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