Speaker 1: Section twenty one of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell.
This s Leagamas recording may be freely distributed and adapted
for any purpose. Part three, Chapter three. There are three
stages in your reintegration, said O'Brien. There is learning, there
is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for
you to enter upon the second stage. As always, Winston
was lying flat on his back, but if late his
bonds were looser. They still held him to the bed,
but he could move his knees a little, and could
turn his head from side to side and raise his
arms from the elbow. The dial also had grown to
be less of a terror. He could evade its pangs
if he was quick witted enough. It was chiefly when
he showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they
got through a whole session without use of the dial.
He could not remember how many sessions there had been.
The whole process seemed to stretch out over a long
indefinite time, weeks possibly, and the intervals between the sessions
might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two.
As you lie there, said O'Brien, you have often wondered
you have even asked me why the ministry of love
should expend so much time and trouble on you. And
when you were free, you have puzzled by what was
essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of
the society you lived in, but not its underlying motives.
Do you remember writing in your diary? I understand how
I do not understand why it was when you thought
about why that you doubted your own sanity. You have
read the book Colstein's book, or parts of it, at least,
did it tell you anything that you did not know already?
You have read it, said Winston, I wrote it. That
is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book
is produced individually, as you know. Is it true what
it says as description? Yes? The program it sets forth
is nonsense, the secret accumulation of knowledge, a gradual spread
of enlightenment, ultimately a proletarian rebellion, the overthrow of the party.
You foresaw yourself that that was what it would say.
It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not
in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I
do not have to tell you the reason. You know
it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of
violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way
in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of
the Party is forever. Make that the starting point of
your thoughts. He came closer to the bed. Forever, he repeated,
And now let us get back to the question of
how and why. You understand well enough how the Party
maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling
to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power?
Go on, speak, he added, as Winston remained silent. Nevertheless,
Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A
feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him. The kin mad gleam
of enthusiasm had come back into O'Brien's face. He knew
in advance what O'Brien would say, that the Party did
not seek power for its own ends, but only for
the good of the majority. That it sought power because
men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could
not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be
ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger
than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom
and happiness, and that for the great bulk of mankind,
happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian
of the week, a dedicated sect doing evil that good
might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others.
The terrible thing, thought Winston. The terrible thing was that
when O'Brien said this, he would believe it. You could
see it in his face. O'Brien knew everything a thousand
times better than Winston. He knew what the world was
really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived,
and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there.
He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it
made no difference. All was justified by the ultimate purpose.
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who
is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a
fair hearing, and then simply persists in his lunacy. You
were ruling over us for our own good, he said, feebly.
You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves.
And therefore he started and almost cried out. A pang
of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien had pushed
the lever of the dial up to thirty five. That
was stupid, Winston, stupid, He said, you should know better
than to say a thing like that. He pulled the
lever back and continued, Now, I will tell you the
answer to my question. It is this, the party seeks
power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested
in the good of others. We are interested solely in power.
Not wealth or luxury, or long life or happiness. Only power,
pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently.
We are different from all the oligarchies of the past
in that we know what we are doing. All the others,
even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The
German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to
us in their methods, but they never had the courage
to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed,
that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time,
and that just round the corner they lay a paradise
where human beings would be free and equal. We are
not like that. We know that no one ever seizes
power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not
a means, It is an end. One does not establish
a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution. One makes
the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object
of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture.
The object of power is power. Now do you begin
to understand me? Winston was struck, as he had been
struck before, by the tiredness of O'Brien's face. It was
strong and fleshy and brutal. It was full of intelligence
and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt
himself helpless. But it was tired. There were partures under
the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheek bones. O'Brien
leaned over him, deliberately, bringing the worn face nearer. You
are thinking, he said, that my face is old and tired.
You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet
I am not even able to prevent the decay of
my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the
individual is only a cell. The weariness of the cell
is the vigor of the organism. Do you die when
you cut your finger nails? He turned away from the
bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand
in his pocket. We are the priests of power, he said,
God is power. But at present, power is only a word.
So far as you are concerned, it is time for
you to gather some idea of what power means. The
first thing you must realize is that power is collective.
The individual only has power in so far as he
ceases to be an individual. You know the party slogan,
freedom is slavery. Has it ever occurred to you that
it is reversible? Slavery is freedom alone free. The human
being is always defeated. It must be so, because every
human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest
of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission,
if he can escape from his identity, if he can
merge himself in the party so that he is the party,
then he is all powerful and immortal. The second thing
for you to realize is that power is power over
human beings, over the body, but above all, over the mind.
Power over matter, external reality as you would call it,
is not important. Already, our control over matter is absolute.
For a moment, Winston ignored the dial. He made a
violent effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and
merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully. But how can
you control matter? He burst out. You don't even control
the climate or the law of gravity, and there are disease, pain, death.
O'Bryan silenced him by a movement of his hand. We
control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside
the skull. You will learn by degrees Winston. There is
nothing that we could not do invisibility, levitation, anything. I
could float off this floor like a soap bubble if
I wish to. I do not wish to, because the
party does not wish it. You must get rid of
those nineteenth century ideas about the laws of nature. We
make the laws of nature, but you do not. You
are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia
and East Asia? You have not conquered them yet, unimportant.
We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if
we did not, what difference would it make. We can
shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world, But
the world itself is only a speck of dust, and
man is tiny, helpless. How long has he been in existence?
For millions of years the earth was uninhabited. Nonsense. The
earth is as old as we are. No older. How
could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.
But the rock are full of the bones of extinct animals,
mammoths and mastodons, and enormous reptiles, which lived here long
before man was ever heard of. Have you ever seen
those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth century biologists invented
them before man. There was nothing after man. If he
could come to an end, there would be nothing outside man.
There is nothing, but the whole universe is outside us.
Look at the stars. Some of them are a million
light years away. They are out of our reach forever.
What are the stars, said O'Brien indifferently. They are bits
of fire a few kilometers away. We could reach them
if we wanted to, or we could blot them out.
The Earth is the center of the universe. The Sun
and the stars go round it. Winston made another convulsive movement.
This time he did not say anything. O'Brien continued, as
though answering a spoken objection. For certain purposes, of course,
that is not true. When we knowavigate the ocean, or
when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient
to assume that the Earth goes round to the Sun
and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometers away.
But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond
us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars
can be near or distant according as we need them.
Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have
you forgotten? Double think? Winston shrank back upon the bed.
Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon.
And yet he knew, he knew that he was in
the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind.
Surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it
was false, had it not been exposed long ago as
a fallacy. There was even a name for it, which
he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched to the corners
of O'Brien's mouth as he looked down at him. I
told you, Winston, He said, that metaphysics is not your
strong point. The word you are trying to think of
his solypsism. But you are mistaken. This is not so olypsism,
collective solypsism, if you like. But that is a different thing,
in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,
he added, in a different tone. The real power, the
power we have to fight for night and day, is
not power over things, but over men. He paused, and
for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster
questioning a promising pupil. How does one man assert his
power over another Winston? Winston thought, by making him suffer,
he said, exactly, by making him suffer. Obedience is not
enough unless he is suffering. How can you be sure
that he is obeying your will and not his own.
Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in
tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again
in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin
to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?
It is the exact opposite of the stupid, hedonistic utopias
that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and
treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon,
A world which will grow not less but more merciless
as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be
progressed towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they
were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred.
In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph,
and self abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already
we are breaking down the habits of thought which have
survived from before the revolution. We have cut the links
between child and parent, and between man and man, and
between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife,
or a child, or a friend any longer. But in
the future there will be no wives and no friends.
Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as
one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will
be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality, like the
renewal of the ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm.
Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will
be no loyalty except loyalty towards the part. There will
be no love except the love of big brother. There
will be no laughter except the laugh of triumph over
a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature,
no science. When we are omnipotent, we shall have no
more need of science. There will be no distinction between
beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment
of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.
But always do not forget this, Winston. Always there will
be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always,
at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory,
the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a
boot stamping on a human face. Forever. He paused, as
though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to
shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He
could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen.
O'Brien went on, and remember that it is forever. The
face will always be there to be stamped upon the heretic,
the enemy of society will always be there so that
he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that
you have undergone since you have been in our hands,
all that will continue and worse. The espionage, the betrayals,
the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease.
It will be a world of terror as much as
a world of triumph. The more the party is powerful,
the less it will be tolerant. The weaker the opposition,
the tighter. The despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live forever.
Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed,
spat upon, and yet they will always survive. This drama
that I have played out with you during seven years
will be played out over and over again, generation after generation,
always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic
here at our mercies, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible,
and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling
to our feet of his own accord. That is the
world that we a preparing, Winston, A world of victory
after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph, an endless pressing, pressing,
pressing upon the nerve of power you are beginning. I
can see to realize what the world will be like.
But in the end you will do more than understand it.
You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. You can't, he said, weakly,
What do you mean by that remark? Winston? You could
not create such a world as you have just described.
It is a dream. It is impossible. Why it is impossible?
To found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty.
It would never endure. Why not, It would have no vitality,
it would disintegrate, it would commit suicide. Nonsense. You are
under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love.
Why should it be, And if it were, what difference
would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves
out fast, Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human
life till men are senile at thirty still, what difference
would it make? Can you not understand that the death
of the individual is not death, The party is immortal?
As usual? The voice had batted Winston into helplessness. Moreover,
he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement,
O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could
not keep silent, feebly, without arguments, With nothing to support
him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien had said,
he returned to the attack. I don't know, I don't care.
Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you, Life will
defeat you. We control life, Winston at all its levels.
You are imagining that there is something called human nature
which will be outraged by what we do and will
turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are
infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old
idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and
overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. Their help,
like the animals, humanity is the party. The others are outside, irrelevant.
I don't care. In the end, they will beat you
sooner or later. They will see you for what you are,
and then they will tear you to pieces. Do you
see any evidence that that is happening or any reason
why it should? No? I believe it. I know that
you will fail. There is something in the universe. I
don't know, some spirit, some principle that you will never overcome.
Do you believe in God, Winston? No? Then what is
it this principle that will defeat us? I don't know
the spirit of man. And do you consider yourself a man? Yes?
If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.
Your kind is extinct. We are the inheritors. Do you
understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you
are non existent. His manner changed, and he said more harshly,
And you consider your self morally superior to us, with
our lives and our cruelty. Yes, I consider myself superior.
O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After
a moment, Winston recognized one of them as his own.
It was a sound track of the conversation he had
had with O'Brien on the night when he had enrolled
himself in the brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie,
to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug taking
and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in
a child's face. O'Brien made a small, impatient gesture, as
though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth making.
Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped. Get
up from that bed, he said. The bonds had loosened themselves.
Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood up unsteadily.
You are the last man, said O'Brien. You are the
guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as
you are take off your clothes. Winston undid the bit
of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener
had long since been wrenched out of them. He could
not remember whether at any time since his arrest he
had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath
the overalls, his body was looped with filthy, yellowish rags,
just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid
them to the ground, he saw that there was a
three sided mirror at the far end of the room.
He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had
broken out of him. Go on, said O'Brien. Stand between
the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side
view as well. He had stopped because he was frightened.
A bowed, gray colored skeleton like thing was coming towards him.
Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact
that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer
to the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded
because of its bent carriage, the forlorn jailbird's face, with
the knobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a
crooked nose, and battered looking cheek bones, above which his
eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the
mouth had a drawn in look. Certainly, it was his
own face, but it seemed to him that it had
changed more than he had changed. Inside. The emotions it
registered would be different from the ones he felt. He
had gone partially bald. For the first moment, he had
thought that he had gone gray as well, But it
was only the scalp that was gray, except for his
hands and a circle of his face. His body was
gray all over, with ancient ingrained dirt. Here and there
under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds,
and near the ankle the varicus alsa was an inflamed mass,
with flakes of skin peeling off it. But the truly
frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel
of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton.
The legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker
than the thighs. He saw now what O'Brien had meant
about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine
was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as
to make a cavity of the chest. The scraggy neck
seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull.
But I guess he would have said that it was
the body of a man of sixty suffering from some
malignant disease. You have thought, sometimes, said O'Brien, that my face,
the face of a member of the Inner party, looks
old and worn. What do you think of your own face?
He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that
he was facing him. Look at the condition you were in,
he said. Look at this filthy grime all over your body.
Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that
disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that
you stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to
notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do you see I
can make my thumb and forefinger meat round your bicep.
I could snap your neck like a carrot. Do you
know that you have lost twenty five kilograms since you
have been in our hands? Even your hair is coming
out in handfuls. Look, he plucked at Winceton's head and
brought away a tuft of hair. Open your mouth, nine
ten eleven teeth left? How many had you when you
came to us? And the few you have left? A
dropping out of your head? Look here, he seized one
of Winston's remaining front teeth between his powerful thumb and forefinger.
A twinge of pain shot through Winston's jaw. O'Brien had
wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed
it across the cell. You are rotting away, he said,
You are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag
of filth? Now turn around and look into that mirror again.
Do you see that thing facing you? That is the
last man? If you are human, that is humanity. Now
put your clothes on again. Winston began to dress himself
with slow, stiff movements. Until now he had not seemed
to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one
thought stirred in his mind that he must have been
in this place longer than he had imagined. Then, suddenly,
as he fixed the miserable rags round himself, a feeling
of pity for his ruined body overcame him. Before he
knew what he was doing, he had collapsed on to
a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst
into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness,
A bundle of bones in filthy underclothes, sitting weeping in
the harsh white light, but he could not stop himself.
O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost kindly. It
will not last forever, he said. You can escape from
it whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself. You did it,
sobbed Winston. You reduced me to this state. No, Winston,
you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted
when you set yourself up against the party. It was
all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that
you did not foresee. He paused, and then went on,
We have beaten you, Winston, We have broken you up.
You have seen what your body is like. Your mind
is in the same state. I do not think that
there can be much pride left in you. You have
been kicked and flogged and insulted. You have screamed with pain.
You have rolled on the floor in your own blood
and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy. You have betrayed
everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation
that has not happened to you? Winston had stopped weeping,
though the tears were still losing out of his eyes.
He looked up at O'Brien. I have not betrayed Julia,
he said. O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. No, he said, No,
that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia. The
peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy,
flooded Winston's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, How intelligent.
Never did O'Brien fail to understand what was said to him.
Any One else on earth would have answered promptly that
he had betrayed Julia. For what was there that they
had not screwed out of him under that torture. He
had told them everything he knew about her, her habits,
her character, her past life. He had confessed in the
most trivial detail, everything that had happened at their meetings,
all that he had said to her, and she to him.
Their black market meals, there are dul their vague plottings
against the party. Everything. And yet in the sense in
which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her.
He had not stopped loving her. His feelings towards her
had remained the same. O'Brien had seen what he meant,
without the need for explanation. Tell me, he said, how
soon will they shoot me. It might be a long time,
said O'Brien. You are a difficult case, but don't give up.
Hope every one is cured, sooner or later. In the end,
we shall shoot you. End of Section twenty one.