Chapter
17
Winston was gelatinous
with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It had come into his head
spontaneously. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but
its translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see
the light through it. All the
blood and lymph had been drained out of him by an
enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and
skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. His overalls fretted his
shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a
hand was an effort that made his joints creak.
He
had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone else in the
Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no Party
work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in
the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild afternoon
sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction of Mr Charrington's
shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that
this afternoon there was no danger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy
briefcase that he was carrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a
tingling sensation up and down the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book,
which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor
even looked at.
On
the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting,
the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of
drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of
the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns —
after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and
the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the
crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were
to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would
unquestionably have torn them to pieces — at just this moment it had been
announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at
war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.
There
was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became
known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Easta- sia and not
Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the
central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the
white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was
packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand
schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an
orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms
and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing
the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped
the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end
of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made
metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities,
massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of
civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost
impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At
every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the
speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from
thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the
schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when
a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into
the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech.
Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was
saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding
rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment
there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square
was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them.
It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous
interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and
trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering
over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys.
But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the
neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at
the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral
roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as
before, except that the target had been changed.
The
thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched
from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause,
but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to
preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder while the posters were
being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the
shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, I think you've dropped your brief-case.' He took
the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days
before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that the
demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the
time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had
done likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them
to their posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania
was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large
part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete.
Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films,
sound-tracks, photographs — all had to be rectified at lightning speed.
Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the
Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia,
or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work
was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could
not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked
eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep.
Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors:
meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by
attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his
spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he
crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of
paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, halfburying the
speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was always to
stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of
all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough
merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events
demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed
in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
By
the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping every
few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something
which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically
anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled
by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of
his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the
Department that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning of the sixth day
the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing came
out of the tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the
same time the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went
through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been
achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary
evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was
unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till tomorrow
morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing the book, which had
remained between his feet while he worked and under his body while he slept,
went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the
water was barely more than tepid.
With
a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair above Mr
Charrington's shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened the
window, lit the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee.
Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book. He sat down in the
sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief-case.
A
heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The
print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and
fell apart, easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The
inscription on the title-page ran:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE
OF
OLIGARCHICAL
COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel
Goldstein
Winston
began reading:
Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the
Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High,
the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have
borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential
structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and
seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself,
just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed
one way or the other.
The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...
Winston
stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading,
in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no
nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand.
The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there
floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound
except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and
put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was etemity. Suddenly, as one
sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and
re-read every word, he opened it at a different place and found himself at
Chapter III. He went on reading:
Chapter III
War is Peace
The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was
an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the
twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British
Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and
Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged
as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers
between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they
fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow
geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the
European and Asiatic land- mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania
comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia,
and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with
a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the
south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of
Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states are
permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War,
however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the
early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between
combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for
fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not
to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it,
has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria
is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting,
the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and
reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are
looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not
by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small
numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively
few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague
frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the
Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the
centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of
consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a
few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the
reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance.
Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of
the early twentieth centuary have now become dominant and are consciously
recognized and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war — for in spite of
the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war — one
must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive.
None of the three superstates could be definitively conquered even by the
other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural
defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces.
Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the
fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no
longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of
self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one
another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has
come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter
of life and death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that
it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries.
In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour
power. Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the
possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at
Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth
of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these
thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers
are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of
the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the
chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that
dictates the endless changes of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and
some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder
climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But
above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power
controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern
India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or
hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of
these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass
continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or
oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control
more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and
so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves
beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and
forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the
Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly
being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the
dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all
three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely
unihabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly
even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always
remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the
Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy. They add nothing to the
wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war,
and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to
wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of
continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure
of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be
essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the
principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not
recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products
of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the
end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of
consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few
human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and
it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had
been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared
with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the
imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the
early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich,
leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glittering antiseptic world of glass and
steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousness of nearly every
literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed,
and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed
to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars
and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly
regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was
fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices,
always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been
developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages
of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired.
Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the
moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking
people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for
human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for
that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated
within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose,
but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes
impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of
the average humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth
threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a
hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had
enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and
possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the
most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once
became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt,
to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and
luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a
small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain
stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass
of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and
would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they
would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and
they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only
possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural
past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of
doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards
mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole
world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was
helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or
indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty
by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the
final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many
countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital
equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from
working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military
weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it
made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry
turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be
produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of
achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of
human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to
pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea,
materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and
hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not
actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending
labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating
Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several
hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having
brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours
another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so
planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs
of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always
underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the
necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate
policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship,
because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small
privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By
the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party
lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that
he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his
clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three
servants, his private motor-car or helicopter — set him in a different world
from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a
similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the
proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession
of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at
the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes
the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable
condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction,
but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would
be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples
and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing
vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide
only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What
is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so
long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself.
Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and
even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should
be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred,
adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he
should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter
whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is
possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that
is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the
intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily
achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the
ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party
that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an
administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know
that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware
that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged
for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily
neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member
wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it
is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire
world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest
as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more
and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power,
or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new
weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities
in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In
Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to
exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of
thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is
opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological
progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the
diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either
standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with
horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital
importance — meaning, in effect, war and police espionage — the empirical
approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party
are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for
all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great
problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against
his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill
several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.
In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.
The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor,
studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions,
gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of
drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist,
physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special
subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the
Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian
forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the
teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with
planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket
bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable
armour- plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble
poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the
vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized
against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall
bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane
as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter
possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended
thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and
tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization,
and none of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others.
What is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the atomic
bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present researches are
likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the
invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the
nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten years later.
At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly
in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America. The effect was to
convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would
mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter,
although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were
dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store
them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come
sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary
for thirty or forty years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly,
bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and
the fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating
Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the
submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade
are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters reported in the Press
and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which
hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in a few weeks,
have never been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which
involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation is undertaken, it
is usually a surprise attack against an ally. The strategy that all three
powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the
same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed
strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or
other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that
rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to
sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at
all the strategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, with
effects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time
to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, in preparation
for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere
daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except
in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy
territory is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that in some places the
frontiers between the superstates are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could
easily conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or
on the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the
Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed on
all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to
conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be
necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical
difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred million people,
who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level.
The problem is the same for all three super-states. It is absolutely necessary
to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to
a limited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the official
ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners
apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either
Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages.
If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are
creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them
is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear,
hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It
is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or
Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by
anything except bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly
understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three
super-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is
called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is
called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps
better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed
to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught
to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually
the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which
they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same
pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy
existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the three super-states
not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so.
On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up,
like three sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three
powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives
are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that
the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the fact
that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which
is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is
necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war
has fundamentally changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that
sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In
the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies
were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to
impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not
afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So
long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally
held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious.
Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or
politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an
aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered
sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions.
Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past,
which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.
Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but
falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible.
War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were
concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars
could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be
dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity.
Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or
disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are
still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of
daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency,
even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania
except the Thought Police. Since each of the three super-states is
unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any
perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality only exerts its pressure
through the needs of everyday life — the need to eat and drink, to get shelter
and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows,
and the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and
physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from
contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like
a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up
and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or
the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from
starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are
obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals;
but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape
they choose.
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous
wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant
animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting
one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the
surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental
atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a
purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries,
although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the
destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always
plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one
another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects,
and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but
to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has
become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming
continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on
human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has
disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be
much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another,
should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own
boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe,
freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was
truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This — although the vast
majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense — is the
inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.
Winston
stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb
thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a
room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical
sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of
the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his
cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it
told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said
what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered
thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but
enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he
perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. He had just turned
back to Chapter I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out
of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown tool-bag on the floor and flung
herself into his arms. It was more than a week since they had seen one another.
'I've
got the book,' he said as they disentangled themselves.
'Oh,
you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest, and almost immediately
knelt down beside the oilstove to make the coffee.
They
did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an hour. The
evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane.
From below came the familiar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the
flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston had seen there on his first
visit was almost a fixture in the yard. There seemed to be no hour of daylight
when she was not marching to and fro between the washtub and the line,
alternately gagging herself with clothes pegs and breaking forth into lusty
song. Julia had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on the point
of falling asleep. He reached out for the book, which was lying on the floor,
and sat up against the bedhead.
'We
must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the Brotherhood have to read
it.'
'You
read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it aloud. That's the best way.
Then you can explain it to me as you go.'
The
clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or four hours ahead of
them. He propped the book against his knees and began reading:
Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the
Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High,
the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have
borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential
structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and
seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself,
just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibnum, however far it is pushed
one way or the other
'Julia,
are you awake?' said Winston.
'Yes,
my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous.'
He
continued reading:
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The
aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change
places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim — for it is an
abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to
be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives —
is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be
equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main
outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be
securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they
lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently,
or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their
side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As
soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into
their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a
new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them,
and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never
even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an
exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a
material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is
physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in
wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human
equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic
change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern
had become obvious to many observers. There then rose schools of thinkers who
interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality
was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, of course, had always
had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put forward there was
a significant change. In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society
had been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings
and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical
upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of compensation in an
imaginary world beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling for
power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity.
Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people
who were not yet in positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before
long. In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality,
and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.
The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism,
a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link
in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was
still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism
that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and
equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared
in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in
Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious
aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These new movements, of course,
grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip- service to
their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and
freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen
once more, and then stop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the
Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy,
the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.
The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of
historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which had hardly
existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical movement of history was now
intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was
alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the
beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically
possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and
that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals
against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or
for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been
not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization.
With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered.
Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work,
it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic
levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the
point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven
after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and
peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe
it. The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a
state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted the
human imagination for thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain
hold even on the groups who actually profited by each historical change. The
heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in
their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before
the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by
them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the
main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise
had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new
political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and
regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about
1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of
years — imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public
executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the
deportation of whole populations-not only became common again, but were
tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and
progressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars,
revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and
its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been
foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had
appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would
emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people
would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made
up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union
organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and
professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried
middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and
brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized
government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were
less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above
all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing
opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing
today, all the tyrannies of the past were halfhearted and inefficient. The
ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were
content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be
uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of
the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this
was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under
constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to
manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process
further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which
made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument,
private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important
enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day under the
eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other
channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only
complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion
on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties,
society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new
High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what
was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only
secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most
easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called 'abolition of
private property' which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in
effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with
this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of
individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty
personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania,
because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit.
In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding
position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act
of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class
were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists
had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport — everything
had been taken away from them: and since these things were no longer private
property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out
of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact
carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen
and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go
deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall
from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently
that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented
Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness
to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them
are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of
them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is
the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in
reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in
fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow demographic changes
which a government with wide powers can easily avert. The second danger, also,
is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and
they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they
are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware
that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past times were
totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other and equally
large dislocations can and do happen without having political results, because
there is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As fcr the problem
of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development
of machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare (see
Chapter III), which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary
pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only
genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed,
power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own
ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously
moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger
executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses
needs only to be influenced in a negative way.
Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it
already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid
comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success,
every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge,
all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his
leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on
the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he
will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was
born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to
the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and
reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than
towards an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. its numbers
limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of
Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party
is described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands.
Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the proles',
numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. In the terms of our earlier
classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave population of the
equatorial lands who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a
permanent or necessary part of the structure.
In principle, membership of these three groups is not
hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the
Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken
at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked
domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure
Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the
administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area.
In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a
colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and
its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that
English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official language, it is
not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by blood-ties but
by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified,
and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary
lines. There is far less to- and-fro movement between the different groups than
happened under capitalism or even in the pre- industrial age. Between the two
branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so
much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that
ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to
rise. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party.
The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are
simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of
affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The
Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at
transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way
of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to
recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the
crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great
deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had been
trained to fight against something called 'class privilege' assumed that what
is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an
oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary
aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such
as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of
years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but
the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by
the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can
nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood
but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that
the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that
characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party
and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived.
Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present
not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to
themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century
to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to
rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it
is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique
made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and
commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is
actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on
as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because
they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the
smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the
Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone.
Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in
bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being
inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his
relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his
face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic
movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual
misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any
nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is
certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever.
On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated
code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when
detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless
purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted
as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the
wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the
future. A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the
right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never
plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions
inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a good-
thinker), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is
the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental
training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words
crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think
too deeply on any subject whatever.
A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no
respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of
hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and
self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents
produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and
dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which
might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance
by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the
discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak,
crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by
instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of
not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of
misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of
being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in
a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But
stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a
control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist
over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother
is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big
Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an
unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword
here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually
contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of
impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.
Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is
white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to
believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to
forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous
alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really
embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of
which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is
that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions
partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the
past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is
necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that
the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more
important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the
infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and
records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show
that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no
change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to
change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for
example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then
that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise
then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This
day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is
as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and
espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past
events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written
records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the
memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and
in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past
is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past
is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it
has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new
version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds
good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of
recognition several times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in
possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been
different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the past
depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure that all written
records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But
it is also necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner.
And if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written
records, then it is necessary to forget that one has done so. The trick of
doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the
majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as
orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality control'. In
Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as
well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs
in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party
intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he
therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of
doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process
has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision,
but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of
falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since
the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining
the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate
lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from
oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective
reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all
this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is
necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is
tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the
truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able —
and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years — to
arrest the course of history.
All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they
ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant,
failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or
they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used
force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either
through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the
Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist
simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the
Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be
able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to
combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the Power to learn from past
mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of
doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast
system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of
what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it
is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the
more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact
that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale.
Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject
peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a
continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal
wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to them. They
are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing
the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as
the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers whom we call 'the proles' are
only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be
prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are
capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is in the
ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war
enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who
know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking-together of opposites —
knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism-is one of the chief
distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions
even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and
vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and
it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the
working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a
uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for
that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it
calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family
loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit
a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of
Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry
of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These
contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy;
they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions
that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient
cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as
we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing
mental condition must be controlled insanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have almost
ignored. It is; why should human equality be averted? Supposing that the
mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for
this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment
of time?
Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen. the mystique
of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon doublethink. But
deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that
first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the Thought Police,
continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence
afterwards. This motive really consists ...
Winston
became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound. It seemed to him
that Julia had been very still for some time past. She was lying on her side,
naked from the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed on her hand and one dark
lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.
'Julia.
No
answer.
'Julia,
are you awake?'
No
answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it carefully on the floor, lay
down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.
He
had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how; he
did not understand why. Chapter I, like Chapter III, had not actually told him
anything that he did not know, it had merely systematized the knowledge that he
possessed already. But after reading it he knew better than before that he was
not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even
against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellow beam from the sinking sun
slanted in through the window and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The
sun on his face and the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong,
sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep
murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling that this remark
contained in it a profound wisdom. When he woke it was with the sensation of
having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him
that it was only twenty-thirty. He lay dozing for a while; then
the usual deep-lunged
singing struck up from the yard below;
'It
was only an 'opeless fancy,
It
passed like an Ipril dye,
But
a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They
'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'
The
driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard it all over
the place. It had outlived the Hate Song. Julia woke at the sound, stretched
herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.
'I'm
hungry,' she said. 'Let's make some more coffee. Damn! The stove's gone out and
the water's cold.' She picked the stove up and shook it. 'There's no oil in
it.'
'We
can get some from old Charrington, I expect.'
'The
funny thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to put my clothes on,' she
added. 'It seems to have got colder.'
Winston
also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable voice sang on:
'They
sye that time 'eals all things,
They
sye you can always forget;
But
the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They
twist my 'eart-strings yet!'
As
he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window. The sun
must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any
longer. The flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had
the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue
between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and
uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers,
and more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or
was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across
to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy
figure below. As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her
thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded,
it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before
occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous
dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse
in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and
after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of
granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl
as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the
flower?
'She's
beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's
a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That
is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
He
held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee
her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That
was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to
mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had
only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many
children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her
momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had
suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and
then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping,
polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren,
over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The
mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of
the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into
interminable distance. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for
everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky
were also very much the same — everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of
thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one
another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost
exactly the same — people who had never learned to think but who were storing
up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn
the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the
end of the book, he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message. The
future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their time came
the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as
the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of
sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would
happen, strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you
could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the
end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a
thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing
on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not
kill.
'Do
you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the
edge of the wood?'
'He
wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to please himself. Not even
that. He was just singing.'
The
birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in
London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden
lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages
of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere
stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and
childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those
mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead,
theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the
mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two
plus two make four.
'We
are the dead,' he said.
'We
are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You
are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
They
sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see
the white all round the irises of Julia's eyes. Her face had turned a milky
yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply,
almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.
'You
are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
'It
was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
'It
was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain exactly where you are. Make no
movement until you are ordered.'
It
was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing except stand
gazing into one another's eyes. To run for life, to get out of the house before
it was too late — no such thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the
iron voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had been turned
back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering
the telescreen behind it.
'Now
they can see us,' said Julia.
'
Now we can see you,' said the voice. ' Stand out in the middle of the room.
Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one
another.'
They
were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia's body
shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own. He could just stop
his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond his control. There was a
sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside. The yard seemed
to be full of men. Something was being dragged across the stones. The woman's
singing had stopped abruptly. There was a long, rolling clang, as though the
washtub had been flung across the yard, and then a confusion of angry shouts
which ended in a yell of pain.
'The
house is surrounded,' said Winston.
'The
house is surrounded,' said the voice.
He
heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may as well say good-bye,'
she said.
'You
may as well say good-bye,' said the voice. And then another quite different
voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having
heard before, struck in; 'And by the way, while we are on the subject,
"Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off
your head"!'
Something
crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The head of a ladder had been
thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing
through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full
of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and
truncheons in their hands.
Winston
was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved. One thing alone
mattered; to keep still, to keep still and not give them an excuse to hit you!
A man with a smooth prize-fighter's jowl in which the mouth was only a slit
paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumb and
forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The feeling of nakedness, with one's hands
behind one's head and one's face and body all exposed, was almost unbearable.
The man protruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips
should have been, and then passed on. There was another crash. Someone had
picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the
hearth-stone.
The
fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake,
rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!
There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a violent kick on the
ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of the men had smashed his
fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. She was
thrashing about on the floor, fighting for breath. Winston dared not turn his
head even by a millimetre, but sometimes her livid, gasping face came within
the angle of his vision. Even in his terror it was as though he could feel the
pain in his own body, the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than
the struggle to get back her breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible,
agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet,
because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe. Then two of the
men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like
a sack. Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted,
with the eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that
was the last he saw of her.
He
stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their own
accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind. He
wondered whether they had got Mr Charrington. He wondered what they had done to
the woman in the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a
faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He noticed
that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light
seemed too strong. Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an
August evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the
time — had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really
it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he did not pursue the
thought further. It was not interesting.
There
was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr Charrington came into the room.
The demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued.
Something had also changed in Mr Charrington's appearance. His eye fell on the
fragments of the glass paperweight.
'Pick
up those pieces,' he said sharply.
A
man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly
realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the
telescreen. Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his
hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing
his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his
identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still recognizable,
but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, and
seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had
nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy,
the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered;
even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about
five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he
was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.
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