---
title: "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 17 of 25
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/17/
cite: "George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, section 17. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/17/"
---

# Nineteen Eighty-Four

*George Orwell*

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> Title: 1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four]
Date of first publication: 1949
Author: Eric Arthur Blair (as George Orwell) (1903-1950)
Date first posted: May 17, 2012
Date last updated: June 26, 2026
Faded Page eBook #20120511

> This eBook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mary Meehan, Al Haines
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

> A NOVEL BY

> George Orwell

> SECKER & WARBURG                         LONDON

> S. J. REGINALD SAUNDERS & CO. LTD.      TORONTO

> COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1949
    S. J. REGINALD SAUNDERS AND COMPANY LIMITED

> _All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
    this book or portions thereof in any form._

> _first Canadian edition_

> PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
    BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, SCRANTON, PA.

> *       *       *       *       *

> _Books by George Orwell_

> NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
    ANIMAL FARM
    DICKENS, DALI AND OTHERS
    COMING UP FOR AIR
    BURMESE DAYS
    DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
    HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
    THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER

> [The end of _1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four]_ by Eric Arthur Blair (as George Orwell)]

## 17. IX

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/17/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/17/#p-N

[¶0] Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It
had come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have not only
the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held
up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood
and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work,
leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All
sensations seemed to be magnified. His overalls fretted his shoulders,
the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand
was an effort that made his joints creak.

[¶1] He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone else
in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to
do, no Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He could
spend six hours in the hiding place and another nine in his own bed.
Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the
direction of Mr. Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open for the
patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no
danger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy brief case that he was
carrying bumped against his knees at each step, sending a tingling
sensation up and down the skin of his leg. Inside it was _the book_,
which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet
opened, nor even looked at.

[¶2] On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the
shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the
waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of
marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of
massed planes, the booming of guns--after six days of this, when the
great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of
Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have
got their hands on the two thousand Eurasian war criminals who were to
be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would
unquestionably have torn them to pieces--at just this moment it had been
announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania
was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.

[¶3] There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place.
Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once,
that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in
a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when
it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners
were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand
people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the
uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the
Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a
large, bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing
the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he
gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other,
enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his
head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an
endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings,
rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda,
unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen
to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few
moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker
was drowned by a wild beastlike roaring that rose uncontrollably from
thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the
schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty
minutes when a messenger hurried onto the platform and a scrap of paper
was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without
pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the
content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different.
Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous
commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated
were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was
sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous
interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to
shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity
in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered
from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The
orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched
forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his
speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting
from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the
target had been changed.

[¶4] The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker
had switched from one line to the other actually in mid-sentence, not
only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the
moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of
disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he
did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me, I think
you've dropped your brief case." He took the brief case abstractedly,
without speaking. He knew that it would be days before he had an
opportunity to look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was
over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now
nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done
likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreens, recalling
them to their posts, were hardly necessary.

[¶5] Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with
Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now
completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers,
books, pamphlets, films, sound tracks, photographs--all had to be
rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it
was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one
week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with
Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was
overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved
could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records
Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour
snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and
pitched all over the corridors; meals consisted of sandwiches and
Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen.
Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried
to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back,
sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper
cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half burying the
speakwrite and overflowing onto the floor, so that the first job was
always to stack them into a neat-enough pile to give him room to work.
What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely
mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for
another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and
imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in
transferring the war from one part of the world to another was
considerable.

[¶6] By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed
wiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing
physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one
was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he
had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word
he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink pencil, was a
deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that
the forgery should be perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the
dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing
came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere
at about the same time the work was easing off. A deep and as it were
secret sigh went through the Department. A mighty deed, which could
never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any
human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia
had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly announced that
all workers in the Ministry were free till tomorrow morning. Winston,
still carrying the brief case containing _the book_, which had remained
between his feet while he worked and under his body while he slept, went
home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the
water was barely more than tepid.

[¶7] With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair
above Mr. Charrington's shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer.
He opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove, and put on a pan of
water for coffee. Julia would arrive presently; meanwhile there was _the
book_. He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the
brief case.

[¶8] A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the
cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at
the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through
many hands. The inscription on the title page ran:

[¶9] THE THEORY AND PRACTICE
    OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

[¶10] by

[¶11] Emmanuel Goldstein

[¶12] [Winston began reading.]

[¶13] _Chapter 1._

[¶14] IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

[¶15] Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the
     Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world,
     the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in
     many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their
     relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another,
     have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society
     has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly
     irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself,
     just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far
     it is pushed one way or the other.

[¶16] The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable....

[¶17] Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he
_was_ reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no
ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or
cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his
cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of
children; in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice
of the clock. He settled deeper into the armchair and put his feet up on
the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes
does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and
reread every word, he opened it at a different place and found himself
at the third chapter. He went on reading:

[¶18] _Chapter 3._

[¶19] WAR IS PEACE.

[¶20] The splitting-up of the world into three great superstates was an
     event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of
     the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and
     of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three
     existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in
     being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after
     another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the
     three superstates are in some places arbitrary, and in others they
     fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they
     follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the
     northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal
     to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic
     islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern
     portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a
     less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries
     to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but
     fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.

[¶21] In one combination or another, these three superstates are
     permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five
     years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating
     struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century.
     It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable
     to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting, and
     are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not
     to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude
     toward it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the
     contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all
     countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of
     children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and
     reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and
     burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are
     committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But
     in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people,
     mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few
     casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the
     vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess
     at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on
     the sea lanes. In the centers of civilization war means no more
     than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional
     crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War
     has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for
     which war is waged have changed in their order of importance.
     Motives which were already present to some small extent in the
     great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant
     and are consciously recognized and acted upon.

[¶22] To understand the nature of the present war--for in spite of the
     regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same
     war--one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for
     it to be decisive. None of the three superstates could be
     definitely conquered even by the other two in combination. They are
     too evenly matched, and their natural defenses are too formidable.
     Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width
     of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and
     industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer,
     in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the
     establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and
     consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets
     which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while
     the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and
     death. In any case, each of the three superstates is so vast that
     it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own
     boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it
     is a war for labor power. Between the frontiers of the superstates,
     and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a
     rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville,
     Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the
     population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly
     populated regions, and of the northern ice cap, that the three
     powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever
     controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are
     constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or
     that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the
     endless changes of alignment.

[¶23] All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some
     of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in
     colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively
     expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve
     of cheap labor. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the
     countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian
     Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of
     millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of
     these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves,
     pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like
     so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to
     capture more territory, to control more labor power, to turn out
     more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely.
     It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the
     edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and
     forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the
     Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are
     constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia;
     in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is
     never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous
     territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored;
     but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the
     territory which forms the heartland of each superstate always
     remains inviolate. Moreover, the labor of the exploited peoples
     round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy.
     They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they
     produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war
     is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
     By their labor the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous
     warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure
     of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself,
     would not be essentially different.

[¶24] The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the
     principles of _doublethink_, this aim is simultaneously recognized
     and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is
     to use up the products of the machine without raising the general
     standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century,
     the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has
     been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human
     beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
     urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial
     processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a
     bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that
     existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the
     imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward.
     In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society
     unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient--a glittering
     antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete--was
     part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science
     and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed
     natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to
     happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long
     series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and
     technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought,
     which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a
     whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years
     ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices,
     always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage,
     have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely
     stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties
     have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent
     in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine
     first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that
     the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for
     human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used
     deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and
     disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact,
     without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic
     process--by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not
     to distribute--the machine did raise the living standards of the
     average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years
     at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
     centuries.

[¶25] But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth
     threatened the destruction--indeed, in some sense was the
     destruction--of a hierarchical society. In a world in which
     everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house
     with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or
     even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important
     form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once
     became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was
     possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the
     sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly
     distributed, while _power_ remained in the hands of a small
     privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long
     remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all
     alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by
     poverty would become literate and would learn to think for
     themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or
     later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and
     they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society
     was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to
     the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the
     twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution.
     It conflicted with the tendency toward mechanization which had
     become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and
     moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was
     helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated,
     directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

[¶26] Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by
     restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent
     during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and
     1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land
     went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great
     blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half
     alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness,
     and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary,
     it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the
     wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of
     the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be
     distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by
     continuous warfare.

[¶27] The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human
     lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of
     shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking
     in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used
     to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too
     intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed,
     their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor
     power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating
     Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labor that would
     build several hundred cargo ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as
     obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and
     with further enormous labors another Floating Fortress is built. In
     principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any
     surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the
     population. In practice the needs of the population are always
     underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of
     half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an
     advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups
     somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of
     scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus
     magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the
     standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the
     Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless,
     the few luxuries that he does enjoy--his large well-appointed flat,
     the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food
     and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private
     motorcar or helicopter--set him in a different world from a member
     of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a
     similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we
     call "the proles." The social atmosphere is that of a besieged
     city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the
     difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the
     consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the
     handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural,
     unavoidable condition of survival.

[¶28] War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary
     destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable
     way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus
     labor of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging
     holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast
     quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would
     provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a
     hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of
     the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept
     steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the
     humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and
     even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary
     that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing
     moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other
     words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate
     to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually
     happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not
     matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed
     is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the
     intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is
     more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost
     universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it
     becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and
     hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an
     administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner
     Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and
     he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either
     not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the
     declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the
     technique of _doublethink_. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers
     for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and
     that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed
     master of the entire world.

[¶29] All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as
     an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually
     acquiring more and more territory and so building up an
     overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some
     new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues
     unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in
     which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any
     outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense,
     has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for
     "Science." The empirical method of thought, on which all the
     scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the
     most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological
     progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for
     the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world
     is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are
     cultivated with horse plows while books are written by machinery.
     But in matters of vital importance--meaning, in effect, war and
     police espionage--the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at
     least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole
     surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the
     possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great
     problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to
     discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking,
     and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a
     few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as
     scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.
     The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and
     inquisitor, studying with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of
     facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the
     truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and
     physical torture; or he is a chemist, physicist, or biologist
     concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are
     relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the
     Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the
     Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands
     of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work.
     Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future
     wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more
     powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armor-plating;
     others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons
     capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the
     vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs
     immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce
     a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine
     under the water, or an airplane as independent of its base as a
     sailing ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as
     focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of
     kilometers away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and
     tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's center.

[¶30] But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization,
     and none of the three superstates ever gains a significant lead on
     the others. What is more remarkable is that all three powers
     already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful
     than any that their present researches are likely to discover.
     Although the Party, according to its habit, claims the invention
     for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the
     Nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten
     years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on
     industrial centers, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and
     North America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all
     countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of
     organized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter,
     although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more
     bombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue to produce
     atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity
     which they all believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the
     art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty
     years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing
     planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles,
     and the fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost
     unsinkable Floating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little
     development. The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun,
     even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use. And in spite
     of the endless slaughters reported in the press and on the
     telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars, in which
     hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed in
     a few weeks, have never been repeated.

[¶31] None of the three superstates ever attempts any maneuver which
     involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation is
     undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. The
     strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to
     themselves that they are following, is the same. The plan is, by a
     combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of
     treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or
     other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship
     with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as
     to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with
     atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally
     they will all be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating
     as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign a
     pact of friendship with the remaining world power, in preparation
     for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is
     a mere daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting
     ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the
     Pole; no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. This
     explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the
     superstates are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily
     conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe,
     or on the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its
     frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would
     violate the principle, followed on all sides though never
     formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer the
     areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be
     necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great
     physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a
     hundred million people, who, so far as technical development goes,
     are roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all
     three superstates. It is absolutely necessary to their structure
     that there should be no contact with foreigners except, to a
     limited extent, with war prisoners and colored slaves. Even the
     official ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest
     suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania
     never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he
     is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed
     contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures
     similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about
     them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken,
     and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale
     depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that
     however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change
     hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except
     bombs.

[¶32] Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly
     understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in
     all three superstates are very much the same. In Oceania the
     prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called
     Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name
     usually translated as Death-worship, but perhaps better rendered
     as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed
     to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but
     he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality
     and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely
     distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not
     distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal
     structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, the same
     economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the
     three superstates not only cannot conquer one another, but would
     gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they
     remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of
     corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are
     simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their
     lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it
     is necessary that the war should continue everlastingly and without
     victory. Meanwhile the fact that there _is_ no danger of conquest
     makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature
     of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to
     repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war
     has fundamentally changed its character.

[¶33] In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that
     sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or
     defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by
     which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All
     rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world
     upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any
     illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as
     defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result
     generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat
     had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In
     philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might
     make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they
     had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner
     or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to
     illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to
     learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of
     what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were,
     of course, always colored and biased, but falsification of the kind
     that is practiced today would have been impossible. War was a sure
     safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were
     concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards.
     While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be
     completely irresponsible.

[¶34] But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be
     dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as
     military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most
     palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen,
     researches that could be called scientific are still carried out
     for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of
     daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important.
     Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing
     is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of
     the three superstates is unconquerable, each is in effect a
     separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can
     be safely practiced. Reality only exerts its pressure through the
     needs of everyday life--the need to eat and drink, to get shelter
     and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of
     top-story windows, and the like. Between life and death, and
     between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a
     distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer
     world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in
     interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up
     and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the
     Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent
     their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to
     be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low
     level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum
     is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they
     choose.

[¶35] The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous
     wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between
     certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that
     they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal
     it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods,
     and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a
     hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely
     internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries,
     although they might recognize their common interest and therefore
     limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another,
     and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they
     are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by
     each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the
     war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep
     the structure of society intact. The very word "war," therefore,
     has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by
     becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure
     that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the
     early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by
     something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the
     three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to
     live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries.
     For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe,
     freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A
     peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent
     war. This--although the vast majority of Party members understand
     it only in a shallower sense--is the inner meaning of the Party
     slogan: WAR IS PEACE.

[¶36] Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a
rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the
forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude
and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness
of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze
from the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or
more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was
new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have
said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in
order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously
more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he
perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. He had just
turned back to Chapter 1 when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and
started out of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown tool bag on
the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was more than a week since
they had seen one another.

[¶37] "I've got _the book_," he said as they disentangled themselves.

[¶38] "Oh, you've got it? Good," she said without much interest, and almost
immediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make the coffee.

[¶39] They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half
an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull
up the counterpane. From below came the familiar sound of singing and
the scrape of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman whom
Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the
yard. There seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was not marching
to and fro between the washtub and the line, alternately gagging herself
with clothes pegs and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled
down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling
asleep. He reached out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and
sat up against the bedhead.

[¶40] "We must read it," he said. "You too. All members of the Brotherhood
have to read it."

[¶41] "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."

[¶42] The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or four
hours ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and began
reading:

[¶43] _Chapter 1._

[¶44] IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

[¶45] Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the
     Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world,
     the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in
     many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their
     relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another,
     have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society
     has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly
     irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself,
     just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far
     it is pushed one way or the other.

[¶46] "Julia, are you awake?" said Winston.

[¶47] "Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvelous."

[¶48] He continued reading:

[¶49] The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim
     of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is
     to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have
     an aim--for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they
     are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently
     conscious of anything outside their daily lives--is to abolish all
     distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
     Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main
     outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem
     to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a
     moment when they lose either their belief in themselves, or their
     capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown
     by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to
     them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as
     they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back
     into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the
     High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other
     groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again.
     Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily
     successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to
     say that throughout history there has been no progress of a
     material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average
     human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries
     ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform
     or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
     From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever
     meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

[¶50] By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had
     become obvious to many observers. There then arose schools of
     thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed
     to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life. This
     doctrine, of course, had always had its adherents, but in the
     manner in which it was now put forward there was a significant
     change. In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had
     been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by
     kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who
     were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by
     promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave.
     The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made
     use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now,
     however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by
     people who were not yet in positions of command, but merely hoped
     to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutions
     under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh
     tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The new Middle
     groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a
     theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the
     last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave
     rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the
     Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that
     appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty
     and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements
     which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in
     Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-worship, as it is
     commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating
     _un_freedom and _in_equality. These new movements, of course, grew out
     of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service
     to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest
     progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar
     pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As usual,
     the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become
     the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be
     able to maintain their position permanently.

[¶51] The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of
     historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which
     had hardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclical
     movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and
     if it was intelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal,
     underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the
     twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible.
     It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents
     and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favored some
     individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need
     for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In
     earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but
     desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the
     development of machine production, however, the case was altered.
     Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different
     kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at
     different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of
     view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power,
     human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a
     danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and
     peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy
     to believe in it. The idea of an earthly paradise in which men
     should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and
     without brute labor, had haunted the human imagination for
     thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain hold even on
     the groups who actually profited by each historic change. The heirs
     of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly
     believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of
     speech, equality before the law, and the like, and had even allowed
     their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the
     fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of
     political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been
     discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every
     new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back
     to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of
     outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long
     abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years--imprisonment
     without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public
     executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and
     the deportation of whole populations--not only became common again,
     but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered
     themselves enlightened and progressive.

[¶52] It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars,
     revolutions and counterrevolutions in all parts of the world that
     Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political
     theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems,
     generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the
     century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from
     the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people
     would control this world had been equally obvious. The new
     aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats,
     scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts,
     sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.
     These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and
     the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought
     together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized
     government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages,
     they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for
     pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing
     and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was
     cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies
     of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups
     were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were
     content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt
     act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.
     Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern
     standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no
     government had the power to keep its citizens under constant
     surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to
     manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the
     process further. With the development of television, and the
     technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
     simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.
     Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be
     worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the
     eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with
     all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of
     enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but
     complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the
     first time.

[¶53] After the revolutionary period of the Fifties and Sixties, society
     regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the
     new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon
     instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had
     long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is
     collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when
     they are possessed jointly. The so-called "abolition of private
     property" which took place in the middle years of the century
     meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands
     than before; but with this difference, that the new owners were a
     group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of
     the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings.
     Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it
     controls everything and disposes of the products as it thinks fit.
     In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this
     commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was
     represented as an act of collectivization. It had always been
     assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism
     must follow; and unquestionably the capitalists had been
     expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport--everything
     had been taken away from them; and since these things were no
     longer private property, it followed that they must be public
     property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement
     and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main
     item in the Socialist program, with the result, foreseen and
     intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made
     permanent.

[¶54] But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper
     than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can
     fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs
     so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it
     allows a strong and discontented Middle Group to come into being,
     or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern.
     These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them
     are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard
     against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately
     the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class
     itself.

[¶55] After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in
     reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the
     world is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable
     through slow demographic changes which a government with wide
     powers can easily avert. The second danger, also, is only a
     theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and
     they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so
     long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison,
     they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent
     economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not
     now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations
     can and do happen without having political results, because there
     is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As for the
     problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society
     since the development of machine technique, it is solved by the
     device of continuous warfare (_see_ Chapter 3), which is also
     useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. From the
     point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the only genuine
     dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able,
     underemployed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism
     and skepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is
     educational. It is a problem of continuously molding the
     consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger
     executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness
     of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.

[¶56] Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it
     already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of
     the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and
     all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory,
     every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all
     happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his
     leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is
     a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be
     reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already
     considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the
     guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world.
     His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and
     reverence, emotions which are more easily felt toward an individual
     than toward an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner
     Party, its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than
     two per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party
     comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as
     the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below
     that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as "the
     proles," numbering perhaps eighty-five per cent of the population.
     In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low,
     for the slave populations of the equatorial lands, who pass
     constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or
     necessary part of the structure.

[¶57] In principle, membership in these three groups is not hereditary.
     The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the
     Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by
     examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial
     discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by
     another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to
     be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators
     of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In
     no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they
     are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has
     no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts
     nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua franca and
     Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in any way.
     Its rulers are not held together by blood ties but by adherence to
     a common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified, and
     very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be
     hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro movement between the
     different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the
     pre-industrial ages. Between the two branches of the Party there is
     a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure
     that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious
     members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to
     rise. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into
     the Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become
     nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police
     and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not necessarily
     permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is not a
     class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting
     power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way
     of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly
     prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the
     proletariat. In the crucial years, the fact that the Party was not
     a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The
     older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against
     something called "class privilege," assumed that what is not
     hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity
     of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect
     that hereditary aristocracies have always been short-lived, whereas
     adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes
     lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of
     oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the
     persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life,
     imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling
     group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not
     concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself.
     _Who_ wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical
     structure remains always the same.

[¶58] All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that
     characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique
     of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society
     from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move
     toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians
     nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue
     from generation to generation and from century to century, working,
     breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but
     without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it
     is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial
     technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since
     military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level
     of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the
     masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of
     indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they
     have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even
     the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject
     can be tolerated.

[¶59] A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the
     Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he
     is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting,
     in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and
     without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is
     indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behavior toward
     his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone,
     the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of
     his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual
     misdemeanor, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of
     habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of
     an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of
     choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand, his actions
     are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of
     behavior. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which,
     when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and
     the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and
     vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have
     actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons
     who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A
     Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but
     the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of
     him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without
     laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a
     person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak, a _goodthinker_), he will
     in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true
     belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate
     mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round
     the Newspeak words _crimestop_, _blackwhite_, and _doublethink_,
     makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject
     whatever.

[¶60] A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no
     respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous
     frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph
     over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of
     the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life
     are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as
     the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly
     induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by
     his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage
     in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is
     called, in Newspeak, _crimestop_. _Crimestop_ means the faculty of
     stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any
     dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies,
     of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the
     simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being
     bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of
     leading in a heretical direction. _Crimestop_, in short, means
     protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary,
     orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental
     processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
     Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is
     omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality
     Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible,
     there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in
     the treatment of facts. The key word here is _blackwhite_. Like so
     many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory
     meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently
     claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.
     Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that
     black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means
     also the ability to _believe_ that black is white, and more, to
     _know_ that black is white, and to forget that one has ever
     believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the
     past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces
     all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as _doublethink_.

[¶61] The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of
     which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary
     reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates
     present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of
     comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be
     cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to
     believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the
     average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far
     the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the
     need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely
     that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be
     constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions
     of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in
     doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to
     change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of
     weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may
     be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the
     enemy. And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be
     altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day
     falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is
     as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of
     repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.

[¶62] The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past
     events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only
     in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the
     records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full
     control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of
     its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses
     to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it
     never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has
     been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this
     new version _is_ the past, and no different past can ever have
     existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same
     event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the
     course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession of
     absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been
     different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of
     the past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure
     that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is
     merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to _remember_
     that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary
     to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records, then
     it is necessary to _forget_ that one has done so. The trick of
     doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It _is_
     learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who
     are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called,
     quite frankly, "reality control." In Newspeak it is called
     _doublethink_, though _doublethink_ comprises much else as well.

[¶63] _Doublethink_ means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs
     in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party
     intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered;
     he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by
     the exercise of _doublethink_ he also satisfies himself that
     reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it
     would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has
     to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity
     and hence of guilt. _Doublethink_ lies at the very heart of Ingsoc,
     since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception
     while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete
     honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them,
     to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it
     becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so
     long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality
     and all the while to take account of the reality which one
     denies--all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word
     _doublethink_ it is necessary to exercise _doublethink_. For by
     using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a
     fresh act of _doublethink_ one erases this knowledge; and so on
     indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
     Ultimately it is by means of _doublethink_ that the Party has been
     able--and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands
     of years--to arrest the course of history.

[¶64] All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they
     ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and
     arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances,
     and were overthrown, or they became liberal and cowardly, made
     concessions when they should have used force, and once again were
     overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness
     or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to
     have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can
     exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could
     the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and
     to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of
     reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in
     one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.

[¶65] It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of
     _doublethink_ are those who invented _doublethink_ and know that it
     is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have
     the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are
     furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater
     the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent,
     the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact that war
     hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale.
     Those whose attitude toward the war is most nearly rational are the
     subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the
     war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over
     their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter
     of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a change of
     overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as
     before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old
     ones. The slightly more favored workers whom we call "the proles"
     are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary
     they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left
     to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that
     the war is happening. It is in the ranks of the Party, and above
     all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found.
     World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to
     be impossible. This peculiar linking-together of
     opposites--knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism--is
     one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The
     official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is
     no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies
     every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood,
     and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a
     contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and
     it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar
     to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It
     systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it
     calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the
     sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries
     by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their
     deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns
     itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of
     Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.
     These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from
     ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in _doublethink_.
     For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be
     retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be
     broken. If human equality is to be forever averted--if the High, as
     we have called them, are to keep their places permanently--then the
     prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

[¶66] But there is one question which until this moment we have almost
     ignored. It is: _why_ should human equality be averted? Supposing
     that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what
     is the motive for this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze
     history at a particular moment of time?

[¶67] Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen, the mystique of
     the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon
     _doublethink_. But deeper than this lies the original motive, the
     never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power
     and brought _doublethink_, the Thought Police, continuous warfare,
     and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence
     afterwards. This motive really consists ...

[¶68] Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound. It
seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some time past. She was
lying on her side, naked from the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed
on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose
and fell slowly and regularly.

[¶69] "Julia."

[¶70] No answer.

[¶71] "Julia, are you awake?"

[¶72] No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it carefully on the
floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.

[¶73] He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He
understood _how_; he did not understand _why_. Chapter 1, like Chapter
3, had not actually told him anything that he did not know; it had
merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already. But after
reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a
minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth
and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the
whole world, you were not mad. A yellow beam from the sinking sun
slanted in through the window and fell across the pillow. He shut his
eyes. The sun on his face and the girl's smooth body touching his own
gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything
was all right. He fell asleep murmuring "Sanity is not statistical,"
with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.