Speaker 1: Section seventeen of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
leagamous recording may be freely distributed and adapted for any purpose.
Part two, Chapter nine. A. 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 lights through it. All the blood and
limph 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 tiggled his feet. Even the
opening and closing of her hand was an effort that
made his joints creak. He had worked more than ninety
hours in five days, so had every one else in
the ministry. Now it was all over, and he had
literally nothing to do, no party work of any description
until to morrow 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 mister 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 erasure had boiled up into such delirium that
if the crowd could have got their hands on the
two thousand 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 East Asia.
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 East Asia,
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 floodless.
The square was packed with several thousand people, including a
block of about a thousand school children 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
rumpel Stiltskin 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 catalog 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 first being 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 school children. 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 East Asia. 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 under foot. 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 mid sentence, not only without a pause,
but without even breaking the sea. 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 briefcase. He took the briefcase 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
East Asia. Oceania had always been at war with East Asia.
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 Day Apartment intended that within one
week no reference to the war with Eurasia or the
alliance with East Asia 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 snow drift, half burying
the speakrit and overflowing onto 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, in 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 speakrite,
every stroke of his ink pencil, was a deliberate lie.
He was as anxious as any one 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 a 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 to morrow morning. Winston, still carrying the briefcase 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 path. Although
the water was barely more than teppid, With a sort
of voluptuous creaking in his joints, he climbed to the
stair above mister Charrington's shop. He was tired, but not
sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty
little earth stove, and put on a pan of water
for coffee. Julia would arrive presently. Meanwhile, there was the book.
He sat down in the sluttish arm chair and undid
the straps of the briefcase, a heavy black volume, amateuriously 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 inscrittion on the title page
ran The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Immanuel Goldstein.
Winston began reading chapter one, Ignorance is strength. Throughout recorded time,
and probably since the end of the Neolithic age, there
have been three kinds of people in the world, the high,
the middle, and the low. They have been subdivided in
many ways. They have borne countless different names, and their
relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another,
have varied from age to age. But the essential structure
of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and
seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself,
just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however
far it is pushed one way or the other. The
aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable. Winston stopped reading,
chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was
reading in comfort and safety. He was alone, no telescreen,
no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance
over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand.
The sweet summer air played against his cheek from somewhere
far away. There floated the faint shouts of children. In
the room itself. There was no sound except the insect
voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm
chair and put his feet up on the fender. It
was bliss. It was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does
with the book of which one knows that one will
ultimately read and reread every word, he opened it at
a different place and found himself at chapter three. He
went on reading Chapter three. War is peace. The splitting
up of the world into three great superstates 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 East Asia only emerged
as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting.
The frontiers between the three superstans 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. East Asia, smaller than
the others and with the 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
superstates 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 centers 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 extent in the great wars of the
early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously
recognized and acted upon. To understand the nature of the
present war, for in spite of the regrouping which occurs
every few years, it is always the same war, one
must realize in the first place that it is impossible
for it to be decisive. None of the three superstates
could be definitively conquered even by the other two. In combination,
they are two evenly matched, and their natural defenses are
too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces,
Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific,
East Asia 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 the 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 superstates 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 labor power between the frontiers of the superstates,
and not permanently in the possession of any of them.
There lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners of Tangier, Brazaville,
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 labor. 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 of
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 contra,
and are expended, like so much coal or oil, in
the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory,
to control more labor 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 under the Pacific are constantly being captured and
recaptured by Oceania or by East Asia in Mongolia, the
dividing line between Eurasia and East Asia is never stable.
Round the pole, all three powers lake lids aimed to
enormous territories, which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored.
But the balance of power always remains roughly even, and
the territory which forms the heart land of each superstate
always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labor 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 labor, 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 double think. This same 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
to day is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with
the world that existed before nineteen fourteen, 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, all the
world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago.
Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in
some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed.
But experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages
of the atomic War of the nineteen fifties have never
been fully repaired. Nevertheless, the dangers inherent in the machine
are still there. From the moment when the machine first
made its appearance, it was clear to all thinking people
that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a
great extent, for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine
were used deliberately for that end, hunger overwork, dirt, illiteracy,
and disease could be eliminated within a few generations, and
in fact without being used for any such purpose, but
by a sort of automatic process, by producing wealth which
it was sometimes impossible not to distribute. The machine did
raise the living standards of the average human being very
greatly over a period of about fifty years at the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all round increase
in wealth threatened the destruction, indeed, in some sense, was
the destruction of a hierarchical society. In a world in
which every one 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 were 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, the 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 nineteen twenty and nineteen forty. 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 labor. 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 labor power without producing anything that can
be consumed. A floating fortress, for example, has locked up
in it the labor 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 labors and
other floating fortresses 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 favored 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
is two or three servants, his private motor cawur 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 horse flesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty,
and at the same time, the consciousnes 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 labor 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 of fear, hatred, adulation, and augiastic 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 double think. 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 is 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 new speak, 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 inksock, 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 plows,
while books are written by machinery. But in matters of
vital importance, meaning in effect, war and police espionage, the
empirical approaches 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 to day is either
a mixture of psychologists 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 biologists
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 immunised 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 is independent of its base as a
sailing ship. Others explore even remoter possibilities, such as focussing
the Sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometers away
in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by
tapping the heat at the Earth's center. But none of
these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none of
the three superstates 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 researchers 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 centers, 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 plants
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 superstates ever attempts any maneuver which involves the risk
of serious defeat. Whenever 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,
there will all be fired simultaneously, with the efects 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 day dream
impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in
the disputed areas around 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 ocean level. The
problem is the same for all three superstates. It is
absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no
contact with foreigners, except to a limited extent with war
prisoners and colored 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 East Asia, and he has
forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed
contact with foreigners, who would discover that there 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 Salon 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 sous states are very much the same.
In Oceania, the prevailing philosophy is called insok. In Eurasia
it is called Neo Bolshevism, and in East Asia 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
four continuous warfare. It follows that the three superstates 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. 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 INKSOK 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 of 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 results 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 colored and biased, but
falsification of the kind that is practiced to day 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 con ceased,
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 day dreaming, 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 superstates is unconquerable,
each is in effect a separate universe within which almost
any perversion of thought can be safely practiced. Reality only
exerts its pressure through the needs of every day life,
the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing,
to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top story
windows under the like between life and death, 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 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 superstates, 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 forever from the sobering influence of external danger.
A piece 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,
stup 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 one 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 disant angled themselves.
Oh you've got it, good, she said, without much interest,
and almost immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to
make the coffee. They did not return into 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 in 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 wash tub and the lion, 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 bed head. 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 one,
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 has
pushed one way or the other. Julia, are you awake,
said Winston, Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on, it's marvelous.
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 lower 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
to day, in a period of decline the average which
human being as 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 minder meter 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 psychical 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
nineteen hundred 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 ingsok in Oceania,
Neo Bolshevism in Eurasia, death worship as it is commonly
called in East Asia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom,
and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of
the old ones, intended to keep their names and pay
lip service to their ideaology, 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 favored 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 labor 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 airs 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 had 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 nineteen thirty, 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 Ingsock
and its rivals emerged as fully worked out to 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
to day. All the tyrannies of the past were half
hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to
some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave
loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and
to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even
the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by
modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that
in the past, no government had the power to keep
its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however,
made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film
and the radio carried the process further. With the development
of television and the technical advance which made it possible
to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private
life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least
every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be
kept for twenty four hours a day under the eyes
of the police and in the sound of official propaganda.
With all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of
enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the state,
but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects now existed
for the first time. After the revolutionary period of the
fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always into high, middle,
and low. But the new high group, unlike all its forerunners,
did not act upon instinct, but knew what was needed
to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that
the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and
privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.
The so called abolition of private property, which took place
in the middle years of the century, meant in effect
the concentration of property and 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 collectivisation. It had always
been assumed that if the capitalists 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 the
these things were no longer private property, it followed that
they must be public property. Inksock, which grew out of
the earlier socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in
fact carried out the main item in the socialist program,
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 day had in reality disappeared.
Each of the three powers which now divide the world
is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through
slow demographic changes, which a government with wide powers can
easily avert. The second danger also is only a theoretical one.
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they
never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long
as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison,
they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The
recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and
are not now permitted to happen. But other and equally
large dislocations can and do happen without having political results,
because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate.
As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent
in our society since the development of machine technique, it
is solved by the device of continuous warfare see Chapter three,
which is also useful in keying up public morale to
the necessary pitch. From the point of view of our
present rulers. There for the only genuine dangers of the
splitting off of a new group of able, underemployed, power
hungry people and the growth of liberalism and skepticism in
their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational.
It is a problem of continuously molding 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
two percent 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
eighty five percent 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 the Inner Party parents is,
in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to
hire the branch of the party is by examination taken
at the age of tis sixteen. Nor is there any
racial discrimination or any march 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 swhereabouts nobody knows, except
that English is its chief lingua franca and new Speak
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 socialists, 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 short lived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the
Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years.
The essence of oligarchical rule is not farther to sun 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 successes. The party is not concerned
with perpetuating its blood, but with perpetuating itself. Who wield's
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 toward 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 behavior 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 misdemeanor,
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 behavior. In Oceania, there is no law.
Thoughts and actions, which, when detected, means 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 leaves and attitudes demanded of him are
never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying
bare the contradictions inherent in ingsock. If he is a
person naturally orthodox in New Speaker 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
around the new speak words crime, stop, black, white, and
double think 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
skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed and 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 new speak, crime stop. Crime stop 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 wingsock,
and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crime stop, in short means protective stupidity. But stupidity is
not enough. On the contrary, Orthodoxy in the full sense,
demands a control over one's 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 key word here is
black white. Like so many news speak 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 news speakers double think. 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 as 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 East Asia, 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 repressioned and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of
ncol 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 re
arrange 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 those who are intelligent as
well as orthodox. In old speak, it is called, quite frankly,
reality control. In new speak 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 hentsive guilt. Doublethink lies at the
very heart of inksock, 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 to double think, it is necessary to
exercise double think, For by using the word one admits
that one is tampering with the reality. By a fresh
act of double think, one erases its knowledge, and so
on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of
the truth. Ultimately, it is by means of double think
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 check ranging 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 double think are those
who invented double think 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 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
as 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 favored 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's 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.
Their deliberate exercises in double think. 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 forever 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 necess paraphernalia into existence. Afterwards, this
motive really consists. Minston 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 one, like chapter three, 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 end of Section seventeen