They did not return to the subj ect until they had been in bed for half an hour.The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane.From below came the familiar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the flagstones.The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard.There seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was not marching to and fro between the washtub and the line,alternately gagging herself with clothes pegs and breaking forth into lusty song.Julia had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep.He reached out for the book,which was lying on the floor,and sat up a-gainst the bedhead.
"We must read it,"he said."You too.All members of the Brotherhood have to read it."
"You read it,"she said with her eyes shut."Read it aloud. That's the best way.Then you can explain it to me as you go."
The clock's hands said six,meaning eighteen.They had three or four hours ahead of them.He propped the book against his knees and began reading:
Chapter I IGNORANCE IS STRENTH
Throughout recorded time,and probably since the end of the Ne-olithic Age,there have been three kinds of people in the world,the High,the Middle,and the Low.They have been subdivided in many ways,they have borne countless different names,and their relative numbers,as well as their attitude toward one another,have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never al-tered.Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes,the same pattern has always reasserted itself,just as a gy-roscope 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 an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all dis-tinctions 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 se-curely in power,but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently,or both.They are then overthrown by the Mid-dle,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 obj ective,the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude,and themselves become the High.Present-ly a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups,or from both of them,and the struggle begins over again.Of the three groups,only the Low are never even temporarily successful in a-chieving their aims.It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind.E-ven today,in a period of decline,the average human being is physi-cally better off than he was a few centuries ago.But no advance in wealth,no softening of manners,no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.From the point of view of the Low,no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had become obvious to many observers.There then a 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 adherents,but in the manner in which it was now put forward there was a significant change.In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High.It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests,lawyers,and the like who were para-sitical 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 e-quality,and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand.Socialism,a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity,was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages.But in each variant of So-cialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establis-hing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned.The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania,Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia,Death-Worship,as it is commonly called,in Eastasia,had the conscious aim of perpetua-ting un freedom and in equality.These new movements,of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology.But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment.The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more,and then stop.As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle,who would then be-come 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 nineteenth century.The cyclical move-ment of history was now intelligible,or appeared to be so;and if it was intelligible,then it was alterable.But the principal,underlying cause was that,as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible.It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favored some individuals against others;but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth.In earlier ages,class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable.Inequality was the price of civilization.With the development of machine production,howev-er,the case was altered.Even if it was still necessary for human be-ings 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 seiz-ing power,human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven af-ter,but a danger to be averted.In more primitive ages,when a just and peaceful society was in fact not possible,it had been fairly easy to believe in it.The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood,without laws and without brute labor,had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years.And this vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually profited by each historic change.The heirs of the French, English,and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man,freedom of speech,equality before the law,and the like,and have even allowed their conduct to be in-fluenced by them to some extent.But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian.The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself,led back to hierarchy and regi-mentation.And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930,practices which had been long abandoned,in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial,the use of war prisoners as slaves,public executions,torture to extract confes-sions,the use of hostages,and the deportation of whole popula-tions—not only became common again,but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and pro-gressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars,civil wars,revolu-tions,and counterrevolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories.But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems,generally called totalitarian,which had appeared earlier in the century,and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the pre-vailing 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,techni-cians,trade-union organizers,publicity experts,sociologists,teach-ers,journalists,and professional politicians.These people,whose or-igins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class,had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government.As com-pared with their opposite numbers in past ages,they were less ava-ricious,less tempted by luxury,hungrier for pure power,and,above all,more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.This last difference was cardinal.By comparison with that existing today,all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient.The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas,and were content to leave loose ends everywhere,to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subj ects were thinking.Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.The invention of print,how-ever,made it easier to manipulate public opinion,and the film and the radio carried the process further.With the development of tele-vision,and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument,private life came to an end.Every citizen,or at least every citizen important e-nough to be worth watching,could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propa-ganda,with all other channels of communication closed.The possi-bility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State,but complete uniformity of opinion on all subj ects,now exis-ted for the first time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties,society regrouped itself,as always,into High,Middle,and Low.But the new High group,unlike all its forerunners,did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position.It had long been re-alized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.The so-called"abolition of private property"which took place in the middle years of the century meant,in effect,the concen-tration 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,ex-cept petty personal belongings.Collectively,the Party owns every-thing in Oceania,because it controls everything and disposes of the products as it thinks fit.In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed,be-cause the whole process was represented as an act of collectiviza-tion.It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were ex-propriated,Socialism must follow;and unquestionably the capital-ists had been expropriated.Factories,mines,land,houses,trans-port—everything had been taken away from them;and since these things were no longer private property,it followed that they must be public property.Ingsoc,which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology,has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program, with the result,foreseen and intended beforehand,that economic inequality has been made per-manent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go dee-per 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 lo-ses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern.These causes do not operate singly,and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree.A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently.Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
After the middle of the present century,the first danger had in reality disappeared.Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in fact unconquerable,and could only become conquerable through slow demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert.The second danger,also,is only a theoreti-cal 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 be-come aware that they are oppressed.The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen,but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without having political results,because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate.As for the problem of overproduc-tion,which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique,it is solved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III),which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch.From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore,the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, under employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and skepticism in their own ranks.The prob-lem,that is to say,is educational.It is a problem of continuously molding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it.The con-sciousness 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.At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother.Big Brother is infallible and all-power-ful.Every success,every achievement,every victory,every scientific discovery,all knowledge,all wisdom,all happiness,all virtue,are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration.Nobody has ever seen Big Brother.He is a face on the hoardings,a voice on the telescreen.We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born.Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world.His function is to act as a focusing point for love,fear,and reverence,emotions which are more easily felt toward an individual than toward an organization.Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party.Its numbers limited to six millions,or something less than two per cent of the population of Oceania.Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party,which,if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State,may be justly likened to the hands.Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as"the proles",numbering perhaps eight five per cent of the population.In the terms of our earlier classification,the proles are the Low,for the slave population in 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 hereditar y.The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the In-ner Party.Admission to either branch of the Party is by examina-tion,taken at the age of sixteen.Nor is there any racial discrimina-tion,or any marked domination of one province by another.Jews, Negroes,South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party,and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area.In no part of O-ceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital.Oceania has no capital,and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows.Ex-cept that English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official language,it is not centralized in any way.Its rulers are not held to-gether by blood ties but by adherence to a common doctrine.It is true that our society is stratified,and very rigidly stratified,on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines.There is far less to-and-fro movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age.Between the two bran-ches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange,but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise.Proletarians,in practice,are not allowed to graduate into the Party.The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent,are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated.But this state of affairs is not necessarily permanent,nor is it a matter of principle.The Par-ty 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 per-fectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat.In the crucial years,the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition.The older kind of Socialist,who had been trained to fight against some-thing called"class privilege"assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent.He did not see that the continuity of an oligar-chy need not be physical,nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived,whereas adoptive organi-zations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years.The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance,but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life,imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its suc-cessors.The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself.Who wields power is not important,provid-ed that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
All the beliefs,habits,tastes,emotions,mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived.Physical rebellion,or any preliminary move toward rebellion,is at present not possible.From the proletarians nothing is to be feared.Left to themselves,they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century,working,breeding,and dying,not only without any impulse to rebel,but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly;but,since military and com-mercial rivalry are no longer important,the level of popular educa-tion 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 mem-ber,on the other hand,not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subj ect 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 with-out knowing that he is being inspected.Nothing that he does is in-different.His friendships,his relaxations,his behavior toward his wife and children,the expression of his face when he is alone,the words he mutters in sleep,even the characteristic movements of his body,are all j ealously scrutinized.Not only any actual misdemean-or,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 regu-lated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behavior.In Oce-ania there is no law.Thoughts and actions which,when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden,and the endless pur-ges,arrests,tortures,imprisonments,and vaporizations are not in-flicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been commit-ted,but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future.A Party member is re-quired 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 contradic-tions inherent in Ingsoc.If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker),he will in all circumstances know,with-out taking thought,what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental training,undergone in child-hood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite,and doublethink,makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subj ect 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 o-ver victories,and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.The discontents produced by his bare,unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate,and the speculations which might possibly in-duce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline.The first and simplest stage in the discipline,which can be taught even to young children,is called,in Newspeak,crimestop.Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short,as though by instinct,at the threshold of any dangerous thought.It includes the power of not grasping analogies,of failing to perceive logical errors,of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc,and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop,in short,means protective stupidity.But stupidity is not enough.On the contrary,orthodoxy in the full sense demands a con-trol over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a con-tortionist over his body.Oceanic society rests ultimately on the be-lief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible,there is need for an unwearying,moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.The key word here is black-white.Like so many Newspeak words,this word has two mutually contradictory meanings.Applied to an opponent,it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white,in contradiction of the plain facts.Applied to a Party member,it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.But it means also the ability to believe that black is white,and more,to know that black is white,and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.This demands a continuous alteration of the past,made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest,and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.
