Speaker 1: Section seven of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
legamous recording may be freely distributed and adapted for any purpose.
Part one, Chapter seven. If there is hope, wrote Winston,
it lies in the proles. If there was hope, it
must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming,
disregarded masses eighty five percent of the population of Oceania
could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.
The Party could not be overthrown from within its enemies.
If it had any enemies, had no way of coming together,
or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary
brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable
that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than
twos and threes. Rebellion meant to look in the eyes
an inflection of the voice, at the most an occasional
whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow
become conscious of their own strength, would have no need
to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake
themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose,
they could blow the party to pieces to morrow morning. Surely,
sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.
And yet he remembered how once he had been walking
down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds
of voices, women's voices, had burst from a side street
a little way ahead. It was a great, formidable cry
of anger and despair, a deep loud oh that went
humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart
had leapt it started. He had thought a riot, the
pearls are breaking loose. At last, when he had reached
the spot, it was to see a mob of two
or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a
street market, with faces as tragic as though they had
been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at
this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude
of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls
had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things,
but cooking pots of any kind were always difficult to get.
Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women,
bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make
off with their saucepans. While dozens of others clamored round
the stall, accusing the stall keeper of favoritism and of
having more saucepan somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh
outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with
her hair coming down, had got hold of the same
saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one
another's hands. For a moment, they were both tugging, and
then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly, and yet,
just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded
in that cry from only a few hundred throats. Why
was it that they could never shout like that about
anything that mattered? He wrote, Until they become conscious, they
will never rebel, And until after they have rebelled, they
cannot become conscious. That he reflected, might almost have been
a transcription from one of the party text books. The
party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage.
Before the revolution, they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists.
They had been starved and flogged, women had been forced
to work in the coal mines. Women still did work
in the coal mines as a matter of fact, children
had been sold into the factories at the age of six.
But simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the party
taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be
kept in subjection like animals, by the application of a
few simple rules. In reality, very little was known about
the proles. It was not necessary to know much so
long as they continued to work and breed. Their other
activities were without importance, left to themselves like cattle turned
loose upon the plains of Argentina. They had reverted to
a style of life that appeared to be natural to them,
a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, They grew
up in the gutters. They went to work. At twelve,
they passed through a brief, blossoming period of beauty and
sexual desire. They married at twenty, there were middle aged
at thirty. They died for the most part at sixty.
Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty
quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling
filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them
in control was not difficult. A few agents of the
thought police moved always among them. Spreading false rumors and
marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged
capable of becoming dangerous, But no attempt was made to
indoctrinate them with the ideology of the party. It was
not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings.
All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism,
which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to
make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And
even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their
discontent led to nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they
could only focus it on petty, specific grievances. The larger
evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles
did not even have telescreens in their Even the civil
police interfered with them very little. There was a vast
amount of criminality in London, a whole world within a
world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug peddlars and racketeers of
every description. But since it all happened among the proles themselves,
it was of no importance in all questions of morals.
They were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual
puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity
went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious
worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown
any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion.
As the party slogan put it, prolls and animals are free.
Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicus ulsa. It
had begun itching again. The thing he invariably came back
to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the
Revolution had really been like. He took out of the
drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he
had borrowed from Missus Parsons, and began copying a passage
into the diary. In the old days it ran before
the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that
we know to day. It was a dark, dirty, miserable
place where hardly anybody had enough to eat, and where
hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on
their feet and not even a roof to sleep under.
Children no older than you had to work twelve hours
a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips
if they worked too slowly, and fed them on nothing
but stale bread crusts and water. But in among all
this terrible poverty, there were just a few great, big,
beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who
had as many as thirty servants to look after them.
These rich men were called capitalists. There were fat, ugly
men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture
on the opposite page. You can see that he is
dressed in a long black coat which was called a
frock coat, and a queer shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe,
which was called a top hat. This was the uniform
of the capitalists, and no no one else was allowed
to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world,
and every one else was their slave. They owned all
the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all
the money. If any one disobeyed them, they could throw
them into prison, or they could take his job away
and starve him to death. Whenever any ordinary person spoke
to a capitalist, he had to cringe and a bow
to him, and take off his cap and address him
as sir. The chief of all the capitalists was called
the king, and but he knew the rest of the catalog.
There would be mentioned of the bishops in their lawn sleeves,
the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks,
the treadmill, the Catennine tales, the lord mayor's banquet, and
the practice of kissing the pope's toe. There was also
something called the us prima noctis, which would probably not
be mentioned in a text book for children. It was
the law by which every capitalist had the right to
sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies?
It might be true that the average human being was
better off now than he had been before the Revolution.
The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest
in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions
you lived in were intolerable, and that at some other
time they must have been different. It struck him that
the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its
cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life,
if you looked about, you, bore no resemblance, not only
to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but
even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve.
Great areas of it, even for a party member, were
neutral and non political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs,
fighting for a place on the tube, darning a worn
out sock, cadging a sacquer and tablet, saving a cigarette end.
The ideal set up by the Party was something huge,
terrible and glittering. A world of steel and concrete, of
monstrous machines and terrifying weapons, A nation of warriors and
fanatics marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same
thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing,
persecuting three hundred million people, all with the same face.
The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled
to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched up nineteenth
century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.
He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and
ruinous city of a million dustpins, and mixed up with
it was a picture of missus Parsons, a woman with
lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked
waist pipe. He reached down and scratched his ankle again.
Day and night. The telescreens bruised duryas with statistics proving
that people to day had more food, more clothes, better houses,
better recreations, that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier,
more intelligent, better educated than the people of fifty years ago.
Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.
The Party claimed, for example, that to day forty percent
of adult prolls were literate. Before the revolution, it was
said the number had only been fifteen percent. The Party
claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only one
hundred and sixty per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it
had been three hundred and So it went on. It
was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might
very well be that literally every word in the history books,
even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.
For all he knew, there might never have been any
such law as the use premnoctis, or any such creature
as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure
was forgotten. The lie became truth. Just once in his
life he had possessed after the event. That was what
counted concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He
had held it between his fingers for as long as
thirty seconds in nineteen seventy three. It must have been,
at any rate, it was about at the time when
he and Catherine had parted, but the really relevant date
was seven or eight years earlier. The story really began
in the middle sixties, the period of the Great Purges,
in which the original leaders of the revolution were wiped
out once and for all. By nineteen seventy none of
them was left except Big Brother himself. All the rest
had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter revolutionaries.
Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where,
and of the others a few had simply disappeared, while
the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at
which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last
survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It
must have been in nineteen sixty five that these three
had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for
a year or more so that one did not know
whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly
been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way.
They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy. At that
date too. The enemy was Eurasia, embezzlement of public funds,
the murder of various trusted party members, intrigues against the
leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the
revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things,
they had been pardoned, reinstated in the party, and given
posts which were in fact sinecures, but which sounded important.
All three had written long, abject articles in the Times,
analyzing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.
Some time after their release. Winston had actually seen all
three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered
the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them.
Out of the corner of his eye. There were men
far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost
the last great figures left over from the heroic days
of the Party. The glamor of the underground struggle in
the Civil War still faintly clung to them. He had
the feeling, though already at that time facts and days
were growing blurry, that he had known their names earlier
than he had known that of Big Brother. But also
there were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to
extinction within a year or two. No one who had
once fallen into the hands of the thought police ever escaped.
In the end, there were corpses waiting to be sent
back to the grave. There was no one at any
of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise
even to be seen in the neighborhood of such people.
They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin
flavored with cloves, which was the speciality of the cafe
of the Three. It was Rutherford whose appearance had most
impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose
brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and
during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals his cartoons
were appearing in the times. There was simply an imitation
of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always
they were a rehashing of the ancient thiets, slum tenements,
starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats. Even on
the barricades, the capitalists still seemed to cling to their
top hats, an endless, hopeless effort to get back into
the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane
of greasy gray hair, his face pouched and seamed with
thick negroid lips. At one time he must have been
immensely strong. Now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging,
falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking
up before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling. It was
the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember
how he had come to be in the cafe at
such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny
music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat
in their corner, almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter
brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on
the table beside them, with the pieces set out, but
no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute
in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that
they were playing changed, and the tone of the music
changed too. There came into it, but it was something
hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note.
In his mind, Winston called it a yellow note. And
then a voice from the telescreen was singing, under the
spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me.
There lie they, and here lie we under the spreading
chestnut tree. The three men never stirred, but when Winston
glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his
eyes were full of tears, and for the first time
he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet
not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Eronson and
Rutherford had broken noses. A little later, all three were
re arrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh
conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their
second trial, they confessed to all their old crimes over
again with a whole string of new ones. They were executed,
and their fate was recorded in the party histories, a
warning to posterity. About five years after this, in nineteen
seventy three, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which
had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube onto his desk.
When he came on a fragment of paper which had
evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten.
The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance.
It was a half page torn out of the Times
of about ten years earlier, the top half of the
page so that it included the date, and it contained
a photograph of the delegates at some party function in
New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones,
Ernson and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them in any case.
Their names were in the caption at the bottom. The
point was that at both trials all three men had
confessed that on that date there had been on Eurasian soil.
They had flown from a secret air field in Canada
to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with
members of the Eurasian General staff, to whom they had
betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's
memory because it chanced to be Midsummer day, but the
whole story must be on record in countless other places
as well. There was only one possible conclusion the confessions
were lies. Of course, this was not in itself a discovery.
Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the
people who were wiped out in the purges had actually
committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this
was concrete evidence. It was a fragment of the abolished past,
like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong
stratum and destroys the geological theory. It was enough to
blow the party to atoms if in some way it
could have been published to the world and its significance
made known. He had gone straight on working as soon
as he saw what the photograph was and what it meant.
He had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily,
when he unrolled it it had been upside down from
the point of view of the telescreen. He took his
scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair
so as to get as far away from the telescreen
as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult,
and even your breathing could be controlled with an effort.
But you could not control the beating of your heart,
and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.
He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by,
tormented all the while by the fear that some accident,
a sudden draft blowing across his desk, for instance, would
betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the
photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.
Within another minute, perhaps it would have crumbled into ashes.
That was ten eleven years ago to day. Probably he
would have kept that photograph. It was curious that the
fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to
him to make a difference, even now, when the photograph itself,
as well as the event it recorded, was only memory.
Was the party's hold upon the past le strong, he wondered,
because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had
once existed, but to day, supposing that it could be
somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even
be evidence. Already. At the time when he made his discovery,
Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it
must have been to the agents of East Asia that
the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then,
there had been other changes two three He could not
remember how many, very likely the confessions had been rewritten
and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer
had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but
changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of
nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the
huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the
past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He
took up his pen again and wrote, I understand how
I do not understand why. He He wondered, as he
had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic.
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At
one time, it had been a sign of madness to
believe that the earth goes round the sun to day,
to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be
alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic.
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly
trouble him. The horror was that he might also be wrong.
He picked up the children's history book and looked at
the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The
hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though
some huge force were pressing down upon you, something that
penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you
out of your beliefs, persuading you almost to deny the
evidence of your senses. In the end, the party would
announce that two and two made five, and you would
have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should
make that claim sooner or later. The logic of their
position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but
the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by
their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And
what was terrifying was not that they would kill you
for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For
after all, how do we know that two and two
make four, or that the force of gravity works, or
that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and
the external world exist only in the mind, and if
the mind itself is controllable, what then? But no, His
courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The
face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association,
had floated into his mind. He knew with more certainty
than before that O'Brien was on his side. He was
writing the Diary for O'Brien too. O'Brien. It was like
an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but
which was addressed to a particular person, and took its
color from that fact. The party told you to reject
the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final,
most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of
the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which
any party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle
arguments which he would not be able to understand, much
less answer. And yet he was in the right. They
were wrong, and he was right. The obvious, the silly,
and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true,
hold on to that the solid world exists, Its laws
do not change. Stones are hard. Water is wet. Objects
unsupported fall towards the Earth's center. With the feeling that
he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was
setting forth an important axiom, he wrote, Freedom is the
freedom to say that two plus two make four. If
that is granted, all else follows. End of section seven,