[size=+2]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 itstranslucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able tosee the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained outof him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structureof nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. Hisoveralls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even theopening 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 elsein the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing todo, no Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He couldspend 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 thedirection of Mr Charrington’s shop, keeping one eye open for thepatrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was nodanger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy brief-case that he wascarrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a tinglingsensation 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, theshouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, thewaxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp ofmarching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar ofmassed planes, the booming of guns—after six days of this, when thegreat orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred ofEurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could havegot their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to bepublicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they wouldunquestionably have torn them to pieces—at just this moment it had beenannounced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceaniawas 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 ina demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment whenit happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet bannerswere luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousandpeople, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in theuniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of theInner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and alarge bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguingthe crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, hegripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other,enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above hishead. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth anendless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda,unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listento him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every fewmoments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speakerwas drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably fromthousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from theschoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twentyminutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap ofpaper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read itwithout pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner,or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names weredifferent. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled throughthe crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there wasa tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the squarewas decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces onthem. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! Therewas a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls,banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performedprodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting thestreamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or threeminutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of themicrophone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at theair, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and theferal roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hatecontinued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speakerhad switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, notonly without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at themoment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the momentof disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whoseface he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuseme, I think you’ve dropped your brief-case.’ He took the brief-caseabstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days before hehad an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that thedemonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth,though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff ofthe Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from thetelescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war withEastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years wasnow completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers,books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to berectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, itwas known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within oneweek no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance withEastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work wasoverwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involvedcould not be called by their true names. Everyone in the RecordsDepartment worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with twothree-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from thecellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted ofsandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendantsfrom the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of hisspells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each timethat he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find thatanother shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like asnowdrift, halfburying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor,so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough pileto give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work wasby no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substituteone name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded careand imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed intransferring the war from one part of the world to another wasconsiderable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles neededwiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushingphysical task, something which one had the right to refuse and whichone was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far ashe had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that everyword he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil,was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in theDepartment that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning of thesixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as much as half anhour nothing came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, thennothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. Adeep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mightydeed, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was nowimpossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence thatthe war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it wasunexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free tilltomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing thebook, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under hisbody while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleepin his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stairabove 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 ofwater for coffee. Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was thebook. He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of thebrief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on thecover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn atthe edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passedthrough many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein
Winston began reading:
Chapter IIgnorance is Strength
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the NeolithicAge, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, theMiddle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they haveborne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well astheir attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: butthe essential structure of society has never altered. Even afterenormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same patternhas always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return toequilibrium, 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
wasreading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear atthe keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or coverthe page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek.From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: inthe room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of theclock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on thefender. It was bliss, it was etemity. Suddenly, as one sometimes doeswith a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read andre-read every word, he opened it at a different place and found himselfat Chapter III. He went on reading:
Chapter III War is Peace
The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was anevent which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of thetwentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of theBritish 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 ofconfused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-states are insome places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to thefortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasiacomprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiaticland-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises theAmericas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles,Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller thanthe others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises Chinaand the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a largebut fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet. In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanentlyat war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however,is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in theearly decades of the twentieth centary. It is a warfare of limited aimsbetween combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have nomaterial cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuineideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct ofwar, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become lessbloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria iscontinuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping,looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populationsto slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even toboiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when theyare committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. Butin a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostlyhighly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties.The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontierswhose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round theFloating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. Inthe centres of civilization war means no more than a continuousshortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocketbomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changedits character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged havechanged in their order of importance. Motives which were alreadypresent to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentiethcentuary have now become dominant and are consciously recognized andacted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war—for in spite of theregrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war—onemust realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to bedecisive. None of the three super-states could be definitivelyconquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenlymatched, and their natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia isprotected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlanticand the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and indus triousness of itsinhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense,anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-containedeconomies, in which production and consumption are geared to oneanother, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previouswars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is nolonger a matter of life and death. In any case each of the threesuper-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materialsthat it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has adirect economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between thefrontiers of the super- states, and not permanently in the possessionof any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners atTangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it abouta fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession ofthese thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that thethree powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power evercontrols the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantlychanging hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragmentby a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes ofalignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some ofthem yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colderclimates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensivemethods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheaplabour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries ofthe Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago,disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions ofill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas,reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continuallyfrom conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oilin the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, tocontrol more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture moreterritory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fightingnever really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. Thefrontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congoand the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the IndianOcean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured byOceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasiaand Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claimto enormous territories which in fact are largely unihabited andunexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, andthe territory which forms the heartland of each super-state alwaysremains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples roundthe Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy. They addnothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is usedfor purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be ina better position in which to wage another war. By their labour theslave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speededup. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and theprocess by which it maintains itself, would not be essentiallydifferent.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of
doublethink,this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by thedirecting brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of themachine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since theend of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with thesurplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. Atpresent, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem isobviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if noartificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world oftoday is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world thatexisted before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginaryfuture to which the people of that period looked forward. In the earlytwentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich,leisured, orderly, and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glassand steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness ofnearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing ata prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would goon developing. This failed to happen, partly because of theimpoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partlybecause scientific and technical progress depended on the empiricalhabit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimentedsociety. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fiftyyears ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices,always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, havebeen developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, andthe ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen- fifties have never beenfully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine arestill there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearanceit 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 fewgenerations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, butby a sort of automatic process—by producing wealth which it wassometimes impossible not to distribute—the machine did raise the livingstandards of the average humand being very greatly over a period ofabout fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of thetwentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatenedthe destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of ahierarchical 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 andperhaps the most important form of inequality would already havedisappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer nodistinction. 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
powerremained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice sucha society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and securitywere enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who arenormally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn tothink for themselves; and when once they had done this, they wouldsooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function,and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical societywas only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to theagricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of thetwentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. Itconflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had becomequasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, anycountry which remained industrially backward was helpless in a militarysense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by itsmore advanced rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty byrestricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent duringthe final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. Theeconomy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out ofcultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of thepopulation were prevented from working and kept half alive by Statecharity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since theprivations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made oppositioninevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turningwithout increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must beproduced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the onlyway of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of humanlives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shatteringto pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depthsof the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the massestoo comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even whenweapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still aconvenient way of expending labour power without producing anythingthat can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked upin it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships.Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought anymaterial benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours anotherFloating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always soplanned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting thebare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the populationare always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronicshortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as anadvantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groupssomewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state ofscarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thusmagnifies the distinction between one group and another. By thestandards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the InnerParty lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the fewluxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the bettertexture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink andtobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car orhelicopter—set him in a different world from a member of the OuterParty, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage incomparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’. Thesocial atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of alump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. Andat the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore indanger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem thenatural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, butaccomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle itwould be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world bybuilding temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them upagain, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then settingfire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not theemotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here isnot the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as theyare kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even thehumblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, andeven intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that heshould be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods arefear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it isnecessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state ofwar. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and,since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether thewar is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of warshould exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Partyrequires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in anatmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranksone goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the InnerParty that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In hiscapacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of theInner 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 eithernot happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than thedeclared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by thetechnique of
doublethink.Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mysticalbelief 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 anarticle of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiringmore and more territory and so building up an overwhelmingpreponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new andunanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly,and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventiveor speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at thepresent day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. InNewspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method ofthought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past werefounded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. Andeven technological progress only happens when its products can in someway be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful artsthe world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields arecultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. Butin matters of vital importance—meaning, in effect, war and policeespionage—the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at leasttolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surfaceof the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility ofindependent thought. There are therefore two great problems which theParty is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will,what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to killseveral hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warningbeforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this isits subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture ofpsychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness themeaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, andtesting the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis,and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologistconcerned only with such branches of his special subject as arerelevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of theMinistry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in theBrazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands ofthe Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some areconcerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; othersdevise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerfulexplosives, and more and more impenetrable armour- plating; otherssearch for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable ofbeing produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of wholecontinents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against allpossible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall boreits way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or anaeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others exploreeven remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun’s rays throughlenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producingartificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at theearth’s centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, andnone of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on theothers. What is more remarkable is that all three powers alreadypossess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any thattheir present researches are likely to discover. Although the Party,according to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombsfirst appeared as early as the nineteen- forties, and were first usedon a large scale about ten years later. At that time some hundreds ofbombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia,Western Europe, and North America. The effect was to convince theruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would meanthe end of organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter,although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombswere dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombsand store them up against the decisive opportunity which they allbelieve will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art of war hasremained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Helicopters aremore used than they were formerly, bombing planes have been largelysuperseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the fragile movablebattleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating Fortress;but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, thesubmarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the handgrenade are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughtersreported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles ofearlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of menwere often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre whichinvolves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation isundertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. Thestrategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselvesthat they are following, is the same. The plan is, by a combination offighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire aring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states,and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain onpeaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep. Duringthis time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all thestrategic spots; finally they will all be fired simultaneously, witheffects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will thenbe time to sign a pact of friendship with the remaining world-power, inpreparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary tosay, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, nofighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator andthe Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. Thisexplains the fact that in some places the frontiers between thesuperstates are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquerthe British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on theother hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers tothe 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 asFrance and Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate theinhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate apopulation of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technicaldevelopment goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem is thesame for all three super-states. It is absolutely necessary to theirstructure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to alimited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even theofficial ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkestsuspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania neversets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he isforbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowedcontact with foreigners he would discover that they are creaturessimilar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them islies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear,hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends mightevaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however oftenPersia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the mainfrontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understoodand acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all threesuper-states are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailingphilosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism,and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated asDeath- Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of theSelf. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of thetenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate themas barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually thethree philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systemswhich they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there isthe same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader,the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It followsthat the three super-states not only cannot conquer one another, butwould gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as theyremain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves ofcorn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers aresimultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their livesare dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it isnecessary that the war should continue everlastingly and withoutvictory. Meanwhile the fact that there is no danger of conquest makespossible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsocand its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat whathas been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war hasfundamentally changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner orlater came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In thepast, also, war was one of the main instruments by which humansocieties were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in allages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon theirfollowers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion thattended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the lossof independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable,the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts couldnot be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, twoand two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or anaeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were alwaysconquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimicalto illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able tolearn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of whathad happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course,always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that ispractised today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard ofsanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probablythe 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 bedangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as militarynecessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts canbe denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could becalled scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, butthey are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to showresults is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is nolonger needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the ThoughtPolice. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each isin effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion ofthought can be safely practised. Reality only exerts its pressurethrough the needs of everyday life—the need to eat and drink, to getshelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out oftop-storey windows, and the like. Between life and death, and betweenphysical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, butthat is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with thepast, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, whohas no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. Therulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesarscould not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starvingto death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they areobliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as theirrivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality intowhatever 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 ruminantanimals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable ofhurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. Iteats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve thespecial mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, itwill be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the rulinggroups of all countries, although they might recognize their commoninterest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fightagainst one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. Inour own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The waris waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the objectof the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but tokeep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore,has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that bybecoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure thatit exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the earlytwentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quitedifferent. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states,instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetualpeace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case eachwould still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from thesobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanentwould be the same as a permanent war. This—although the vast majorityof Party members understand it only in a shallower sense—is the innermeaning of the Party slogan:
War is Peace.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance arocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with theforbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off.Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with thetiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of thefaint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The bookfascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it toldhim nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It saidwhat he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set hisscattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar tohis own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, lessfear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you whatyou know already. He had just turned back to Chapter I when he heardJulia’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 hisarms. 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 almostimmediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make the coffee.
They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for halfan hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while topull up the counterpane. From below came the familiar sound of singingand the scrape of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed womanwhom Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture inthe yard. There seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was notmarching to and fro between the washtub and the line, alternatelygagging herself with clothes pegs and breaking forth into lusty song.Julia had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on thepoint of falling asleep. He reached out for the book, which was lyingon 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 fourhours ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and beganreading:
Chapter I Ignorance is Strength
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the NeolithicAge, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, theMiddle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they haveborne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well astheir attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: butthe essential structure of society has never altered. Even afterenormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same patternhas always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return toequilibnum, 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 ofthe High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is tochange places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have anaim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are toomuch crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious ofanything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions andcreate a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughouthistory a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs overand 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 eithertheir belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, orboth. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low ontheir side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty andjustice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middlethrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, andthemselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits offfrom one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the strugglebegins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never eventemporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be anexaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progressof a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the averagehuman being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago.But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform orrevolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. Fromthe point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant muchmore than a change in the name of their masters. By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern hadbecome obvious to many observers. There then rose schools of thinkerswho interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show thatinequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, ofcourse, had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it wasnow put forward there was a significant change. In the past the needfor a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specificallyof the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by thepriests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and ithad generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginaryworld beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling forpower, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, andfraternity. Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood began to beassailed by people who were not yet in positions of command, but merelyhoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutionsunder the banner of equality, and then had estab lished a fresh tyrannyas soon as the old one was overthrown. The new Middle groups in effectproclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appearedin the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain ofthought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was stilldeeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant ofSocialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishingliberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The newmovements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc inOceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonlycalled, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating
unfreedom and
in
equality.These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended tokeep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purposeof all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosenmoment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and thenstop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who wouldthen become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the Highwould be able to maintain their position permanently. The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation ofhistorical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which hadhardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical movement ofhistory was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it wasintelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal, underlyingcause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century,human equality had become technically possible. It was still true thatmen were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to bespecialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; butthere was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for largedifferences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been notonly inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price ofcivilization. With the development of machine production, however, thecase was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to dodifferent kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live atdifferent social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of viewof the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, humanequality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to beaverted. In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society wasin fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The ideaof an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state ofbrotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted thehuman imagination for thousands of years. And this vision had had acertain hold even on the groups who actually profited by eachhistorical change. The heirs of the French, English, and Americanrevolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rightsof man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, andhave even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to someextent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the maincurrents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradisehad been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led backto hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlookthat set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned,in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the useof war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extractconfessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of wholepopulations-not only became common again, but were tolerated and evendefended by people who considered themselves enlightened andprogressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions,and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and itsrivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they hadbeen foreshadowed by the various systems, generally calledtotalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the mainoutlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos hadlong been obvious. What kind of people would control this world hadbeen equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most partof bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers,publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, andprofessional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in thesalaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, hadbeen shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopolyindustry and centralized government. As compared with their oppositenumbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted byluxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of whatthey were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This lastdifference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, allthe tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The rulinggroups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and werecontent to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt actand to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even theCatholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had thepower to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The inventionof print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and thefilm and the radio carried the process further. With the development oftelevision, and the technical advance which made it possible to receiveand transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life cameto an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough tobe worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day under theeyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with allother channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcingnot only complete obedience to the will of the State, but completeuniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, societyregrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the newHigh group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct butknew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long beenrealized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessedjointly. The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ which took placein the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentrationof 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 pettypersonal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything inOceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the productsas it thinks fit. In the years following the Revolution it was able tostep into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the wholeprocess was represented as an act of collectivization. It had alwaysbeen assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialismmust follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated.Factories, mines, land, houses, transport—everything had been takenaway from them: and since these things were no longer private property,it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew outof the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has infact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with theresult, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality hasbeen made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper thanthis. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall frompower. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs soinefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows astrong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it losesits own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do notoperate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in somedegree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them wouldremain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is themental attitude of the ruling class itself.
After the middle of the present century, the first danger had inreality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide theworld is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerablethrough slow demographic changes which a government with wide powerscan easily avert. The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one.The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revoltmerely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are notpermitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become awarethat they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past timeswere totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but otherand equally large dislocations can and do happen without havingpolitical results, because there is no way in which discontent canbecome articulate. As fcr the problem of overproduction, which has beenlatent in our society since the development of machine technique, it issolved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), which isalso useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From thepoint of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuinedangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, underemployed,power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and scepticism intheir own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is aproblem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of thedirecting group and of the larger executive group that lies immediatelybelow it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influencedin 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 pyramidcomes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Everysuccess, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery,all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issuedirectly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen BigBrother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. Wemay be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is alreadyconsiderable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is theguise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. Hisfunction is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence,emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towardsan organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. its numberslimited to six millions, or something less than 2 per cent of thepopulation of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party,which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, maybe justly likened to the hands. Below that come the dumb masses whom wehabitually refer to as ‘the proles’, numbering perhaps 85 per cent ofthe population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the prolesare the Low: for the slave population of the equatorial lands who passconstantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent ornecessary part of the structure.
In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. Thechild of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the InnerParty. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, takenat the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or anymarked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, SouthAmericans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks ofthe Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from theinhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants havethe feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distantcapital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whosewhereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief linguafranca and Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in anyway. Its rulers are not held together by blood-ties but by adherence toa common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified, and veryrigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditarylines. There is far less to- and-fro movement between the differentgroups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrialage. Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount ofinterchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings areexcluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the OuterParty are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, inpractice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most giftedamong them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simplymarked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state ofaffairs 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 aimat transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there wereno other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would beperfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranksof the proletariat. In the crucial years, the fact that the Party wasnot a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. Theolder kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight againstsomething called ‘class privilege’ assumed that what is not hereditarycannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchyneed not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditaryaristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptiveorganizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted forhundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is notfather-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-viewand a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. Aruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate itssuccessors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood butwith 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 thatcharacterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique ofthe Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from beingperceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towardsrebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing isto be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation togeneration and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying,not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power ofgrasping that the world could be other than it is. They could onlybecome dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made itnecessary to educate them more highly; but, since military andcommercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popu lareducation is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or donot hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be grantedintellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member,on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on themost unimportant subject can be tolerated.
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the ThoughtPolice. 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 orin bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that heis being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. Hisfriendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife andchildren, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words hemutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, areall jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but anyeccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervousmannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, iscertain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any directionwhatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or byany clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law.Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are notformally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures,imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment forcrimes which have actually been committed, but are merely thewiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time inthe future. A Party member is required to have not only the rightopinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudesdemanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be statedwithout laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is aperson naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a
goodthinker),he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is thetrue belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaboratemental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round theNewspeak 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 respitesfrom enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy ofhatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph overvictories, and selfabasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life aredeliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the TwoMinutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce asceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his earlyacquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in thediscipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, inNewspeak,
crimestop.
Crimestopmeans the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at thethreshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of notgrasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, ofmisunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc,and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capableof leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, meansprotective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary,orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mentalprocesses as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanicsociety rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotentand that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother isnot omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for anunwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. Thekeyword here is
blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, thisword has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent,it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, incontradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means aloyal willingness to say that black is white when Party disciplinedemands this. But it means also the ability to
believe that black is white, and more, to
knowthat black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed thecontrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, madepossible 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 whichis subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason isthat the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-dayconditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must becut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreigncountries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is betteroff than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfortis constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for thereadjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility ofthe Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records ofevery kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show thatthe predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also thatno 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 ofweakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) isthe enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. Andif the facts say otherwise then the facts must be altered. Thus historyis continuously rewritten. This day- to-day falsification of the past,carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stabilityof the régime as the work of repression and espionage carried out bythe 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 writtenrecords and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and thememories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of allrecords and in equally full control of the minds of its members, itfollows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It alsofollows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered inany specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shapeis needed at the moment, then this new version
isthe past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds goodeven when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out ofrecognition several times in the course of a year. At all times theParty is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute cannever have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that thecontrol of the past depends above all on the training of memory. Tomake sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of themoment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to
rememberthat events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary torearrange one’s memories or to tamper with written records, then it isnecessary to
forget that one has done so. The trick of doingthis can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned bythe majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligentas well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, ‘realitycontrol’. In Newspeak it is called
doublethink, though
doublethink comprises much else as well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefsin one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Partyintellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; hetherefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by theexercise of
doublethink he also satisfies himself that realityis not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not becarried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to beunconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and henceof guilt.
Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, sincethe essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception whileretaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. Totell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget anyfact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessaryagain, 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 takeaccount of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensablynecessary. 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
doublethinkone erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie alwaysone leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of
doublethinkthat the Party has been able—and may, for all we know, continue to beable for thousands of years—to arrest the course of history.
All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because theyossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid andarrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, andwere overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessionswhen they should have used force, and once again were overthrown. Theyfell, that is to say, either through consciousness or throughunconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have produced asystem of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously.And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party bemade permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must beable to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership isto combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the Power to learnfrom past mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of
doublethink are those who invented
doublethinkand 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 thosewho are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, thegreater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the moreintelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the factthat war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the socialscale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational arethe subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people thewar is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over theirbodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of completeindifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordshipmeans simply that they will be doing the same work as before for newmasters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightlymore favoured workers whom we call ‘the proles’ are only intermittentlyconscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded intofrenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they arecapable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It isin the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that thetrue war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmlyby those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking-togetherof opposites—knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism-is oneof the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The officialideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practicalreason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principlefor which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to dothis in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the workingclass unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in auniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and wasadopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity ofthe family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appealto the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the fourMinistries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence intheir deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concernsitself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Lovewith torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. Thesecontradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinaryhypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in
doublethink. For itis only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retainedindefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. Ifhuman equality is to be for ever averted—if the High, as we have calledthem, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mentalcondition must be controlled insanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored. It is;
whyshould human equality be averted? Supposing that the mechanics of theprocess have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge,accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment oftime?
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-questionedinstinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought
doublethink,the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessaryparaphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists .. .
Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a newsound. It seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some timepast. She was lying on her side, naked from the waist upwards, with hercheek 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 thefloor, 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 hedid not know, it had merely systematized the knowledge that hepossessed already. But after reading it he knew better than before thathe was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did notmake you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clungto the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellowbeam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell acrossthe pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and the girl’s smoothbody touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. Hewas safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring ‘Sanity isnot statistical,’ with the feeling that this remark contained in it aprofound wisdom.
