O'Brien says reveals the true, totalitarian nature of the society the Party established in Oceania: Full membership to the Brotherhood requires reading it. When alone in the room above Mr. Charrington's shop, Winston examines the book, before reading it, noting that it was:. A heavy black volume, 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: [1 ].
The term "oligarchical collectivism" refers not only to the Party's ideology of Ingsoc English Socialism but also to the ideologies of the other two states Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia; in Eastasia, "Death Worship" or "Obliteration of the Self". Winston reads two long excerpts establishing [2 ] how the three totalitarian super-states — Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia — emerged from a global war, thus connecting the past and the present, and explains the basic political philosophy of the totalitarianism that derived from the authoritarian political tendencies manifested in the twentieth century.
That the three "opposing" ideologies are functionally identical is central to the revelations of The Book. James M. Chapter II, presumably titled Freedom is Slavery after the remaining Party slogan, is not detailed in the novel.
Ignorance is Strength details the perpetual class struggle characteristic of human societies; [5 ] beginning with the historical observation that societies always have hierarchically divided themselves into social classes and castes : the High who rule ; the Middle who work for, and yearn to supplant the High , and the Low whose goal is quotidian survival. Cyclically, the Middle deposed the High, by enlisting the Low.
Upon assuming power, however, the Middle the new High class recast the Low into their usual servitude. In the event, the classes perpetually repeat the cycle, when the Middle class speaks to the Low class of "justice" and of "human brotherhood" in aid of becoming the High class rulers. Ian Slater writes that Goldstein goes beyond George Orwell's beliefs in earlier work, such as A Clergyman's Daughter , in which the Middle makes a pretence of believing in equality.
In Animal Farm , the state sought power to improve society, but once technological advances make equality possible, the Middle abandons their former promises, as liberalism only stands in the way of their aims; they become explicitly tyrannical and openly hostile to liberalism. The new rhetoric of the Middle becomes Ingsoc and hierarchical collectivism. This pursuit of naked power and utter lack of liberalism distinguishes the Party from previous tyrannies, though the Party initially justifies its control through dedication to socialism.
By focusing on collectivism, the Party can consolidate their power and present Ingsoc as an inevitable followup to capitalism in which the Low are no longer exploited. In reality, the social castes are no longer necessary, and collectivism only serves to prolong the exploitation of the Low. Slater states that while O'Brien does not own his mansion, he still lives in luxury compared to the lower castes.
Once the Party consolidates its power, all justifications are abandoned. The Party itself is a meritocracy , not hereditary. This is not rooted in egalitarianism but practicality, as the Party realizes that its continuation depends on purity of orthodoxy, rather than a bloodline.
Unlike Orwell's prior writing, the Party's exploitation in this case is fully intentional. The main issue is that selecting for fanaticism and ruthlessness in peacetime is like pulling teeth. Because ambitious pragmatists will eagerly and skillfully feign fanaticism and ruthlessness to get ahead — and in every known human population, ambitious pragmatists outnumber ruthless fanatics by a factor of at least 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 favoured 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, 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.
How about to provide incentives to work, acquire useful skills, and innovate? And incentives aside, you might want to allow inequality because preventing inequality requires a draconian police state. Come now, Orwell! Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing 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 brute labour, 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 historical 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 influenced by them to some extent.
Orwell conspicuously omits the heirs of Russian revolution from his enumeration of the partially sincere.
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 regimentation.
And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about , 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 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 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 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 organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.
And who did the new aristocracy supplant? Nobles and clergy in some countries. But businesspeople and the rich in all countries — the elite that is as masterful at delivering prosperity as it is incompetent at pandering to Social Desirability Bias.
These people, whose origins 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 compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.
Power-hunger is the great neglected motive of social science. And the big power grab of the 20th-century was when professions high in rhetorical dominance got the upper hand over professions high in material dominance. 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 subjects 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, 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. At this point, modern readers may feel chills run up their spines.
Imagine Stalinism enforced with modern computing power! Even so, the potential for totalitarian oppression has probably reached a new height, and continues to grow. Facial recognition plus ubiquitous cameras plus AI approximates constant surveillance.
For example, omitting the heirs of the Russian revolution the October one was something I missed. As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development of machine technique. Orwell buys into the idea of overproduction. In his view, we had too much even in This stuck out to me, too. I tend to discount people who take complicated subjects, establish a general narrative on that subject, then wax poetic on that subject, without references to specific examples, nor considering alternative explanations or counter-exam.
Orwell is a great storyteller, but when trying to explain the world, I do think he tends towards the latter, not the former. This is what worries me right now. I see the Democrats this time wanting to crush their opposition.
I think, and hope, it will backfire, but in reading this the other day, I see this as what is being attempted. The calls for censorship, for prosecution, the military in DC, etc, all seem to be very Orwell inspired. If it was just leading to the destruction of the GOP, with a smarter opposition party rising in replacement like when the GOP replaced the Whigs that would be okay.
Though strikingly, Orwell suggests no role for politically-powerful families to grow rich by corruption. In contrast, the Party continuously persecutes romance because it recognizes the power of the pair-bonding instinct. In the real world, however, kin relations seem much more resilient than romantic bonds — and a much firmer basis for organized graft.
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. A strange situation. In the crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years.
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 towards 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.
This bleak picture is close to literally true. Consider: Haiti appears to be the sole durably successful slave revolt in history. Contra Orwell, slaves often feel the desire to rebel. But that impulse rarely leads to a blueprint for social reform. And even if it did, the coordination problem is crushing. 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.
Orwell seems to assume absurdly high Transfer of Learning. In practice, however, learning is highly compartmentalized. 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… A Party 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 Ingsoc.
If he is a person naturally orthodox in Newspeak a goodthinker , he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop , blackwhite , 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, 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… 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 big difference, of course, is that contemporary Western Thought Police are soft and disorganized. Scary, but a far cry from jail, slave labor, or death. And most of their wrath focuses on emotionally-charged incidents. Was Gorbachev the individual a necessary cause of the end of the Soviet Union? Moreover, cracks in the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe — for example, Solidarnosc in Poland — cast a shadow over long-term stability of the Soviet Union itself; perhaps especially in the Baltic republics.
Thus two of the the mechanisms mentioned by Goldstein Orwell interacted to increase the probability that communism would collapse: ever broader exposure to standards of comparison caused loss of self-confidence among the ruling group.
The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.
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