Ignorance is Strength - Freedom is Slavery - War is Peace
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE
OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again…
Read the full text:
http://altion-days.blogspot.com/2013/08/text-theory-and-practice-of.html
see also:
by Emmanuel Goldstein
NB: These extracts are from the Book within a Book in Chapter 9 of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; first published in 1949. Sixty fours years later, the dystopic vision contained in the book throws light on the contemporary world, its obsessive fascination with war, violence and the fanatical ideologies that justify a continuous system of thought control and conflict – a veritable Enemy System, as John Mack named it. Quite apart from which, the Book within a Book is a work of masterful irony, and a commentary on modern political language, for which Orwell had coined the term Doublespeak. January 21 is his 63rd death anniversary.
NB: These extracts are from the Book within a Book in Chapter 9 of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; first published in 1949. Sixty fours years later, the dystopic vision contained in the book throws light on the contemporary world, its obsessive fascination with war, violence and the fanatical ideologies that justify a continuous system of thought control and conflict – a veritable Enemy System, as John Mack named it. Quite apart from which, the Book within a Book is a work of masterful irony, and a commentary on modern political language, for which Orwell had coined the term Doublespeak. January 21 is his 63rd death anniversary.
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 varied from age to age: but
the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous
upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always
reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium,
however far it is pushed one way or the other.
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again…
in the past no government had
the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of
print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and
the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and
the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every
citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could
be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the
sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.
The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the
State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the
first time…
From the point of view of our
present rulers, therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a
new group of able, underemployed, power-hungry people, and the growth of
liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is
educational. It is a problem of continuously 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. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party…
Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party…
In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean
certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests,
tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for
crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of
persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party
member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts…
A Party member is expected to
have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to
live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors,
triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the
Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately
turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the
speculations which might possibly induce a 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..
Oceanic society rests
ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is
infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is
not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility
in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many
Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to
an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in
contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal
willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But
it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know
that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.
This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system
of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak
as doublethink…
The alteration of the past is
necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak,
precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the
proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no
standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be
cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that
he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material
comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the
readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party.
It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be
constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the
Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in
political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even
one's policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that
country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then
the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as
necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and
espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love..
To make sure that all written
records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But
it is also necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner.
And if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written
records, then it is necessary to forget that one has done so. The trick of
doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the
majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as
orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality control'. In
Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as
well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able -- and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years -- to arrest the course of history…
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able -- and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years -- to arrest the course of history…
War, however, is no longer
the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the
twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are
unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not
divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either
the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less
bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous
and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter
of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals
against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked
upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the
enemy, meritorious.
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 labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging
holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods
and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not
the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not
the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept
steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party
member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within
narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant
fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic
triumph.
In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality
appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually
happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter
whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of
war should exist…The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of
its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now
almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it
becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the
enemy are strongest..
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…researches that could be
called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are
essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not
important.. efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing
is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police..
War, it will now be seen,
is a purely internal affair. In the
past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognise their
common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight
against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own
day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each
ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make
or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
The very word “war,” therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be
accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist..(emphases added).
Read the full text:
http://altion-days.blogspot.com/2013/08/text-theory-and-practice-of.html
see also:
Rudyard
Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)
George
Orwell: Literature and Totalitarianism (1941)
George
Orwell - Freedom of the Park (1945)
George
Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)
J.K.
Rowling asks us to remember George Orwell
George
Orwell statue 'too left-wing' for the BBC
Are we
Trapped in Orwell’s ‘1984’? By Robert Hassan
What
Orwell Saw - and what he missed - about today’s world By THOMAS E. RICKS
Book
review - George Orwell: A Life in Letters
A Final
Warning by George Orwell
The
Political George Orwell. By DAVID N. SMITH
Dorian
Lynskey - Nothing but the truth: the legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four
Orwell
in China: Big Brother in every bookshop
