---
title: "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 21 of 25
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/21/
cite: "George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, section 21. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/21/"
---

# 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)]

## 21. III

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/21/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/21/#p-N

[¶0] "There are three stages in your reintegration," said O'Brien. "There is
learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time
for you to enter upon the second stage."

[¶1] As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds
were looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could move his knees
a little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms
from the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He
could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough; it was chiefly when
he showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got
through a whole session without use of the dial. He could not remember
how many sessions there had been. The whole process seemed to stretch
out over a long, indefinite time--weeks, possibly--and the intervals
between the sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an
hour or two.

[¶2] "As you lie there," said O'Brien, "you have often wondered--you have
even asked me--why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and
trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was
essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the
society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember
writing in your diary, 'I understand _how_; I do not understand _why_'?
It was when you thought about 'why' that you doubted your own sanity.
You have read _the book_, Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at least.
Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?"

[¶3] "You have read it?" said Winston.

[¶4] "I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is
produced individually, as you know."

[¶5] "Is it true, what it says?"

[¶6] "As description, yes. The program it sets forth is nonsense. The secret
accumulation of knowledge--a gradual spread of enlightenment--ultimately
a proletarian rebellion--the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw
yourself that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The
proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million.
They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason; you know it already.
If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you must
abandon them. There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The
rule of the Party is forever. Make that the starting point of your
thoughts."

[¶7] He came closer to the bed. "Forever!" he repeated. "And now let us get
back to the question of 'how' and 'why.' You understand well enough
_how_ the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me _why_ we cling to
power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak," he
added as Winston remained silent.

[¶8] Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feeling
of weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had
come back into O'Brien's face. He knew in advance what O'Brien would
say: that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for
the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass
were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the
truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who
were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between
freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind,
happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of the
weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its
own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston,
the terrible thing was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it.
You could see it in his face. O'Brien knew everything. A thousand times
better than Winston, he knew what the world was really like, in what
degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and
barbarities the Party kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed
it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate
purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is
more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing
and then simply persists in his lunacy?

[¶9] "You are ruling over us for our own good," he said feebly. "You believe
that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore--"

[¶10] He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his
body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

[¶11] "That was stupid, Winston, stupid!" he said. "You should know better
than to say a thing like that."

[¶12] He pulled the lever back and continued:

[¶13] "Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party
seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good
of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or
long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means
you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies
of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even
those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German
Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods,
but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They
pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power
unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there
lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not
like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of
relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not
establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes
the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of
persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object
of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

[¶14] Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of
O'Brien's face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of
intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt
himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes,
the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O'Brien leaned over him,
deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.

[¶15] "You are thinking," he said, "that my face is old and tired. You are
thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the
decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the
individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the
organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?"

[¶16] He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one
hand in his pocket.

[¶17] "We are the priests of power," he said. "God is power. But at present
power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to
gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize
is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as
he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: 'Freedom is
Slavery.' Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is
freedom. Alone--free--the human being is always defeated. It must be so,
because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all
failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can
escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that
he _is_ the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second
thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over
the body--but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter--external
reality, as you would call it--is not important. Already our control
over matter is absolute."

[¶18] For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise
himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his
body painfully.

[¶19] "But how can you control matter?" he burst out. "You don't even control
the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death--"

[¶20] O'Brien silenced him by a movement of the hand. "We control matter
because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn
by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do.
Invisibility, levitation--anything. I could float off this floor like a
soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not
wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the
laws of nature. We make the laws of nature."

[¶21] "But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about
Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet."

[¶22] "Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not,
what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence.
Oceania is the world."

[¶23] "But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is
tiny--helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years
the earth was uninhabited."

[¶24] "Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be
older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness."

[¶25] "But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and
mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was
ever heard of."

[¶26] "Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not.
Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was
nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing.
Outside man there is nothing."

[¶27] "But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them
are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach forever."

[¶28] "What are the stars?" said O'Brien indifferently. "They are bits of fire
a few kilometers away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could
blot them out. The earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the
stars go round it."

[¶29] Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say
anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

[¶30] "For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the
ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to
assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions
upon millions of kilometers away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is
beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near
or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians
are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?"

[¶31] Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer
crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he _knew_, that he was in
the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind--surely
there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false. Had it not
been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which
he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth
as he looked down at him.

[¶32] "I told you, Winston," he said, "that metaphysics is not your strong
point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are
mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But
that is a different thing; in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a
digression," he added in a different tone. "The real power, the power we
have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over
men." He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a
schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: "How does one man assert his
power over another, Winston?"

[¶33] Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.

[¶34] "Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is
suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his
own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing
human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of
your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are
creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that
the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a
world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not
less but _more_ merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world
will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that
they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In
our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and
self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy--everything. Already we
are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before
the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and
between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a
wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be
no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at
birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be
eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of
a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work
upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party.
There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no
laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will
be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall
have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between
beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the
process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But
always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the
intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing
subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory,
the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a
picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human
face--forever."

[¶35] He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to
shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say
anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on:

[¶36] "And remember that it is forever. The face will always be there to be
stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there,
so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that
you have undergone since you have been in our hands--all that will
continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the
tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will
be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party
is powerful, the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition,
the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live forever.
Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited,
ridiculed, spat upon--and yet they will always survive. This drama that
I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over
and over again, generation after generation, always in subtler forms.
Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain,
broken up, contemptible--and in the end utterly penitent, saved from
himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that
we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph
after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing
upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what
that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand
it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it."

[¶37] Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. "You can't!" he
said weakly.

[¶38] "What do you mean by that remark, Winston?"

[¶39] "You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a
dream. It is impossible."

[¶40] "Why?"

[¶41] "It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and
cruelty. It would never endure."

[¶42] "Why not?"

[¶43] "It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit
suicide."

[¶44] "Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting
than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that
make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that
we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still
what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of
the individual is not death? The Party is immortal."

[¶45] As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he
was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would
twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without
arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of
what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

[¶46] "I don't know--I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will
defeat you. Life will defeat you."

[¶47] "We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that
there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we
do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are
infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that
the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out
of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the
Party. The others are outside--irrelevant."

[¶48] "I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will
see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces."

[¶49] "Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it
should?"

[¶50] "No. I believe it. I _know_ that you will fail. There is something in
the universe--I don't know, some spirit, some principle--that you will
never overcome."

[¶51] "Do you believe in God, Winston?"

[¶52] "No."

[¶53] "Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?"

[¶54] "I don't know. The spirit of Man."

[¶55] "And do you consider yourself a man?"

[¶56] "Yes."

[¶57] "If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct;
we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are _alone_? You are
outside history, you are nonexistent." His manner changed and he said
more harshly: "And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with
our lies and our cruelty?"

[¶58] "Yes, I consider myself superior."

[¶59] O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment
Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound track of the
conversation he had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled
himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal,
to forge, to murder, to encourage drug taking and prostitution, to
disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face.
O'Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the
demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the
voices stopped.

[¶60] "Get up from that bed," he said.

[¶61] The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor
and stood up unsteadily.

[¶62] "You are the last man," said O'Brien. "You are the guardian of the human
spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes."

[¶63] Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The
zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not
remember whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his
clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with
filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants of
underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was a
three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then
stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.

[¶64] "Go on," said O'Brien. "Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall
see the side view as well."

[¶65] He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, gray-colored,
skeletonlike thing was coming toward him. Its actual appearance was
frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He
moved closer to the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded,
because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby
forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose and
battered-looking cheekbones above which the eyes were fierce and
watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look.
Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed
more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be
different from the ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For the
first moment he had thought that he had gone gray as well, but it was
only the scalp that was gray. Except for his hands and a circle of his
face, his body was gray all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and
there under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the
ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin
peeling off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of
his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton;
the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He
saw now what O'Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The curvature
of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward
so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be
bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he would have
said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some
malignant disease.

[¶66] "You have thought sometimes," said O'Brien, "that my face--the face of a
member of the Inner Party--looks old and worn. What do you think of your
own face?"

[¶67] He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing
him.

[¶68] "Look at the condition you are in!" he said. "Look at this filthy grime
all over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that
disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a
goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do
you see? I can make my thumb and forefinger meet around your bicep. I
could snap your neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost
twenty-five kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your hair
is coming out in handfuls. Look!" He plucked at Winston's head and
brought away a tuft of hair. "Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth
left. How many had you when you came to us? And the few you have left
are dropping out of your head. Look here!"

[¶69] He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between his powerful
thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston's jaw.
O'Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it
across the cell.

[¶70] "You are rotting away," he said; "you are falling to pieces. What are
you? A bag of filth. Now turn round and look into that mirror again. Do
you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human,
that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again."

[¶71] Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Until now he
had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought
stirred in his mind: that he must have been in this place longer than he
had imagined. Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round
himself a feeling of pity for his ruined body overcame him. Before he
knew what he was doing he had collapsed onto a small stool that stood
beside the bed and burst into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his
gracelessness, a bundle of bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping
in the harsh white light; but he could not stop himself. O'Brien laid a
hand on his shoulder, almost kindly.

[¶72] "It will not last forever," he said. "You can escape from it whenever
you choose. Everything depends on yourself."

[¶73] "You did it!" sobbed Winston. "You reduced me to this state."

[¶74] "No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when
you set yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that
first act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee."

[¶75] He paused, and then went on:

[¶76] "We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what
your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think there
can be much pride left in you. You have been kicked and flogged and
insulted, you have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in
your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have
betrayed everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation
that has not happened to you?"

[¶77] Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of
his eyes. He looked up at O'Brien.

[¶78] "I have not betrayed Julia," he said.

[¶79] O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. "No," he said, "no; that is
perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia."

[¶80] The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to
destroy, flooded Winston's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how
intelligent! Never did O'Brien fail to understand what was said to him.
Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he _had_ betrayed
Julia. For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under
the torture? He had told them everything he knew about her, her habits,
her character, her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial
detail everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had
said to her and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries,
their vague plottings against the Party--everything. And yet, in the
sense in which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not
stopped loving her; his feeling toward her had remained the same.
O'Brien had seen what he meant without the need for explanation.

[¶81] "Tell me," he said, "how soon will they shoot me?"

[¶82] "It might be a long time," said O'Brien. "You are a difficult case. But
don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we
shall shoot you."