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
brief-case 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 Eastasia 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 centary. 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
super-states 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 indus triousness 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 estab
lished 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 half-hearted and
inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some
extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends
everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested
in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church
of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of
the reason for this was that in the past no government had the
power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The
invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate
public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process
further. With the development of television, and the technical
advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an
end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough
to be worth watching, could be kept for 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, underemployed, 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 popu lar 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 goodthinker), 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 selfabasement 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 re/gime 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 prizefighter'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 ws 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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