Extracts:
“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 alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by
poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when
once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged
minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a
hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and
ignorance."
“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. The splitting of the intelligence
which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in
an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one
goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war
hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an
administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know
that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware
that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged
for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily
neutralized by the technique of doublethink.”
“War, it
will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups
of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and
therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and
the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not
fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group
against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent
conquests of territory but to keep the structure of society intact. The very
word “war”, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to
say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.”
“Throughout
recorded time, (...) 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 equilibnum, 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 remainwhere they are. The aim of the
Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an
aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much
crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything
outside their daily lives --is to abolish all distinctions and create a society
in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is
the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the
High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a
moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to
govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist
the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty
and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust
the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the
High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or
from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups,
only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims.”
“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.”
“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. (...) From the proletarians nothing is to be
feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation
and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any
impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be
other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial
technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military
and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education
is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked
on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty
because they have no intellect.”
“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."
“If one is
to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of
reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own
infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes. (...) 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.”
“ 'Let us
get back to the question of ‘how’ and ‘why’. You understand well enough how the
Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our
motive? Why should we want power?' (...)
He knew in
advance what O’Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own
ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men
in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face
the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who
were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom
and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
(...)
'Now I will
tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely
for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are
interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness:
only power, pure power. (...)
No one ever
seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it
is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a
revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The
object of power is power.' "
