[ Music ] 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 transducency. He felt that if he held up his hand, he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and limb had been drained out of him by an enormous debunk of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. His overalls threatened his shoulders. The pavement tickled his feet. Even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creep. He had worked more than 90 hours in five days. So had everyone else in the ministry. Now he 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 a hiding place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dinghy street in the direction of Mr. Charington's shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols. But irrationally, he convinced that this afternoon, there was no danger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy briefcase that he was carrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his leg. Inside, it was the book, which he had now had in his procession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at. On a sick day of hate week, after the processions, the speeches, the shout, 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 mass 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 a 2000 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 East Asia. Eurasia was an airline. There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Many, it became known, with extreme suddenness in everywhere at once, that East Asia 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 flooded. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand school children in the uniform of the spots. On a scarlet-draped platform and orator of the inner party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bolt skull, over which a few length locks struggled, was harangue in the crowd. A little rumple still skinned 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, newtings, rapists, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust oppressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then matted. At every few moments, the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by wild, beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the school children. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps 20 minutes when a messenger harried on to the platform and his breath of paper was slid into the speaker's hand. He enrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or many, 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 East Asia. 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 to run faces on them. It was sabotage. The agents of ghosting had been at work. There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls. Banners torn to shreds and trampled on the foot. The spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that flooded from the chimps. 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 for speech. One minute more and the feral roles of rage were again bursting from the car. The hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed. The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in mid-sentence, not only without reports, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to be occupied. He was steering the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn down that the man who's face it had not seen had tapped him on his shoulder and said, "Excuse me, I think you've dropped your witness." He took the briefcase abstractively, 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. Although the time was now nearly 23 hours, the entire staff of the Ministry had done like once. The orders already issuing from the telescope, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary. Oceana was at war with East Asia. Oceana had always been at war with East Asia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, soundtracks, photographs all had to be ratified 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 East Asia, should remain in existence anyway. The work was overwhelming, or the more so, because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the records department worked 18 hours in the 24, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Matrices were brought up from the setters and pitched all over the corridors. Meals consisted of sandwiches and victory coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from a 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 snow stripped. Half-bearing the speak-right 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 mainly to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable. By the third day, his eyes ate 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 work he murmured into the speak-right, every stroke of his ink pencil was a deliberate lie. He was 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 about the same time the work was easing off. A deep and as it was, 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 1200, it was unexpectedly announced that all workers in the ministry were free till tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the briefcase 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 trapped. With a sort of full up to his creaking and his joints, he climbed the stair above Mr. Charington's shop. He was tight, but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty little oil stove, and put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia would arrive presently. Meanwhile, there was the book. He sat down in the sluttish arm chair and undid the straps of the briefcase. A heavy black fawning, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title page ran, the theory and practice of opagarchical collectives by Emmanuel Ghost. Winston began reading, chapter one, ignorance history. Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the new living age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the high, the middle, and the low. They have been subdivided in many ways. They have borne countless different names and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have ferried from age to age. But the sensual structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always been asserted itself, just as the gyroscope will always return to equilibrium. However far, it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable. Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading in comfort and safety. He was alone, no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder and cut the page with his hand. The sweet samurai 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 chapter three. He went on reading. Chapter three, war is peace. 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 20th 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, East Asia, 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 followed geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmarks, from Portugal to the Bering Street. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. East Asia, 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 Montreal, Mongolia, and Tibet. In one combination or another, these three superstates are permanently at war and have been served for the past 25 years. War, however, is no longer the desperate annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the 20th 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 towards it has become less bloodthirsty or more shidless. On a contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries. In 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 high trained specialists and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the fake frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at or round the floating fortresses which got 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 this character. More exactly the reasons for which war is waged have changed in the order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the Great Wars of the early 20th century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon. To understand the nature of the present war, for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always to say 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 as fast land spaces. Ojiana by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific. East Asia by the fecundity and industrialistness 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 the main course 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 fast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. And 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 permanent in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners of tangent, grassy, downward, and honk honk. Containing the limit about the fifth of the population of the island. It is for the possession of these thickly populated regions and of the northern aspect that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice, no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed end. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seasonals or that fragments by a sudden stroke of a stretch that indicates the endless changes of alignment. All of the disputed territories contain valuable meanings, and some of them deal important vegetable products, such as rubber, which encole the climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all, they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labor, whichever power controls a cartorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian archipelago. This goes as also of the bodies of scores of hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working foods. The inhabitants of these areas reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, passed continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expanded 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 a northern shore of the Mediterranean. The islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by East Asia. In Mongolia, the dividing line between Eurasia and East Asia 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. In the territory which forms the heartland of each superstate always remains in violent. 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 the labor, the slave populations allowed a temple of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society and the process by which it maintains itself would not be essentially different. The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the 19th 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 not 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 20th century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, lashing, 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 the 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 50 years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiments and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war off the 1950s 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, overwhelm, 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 50 years at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction. Indeed, in some sense was the destruction of a hierarchical society, in a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice, such a society could not long remain stable, for if leisure and security were enjoyed by all life, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literal 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 speak of the way. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the 20th century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization, which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world. And moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in the military sense and was bound to be dominated directly or indirectly. By its more advanced rifles. 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 attitude. Great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by state charity. But this too entailed the 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 well. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice, the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The essential act of war is destruction. Not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human 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 its "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, indeed 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 20th century. Even the member of the inner party lives in 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 in tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor car or helicopter, set him in a different world from a member of the outer party. And the members of the outer party have a similar advantage in comparison with these submerged masses whom we call the pros. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city where the possession of a lump of horse flesh 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 seeing the natural and avoidable condition of survival. War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle, it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labor of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again or even by producing fast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses. Whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work but the morale of the party itself. Even the humblest party member is expected to be competent, industrious and even intelligent with the narrow limits. But it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic who is prevailing rules of fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic trust. In other words, it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to the 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 the 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 to 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 groups is untruthful and he may often be aware that the entire war is serious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declare ones. But such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of double-fifty. Meanwhile, no inner party member waivers for an instant and its mystical belief that the war is real and that it is bound to end victorious with Oziana the undisputed master of the entire war. All members of the inner party believe in this common conflict as an unequal effect. It is to be achieved either by grand jury requiring 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 Oziana at the present day, science in the old sense has almost ceased to exist. In new speak, there is no word for science. The empirical method of thought on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded is supposed to the most fundamental principles of insult. An even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful us, 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 one's 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 as well, 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 psychologists and inquisitor, studying with real ornery minutenuteness, the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the true producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture. Or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist, concerned only with such branches of his special subject as a relevant to the taking of life. In the fast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests or in the Australian deserts 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 deadly gases or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents or for breeds of diseased germs immunized against all possible antibodies. Others strive to produce a vehicle that shall boil its way under the soil like a submarine under the water or an aeroplane as independent of its base as the sailing ship. Others explore even remote 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 air of center. 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 researchers are likely to discover. Although the party, according to his habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as the 1940s and were first used on a large scale about 10 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 hands of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three powers mainly continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against a decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile, the art of war has remained almost stationary for 30 or 40 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 storters 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 the few weeks have never been repeated. 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 attempt 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 rifle states and then to sign a packed of friendship with that rifle and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to allow 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 packed of friendship with the remaining well-powered in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say is a near-day dream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in disputed areas around 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 Fastula. 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 ones to be known as France in Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about 100 million people, who so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the Oceania 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 current slaves. Even the official ally of the movement is always regarded with the darkest exposure. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on the citizen of either Eurasia or East Asia. And he is forbidden in the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were a loud 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 will be broken and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might affect it. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persian, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs. Under these lies of 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 Incso. In Eurasia it is called Neil Bolshevism, and in East Asia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as death worship, but perhaps better rendered as obiteration 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 excrate them as barbarias, outrageous upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the three 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. The 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 Inksop and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character. In past ages the 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 helped 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 deciding a gun or an aeroplane they had to make form. In efficient 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, where wars could be won or lost. No ruling class could be completely responsible, 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, researchers 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 fact 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 alike. 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 outside 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 estates are absolute, as the pharaohs or the seizes could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals. But once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose. The war therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal, it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and 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 firm 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 20th 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 into factual 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 fast majority of party members understand that only in the shallower sense is the inner meaning of the party's logo, war disputes. Winston stopped leaving for a moment, somewhere in remote distance a rock-a-top final, with blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book. In a room with no territory 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 reassured him. In a sense, it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It was 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. 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 Julius footsteps on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown tool bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was more than a week since they had seen one another. "I've got the book," he said as they disentangled themselves. "Oh, you've got it. Good," she said without much interest, and almost immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to make the coffee. They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worthwhile 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. Alternatively, gagging herself with clothes packs and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down on the 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 set up against the bedhead. "We must read it," he said. "You too. All members of the Brotherhood have to read it." "You read it," she said with her eyes shut. "Read it aloud. That's the best way." "Then you can explain it to me as you go." The clock's hands set six, meaning 18. They had three or four hours ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and began reading. Chapter 1, Ignorance's strength. Throughout recorded time and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the high, the middle, and the low. They have been subdivided in many ways. They have borne countless different names and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have ferried 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 recerted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium. However far it is pushed one way or the other. "Julia, are you awake?" said Winston. "Yes, my love. I'm listening. Go on. It's marvelous." He continued reading. "The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the high is to remain where they are. The aim of the middle is to change places with the high. The aim of the low, when they have a name, for it is an abiding characteristic of the low that they are too much crushed by a 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 the capacity to govern efficiently. Above 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 spits 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 the 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 madness, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter near. From the point of view of the low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters. By the late 19th century the recurrence of this pattern has become obvious to many observers. There then rose schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine of course had always had its adherence, 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 in aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and alike 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 19th 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 a century, Inksop in Oceania, neo-Bojvism in Eurasia, death worship as it is commonly called in East Asia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These new movements of course grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip service to the ideology, but the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more and then stop, as usual the high were to be turned out by the middle who would then become the high, but this time by conscious strategy the high would be able to maintain their position permanently. The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of historical knowledge and the growth of the historical sense which had hardly existed before the 19th 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 principle underlying course was that, as early as the beginning of the 20th century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and their 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 early 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 season power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without group labor, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years, and this vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually provided by each historical change. The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of men, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent, but by the fourth decade of the 20th 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 a general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, and in some cases for hundreds of years, imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive. It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Inksok and his 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 organises, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians, these people, whose origins lay in the celeried middle class and upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less apparitious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, about 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 Luzans 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 were tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizen 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 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. It could be kept for 24 hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the state, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects now existed for the first time. After a revolutionary period of the 50s and 60s, society regrouped itself, as always, into high, middle and low. But the new high group, unlike all its foreigners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secured 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 fact, 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 things fit. In a year's following the revolution, it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed because the whole process was represented as an act of collateralization. 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. Inksok, 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. 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 courses do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class, which could guard against all of them, would remain in power permanently. Ultimately, the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself. After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now defied the world is in fact uncomfortable, and could only become comfortable 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 crisis of pastimes 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, 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 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 continuous moulding the consciousness, both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way. Given this background, one could infer if one did not know it already, the general structure of oceanic society, and the apex of the period comes Big Brother. Big Brother is invaluable 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 hoarding, a voice on the telescope. 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 guy in which the party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reference emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization. Big Brother comes to inner-party. Its numbers limited to six millions, or something less than two percent 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 comes the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as the pros, numbering perhaps 85 percent of the population. In the terms of our early classification, the pros are the low. For the slave population of the equatorial lands who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure. In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The child of inner-party parents is in theory not born into the inner-party. Admission to either branch of the party is by examination, taken at the age of 16, nor is there any racial discrimination or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans, or pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest branch of the party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of the 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 warehouse nobody knows, except that English is its chief lingua franca, and new speak its official language. It is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by blood types, but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appeared to be hereditary lands. There is far less to and throw movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism, or even in the pre-industrial range. Between the two branches of the party there is certain amount of interchange, but only so much as to ensure that weakness are excluded from the inner-party, and that ambitious members of the outer-party are made honest, allowing them to rise. Philitarics, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the party. The most gifted among them, whom might possibly become neutral of this content, are simply marked down by the thought police and limit. But this state of affairs is not necessarily present, 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 neutralise 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 permitted. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor that he post-reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been short-lived, whereas adoptive organisations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oblique-garchical rule is not farther to sun in heretics, but the persistence of a certain worldview 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 successes. The party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood, but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same. All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterise our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the palitarians, nothing is to be feared. Lefted 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 the 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. A party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the thought police. Even when he is alone, he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual 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 rapulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania, there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, torches, imprisonments and favourisations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but amelie the wiping out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A parting 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 inksogh. If he is a person naturally orthodox, he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief of the desirable emotion, but in any case, an elaborate mental training. Undergone in childhood and grouping itself round in new speak words, crime stop, black white and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject, whatever. A party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self abasement before the power and wisdom of the party. The discontents produced by his bare and satisfying 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 the funds 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 new speak, crime stop. Crime stop 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 insult, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crime stop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On a 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 invaluable. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not invaluable, there is need for an unwarying moment to moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is "black white". Like so many new speak 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 new speak as doublethink. The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the party member like the proletarian tolerates present day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past just as he must be cut off from foreign countries because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the invalidity of the party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics and records of every time must be constantly brought up today 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, fall to change one's mind or even one's policy is a confession of these. If for example Eurasia or East Asia 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. The mutability of the past is the central tenant of Inksa. 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 his 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 temper 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 old speak it is called quite frankly reality control. In new speak it is called double think though double think comprises much else as well. Double think 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 double think 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 hands of guilt. Double think lies at the very heart of Inksok 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 double think it is necessary to exercise double think for by using the word one admits that one is tempering with reality by a fresh act of double think one erases this knowledge and so on indefinitely with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of double think that the party has been able and may for all we know continue to be able for thousands of years to arrest the cause of history. All past Obligakis 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 felt 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 the belief in one's own invalidity with the power to learn from past mistakes. It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of double think are those who invented double think and know that it is a fast system of mental cheating. In our society those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion the more intelligent the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and throw over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is the matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a change of over lordship 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 pros 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 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 victories cynicism with fanaticism is one of the chief distinguishing marks of oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus the party rejects and filifies 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 addresses 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 causes neither 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 the 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 exercise in double think. 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. But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored it is why should human equality be averted. Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described what is the motive for this huge accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time. Here we reach the central secret as we have seen the mystique of the party and above all the inner party depends upon double think but deeper than its lies the original motive. The never questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought double think. The thought please continuous warfare and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards this motive really consists. Winston became aware of science as one becomes aware of a new son. It seemed to him that Julian had been very still for some time past she was lying on her side naked from the waist upwards with a cheek below on her hand and one dark long tumbling across her eyes her breast rose and fell slowly and rapidly. Julian no answer. Julian are you awake? No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book put it carefully on the floor lay down and pulled the couplet over both of them. He had still he reflected them not learned the ultimate secret he understood how he did not understand why chapter one like chapter three had not actually told him anything that he did not know it had merely systemized 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 the minority of one did not make you mad there was truth and there was untrue 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 a girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong sleepy confident feeling he was saying everything was all right you fell asleep murmuring sanity is not statistical with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom when he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only 2030 he laid dosing for a while then the usual deep lunged singing struck up from the yard below he was only an hopeless fancy he passed like an april die but a look and a word and dreams they stirred they have stolen my art a while the dribbling songs seem to have kept his popularity you still heard it all over the place it had outlived the hate song Julia woke at the sound stretched herself luxuriously and got out of bed i'm hungry she said let's make some more coffee damn the stuff's gone out in the water's cold she picked the stove up and shook it there's no oil in it we can get some from old charrington i expect the funny thing is i made sure he was full i'm going to put my clothes on she added it seems to have got colder winston also got up and dressed himself the indefatigable voice sang on they say that time heals all things they say you can always forget but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my art strings yet as he fastened the belt of his overalls he stroked across to the window the sun must have gone down between the houses it was not shining into the yard any longer the flat stones were wet as though they had just been washed and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney pots tirelessly the woman marched to and fro caulking and uncorking herself singing and falling silent and pegging out more diapers and more and yet more he wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of 20 or 30 grandchildren Julia had come across to her side together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below as he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude her thick arms reaching up for the line her powerful man like butters protruded it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful it had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of 50 blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing then hardened roughened by work till it was caused in the grain like an overripe turned it could be beautiful but it was so and after all he thought why not the solid contourless body like a block of granite and the rasping red skin bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose hip to the rose why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower she's beautiful he murmured she's a meter across the hips easily said Julia that is her style of beauty said Winston he helped Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm from the hip to the knee her flank was against his out of their bodies no child would ever come that was the one thing they could never do only by word of mouth from mind to mind could they pass on the secret the woman down there had no mind she had only strong arms a warm heart and a fertile belly he wondered how many children she had given birth to it might easily be 15 she had had her momentary flowering a year perhaps of wild rose beauty and then she had suddenly swaddened like a fertilized fruit and drummed hard and red and coarse and then her life had been laundering scrubbing darning cooking sweeping polishing mending scrubbing laundering first for children then for grandchildren over 30 unbroken years at the end of it she was still singing the mystical reference that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale cloudless sky stretching away behind the chimney pots into interminable distance it was curious to think that the sky was the saying for everybody in Eurasia or East Asia as well as here and if people under the sky were also very much the same everywhere all over the world hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this people ignorant of one another's existence held apart by walls of hatred and lies and yet almost exactly the same people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts in bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world if there was hope it lay in the prose without having read to the end of the book he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message the future belonged to the prose and could he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him Winston Smith as the world of the party yes because at the least it would be a world of sanity where there is equality there can be sanity sooner or later it would happen strength would change into consciousness the prose were immortal you could not doubt it when you look at that valiant figure in the yard in the end the awakening would come and until that happened though it might be a thousand years they would stay alive against all the arts like birds passing on from body to body the fatality which the party did not share and could not kill do you remember he said the thrush that sang to us that first day at the edge of the wood he wasn't singing to us said Julia he was singing to please himself not even that he was just singing the birds saying the prose say the party did not sing all around the world in London in New York in Africa and Brazil and in the mysterious forbidden lands beyond the frontiers in the streets of Paris and Berlin in the villages of the endless Russian plain in the bazaars of China and Japan everywhere stood the same solid uncomfortable figure make monstrous by work and childbearing toiling from birth to death and still singing out of those mighty loins arrays of conscious beings must one day come you were the dead theirs was the future but you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four we are the dead he said we are the dead echo Julia dutifully you are the dead set an iron voice behind them they sprang apart winstance and trails seem to have turned into ice he could see the white all round irises of Julia's eyes her face had turned a milky yellow the smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply almost as though and connected with the skin beneath you are the dead repeated the iron voice it was behind the picture brief julia it was behind the picture set the voice remain exactly where you are make no movement until you are ordered it was starting it was starting at last they could do nothing except stand gazing into one another's eyes to run for life to get out of the house before it was too late no such thought occurred to them unthinkable to disobeyed iron voice from the wall there was a snap as though a catch had been turned back and the crash of breaking glass the picture had fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it now they can see us set julia now we can see you set the voice stand out in the middle of the room stand back to back clap your hands behind your heads do not touch one another they were not touching but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia's body shaking or perhaps it wasn't merely the shaking of his own he could just stop his teeth from champion but his knees were beyond his control there was a sound of trampling boots below inside the house in our side the yard seemed to be full of man something was being dragged across the stones the woman singing had stopped the brother there was a long rolling claim as though the washed up had been flung across the yard and then a confusion of angry shots which ended in the yellow pain the house is surrounded second step the house is surrounded second force he had Julia snap her teeth together I suppose we may as well say goodbye she said you may as well say goodbye second force and then another quite different voice a thin counterfeited voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before struck him and by the way while we on the subject here comes a candle to light you to back here comes a chopper to chop off your head something crashed onto the bed behind Winston's back the head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst into fear someone was climbing through the window there was a stampede of boots up the stairs the room was full of solid men and black uniforms with iron shot beads on the feet and trunchets in the hands Winston was not trembling any longer even his eyes he barely knew that one thing alone mattered to keep still to keep still and not give them excuse to hitch a man with a smooth prized fighter's jaw enriched the mile course only a slip caused opposite and balancing his truncheon meditated between thumb and forefinger Winston met his eyes the feeling of makings with one's hands behind one's head and one's face and body all exposed was almost unbearable the man treated the tip of a white tongue licked the place where his lips should have been and then passed on there was another brush someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the head of stone the fragment of coral a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rose butt from a cake rolled across the mat how small thought Winston how small it always was there was a gasp and a thumb behind it and he received a violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance one of the men has smashed his fist into Julius solar plexus doubling her up like a pocket ruler she was thrashing about on the floor fighting for breath Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimeter but sometimes her livid gasping face came within the angle of his vision even in his terror he was as though he could feel the pain his own body the deadly pain which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her breath he knew what it was like the terrible agonizing pain which was there all the while but could not be suffered yet because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe then two of the men hoisted her up by knees and shoulders and carried her out of the room like a sack Winston had a glimpse of her face upside down yellow and contorted with the eyes shut and still with a sme of rouge on either cheek and that was the last he saw of her he stood dead still no one had hit him yet thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flip through his mind he wondered whether they had got mr charrington he wondered what they had done to the woman in the yard he noticed that he badly wanted to urinate and felt a faint surprise because he had done so only two or three hours ago he noticed that the clock on the mental piece said nine meaning 21 but the lights seem too strong would not the light be fading at 21 hours on an August evening he wondered whether after all he and julia had mistaken the time had slept a clock round and thought it was 20 30 when really it was not 8 30 on the following morning but he did not pursue the thought further it was not interesting there was another lighter step in the passage mr charrington came to the room the demeanour of the black uniform men suddenly became more subdued something had also changed in mr charrington's appearance his eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperwood pick up those pieces he said charlie a man stooped to obey the copney accent had disappeared winston suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the tennis screen mr charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket but his hair which had been almost white had turned black also he was not wearing his spectacles he gave winston a single sharp glance as though verifying his identity and then paid no more attention to him he was still recognizable but he was not the same person any longer his body had straightened and seemed to have grown bigger his face has undergone only tiny changes that have never been this work a complete transformation the black eyebrows were less bushy the wrinkles began the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered even the nose seemed shorter it was the alert cub face momentum of about 5 and 30 he occurred to winston that for the first time in his life he was looking with knowledge as a member of the thought police syntax syntax now the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in language the structure of statements in the computer language oligarchy oligarchy now a small group of people having control of a country urbanization collectivism collectivism now the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it irreconcilable irreconcilable adjective of ideas or statements so different from each other that they cannot be made compatible fecundity fecundity now the ability to produce an abundance of offspring or new growth fertility empirical empirical adjective based on consent with offerifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic preponderance preponderance now the quality or fact of being greater in number quantity or importance diminution diminution now a reduction in the size extend or importance of something indefaticably indefaticably advert in an always determined and energetic way never willing to admit defeat tenant tenant now a principle or belief especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy regimentation regimentation now the act of force in strict discipline and all organization on somebody something expropriate expropriate verb of the state or an authority take property from its owner for public use or benefit inimical inimical additive tending to obstruct or harm avaricious avaricious additive having or showing an extreme greed for wealth or material gain ossified ossified additive having become rigid or fixed in attitude or position
