retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle
be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the
High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently
-- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have almost
ignored. It is: why should human equality be averted? Supposing
that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described,
what is the motive for this huge, accurately planned effort to
freeze history at a particular moment of time?
Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen, the mystique
of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon doublethink.
But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned
instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink,
the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary
paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists...
Winston
became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound.
It seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some time
past. She was lying on her side, naked from the waist upwards,
with her cheek pillowed on her hand and one dark lock tumbling
across her eyes. Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.
'Julia'.
No answer.
'Julia, are you awake?'
No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it carefully
on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.
He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He
understood how; he did not understand why. Chapter
I, like Chapter III, had not actually told him anything that he
did not know, it had merely systematized the knowledge that he
possessed already. But after reading it he knew better than before
that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one,
did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and
if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were
not mad. A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through
the window and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun
on his face and the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him
a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was
all right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,'
with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.
.. .... ..
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