Nineteen
Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its
futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book
offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a
totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find
individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of
modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the
language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of
hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks
among the most terrifying novels ever written.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
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
briefcase 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 Easta- sia 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, halfburying 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 etemity. 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 centuary
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
superstates 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
humand 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 and seemed 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 halfhearted 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 twentyfour 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 fcr 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 good-
thinker), 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. When he woke it was with the sensation of
having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him
that it was only twenty-thirty. He lay dozing for a while; then
the usual deep-lunged singing struck up from the yard below;
'It
was only an 'opeless fancy,
It
passed like an Ipril dye,
But
a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They
'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'
The
driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard it all over
the place. It had outlived the Hate Song. Julia woke at the sound, stretched
herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.
'I'm
hungry,' she said. 'Let's make some more coffee. Damn! The stove's gone out and
the water's cold.' She picked the stove up and shook it. 'There's no oil in
it.'
'We
can get some from old Charrington, I expect.'
'The
funny thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to put my clothes on,' she
added. 'It seems to have got colder.'
Winston
also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable voice sang on:
'They
sye that time 'eals all things,
They
sye you can always forget;
But
the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They
twist my 'eart-strings yet!'
As
he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window. The sun
must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any
longer. The flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had
the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue
between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and
uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers,
and more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or
was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across
to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy
figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her
thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded,
it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before
occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous
dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse
in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and
after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of
granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl
as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the
flower?
'She's
beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's
a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That
is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
He
held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee
her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That
was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to
mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had
only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many
children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her
momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had
suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and
then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing,
mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren,
over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The
mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of
the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into
interminable distance. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for
everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky
were also very much the same — everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of
thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one
another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost
exactly the same — people who had never learned to think but who were storing
up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day
overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having
read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be Goldstein's final
message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when
their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him,
Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be
a world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later
it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. The proles were
immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the
yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it
might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like
birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share
and could not kill.
'Do
you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the
edge of the wood?'
'He
wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to please himself. Not even
that. He was just singing.'
The
birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in
London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden
lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages
of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere
stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing,
toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race
of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs was the
future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they
kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make
four.
'We
are the dead,' he said.
'We
are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You
are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
They
sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see
the white all round the irises of Julia's eyes. Her face had turned a milky
yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply,
almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.
'You
are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
'It
was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
'It
was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain exactly where you are. Make no
movement until you are ordered.'
It
was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing except stand gazing
into one another's eyes. To run for life, to get out of the house before it was
too late — no such thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron
voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had been turned back,
and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering
the telescreen behind it.
'Now
they can see us,' said Julia.
'
Now we can see you,' said the voice. ' Stand out in the middle of the room.
Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one
another.'
They
were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia's body
shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own. He could just stop
his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond his control. There was a
sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. The yard seemed
to be full of men. Something was being dragged across the stones. The woman's
singing had stopped abruptly. There was a long, rolling clang, as though the
washtub had been flung across the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts
which ended in a yell of pain.
'The
house is surrounded,' said Winston.
'The
house is surrounded,' said the voice.
He
heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may as well say good-bye,' she
said.
'You
may as well say good-bye,' said the voice. And then another quite different
voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having
heard before, struck in; 'And by the way, while we are on the subject,
"Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off
your head"!'
Something
crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The head of a ladder had been
thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing
through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was
full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and
truncheons in their hands.
Winston
was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved. One thing alone
mattered; to keep still, to keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you!
A man with a smooth prize-fighter's jowl in which the mouth was only a slit
paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumb and
forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The feeling of nakedness, with one's hands
behind one's head and one's face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable.
The man protruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips
should have been, and then passed on. There was another crash. Someone had
picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the
hearth-stone.
The
fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake,
rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!
There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a violent kick on the
ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed his
fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. She was
thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath. Winston dared not turn his
head even by a millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within
the angle of his vision. Even in his terror it was as though he could feel the
pain in his own body, the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than
the struggle to get back her breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible,
agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet,
because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe. Then two of the
men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like
a sack. Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted,
with the eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that
was the last he saw of her.
He
stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their own
accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind. He
wondered whether they had got Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had done to
the woman in the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a
faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He noticed
that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light
seemed too strong. Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an
August evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the
time — had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really
it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he did not pursue the
thought further. It was not interesting.
There
was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr Charrington came into the room. The
demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something
had also changed in Mr Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the fragments
of the glass paperweight.
'Pick
up those pieces,' he said sharply.
A
man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly
realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the
telescreen. Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his
hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing
his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his
identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still recognizable,
but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, and
seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had
nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less
bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have
altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of
about five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his
life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.
2 comments:
Tell them to buy this book better
than you are posting this article.
Nobody is going to read because
it is too long.
STOP!Waste time the bloggers.
Time is valuable that anyone
can not buy.
Theary Seng is Khmer Democrat with a communism mind, and she will never consider others' opinions as important but herself. Your criticism injured her ego, but this woman does not understand how to market her product to the right people. She wastes the valuable spaces, and wastes her own times because no body who visits KI read it.
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