He had just turned back to Chapter
I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out
of his chair to meet her.
I when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out
of his chair to meet her.
Orwell - 1984
Oceania comprises the
Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles,
Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia,
smaller than the others and with a less definite western
frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of
1984
it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion
of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states
are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twen-
ty-five years. 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 genu-
ine ideological difference This is not to say that either the
conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has be-
come 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 com-
mitted by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.
But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of
people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes com-
paratively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any,
takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the
average man can only guess at, or round the Floating For-
tresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the
centres of civilization war means no more than a contin-
uous 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 its character. More exactly,
the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their
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order of importance. Motives which were already present
to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth
centuury 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 al-
ways the same war — one must realize in the first place that
it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three su-
per-states could be definitively conquered even by the other
two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their
natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by
its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic
and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and indus tri-
ousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in
a material sense, anything to fight about. With the estab-
lishment of self-contained economies, in which production
and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble
for markets which was a main cause 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 super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the
materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far
as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for la-
bour power. Between the frontiers of the super-states, and
not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies
a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazza-
ville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about
a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the posses-
sion of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern
236 1984
ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In
practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disput-
ed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and
it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sud-
den stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of
alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals,
and some of them yield important vegetable products such
as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to syn-
thesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all
they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Which-
ever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries
of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian
Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hun-
dreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The
inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to
the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to con-
queror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the
race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory,
to control more labour 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 the
northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the In-
dian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured
and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the
dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable;
round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous terri-
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tories which in fact are largely unihabited and unexplored:
but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and
the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state
always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the ex-
ploited 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 bet-
ter position in which to wage another war. By their labour
the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous war-
fare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure
of world society, and the process by which it maintains it-
self, would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance
with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simul-
taneously recognized and not recognized by the directing
brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the
machine without raising the general standard of living.
Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of
what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been
latent in industrial society. At present, when few human be-
ings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artifi-
cial 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 com-
pared with the imaginary future to which the people of that
period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the
vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly,
238 1984
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 a
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 fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced,
and various devices, always in some way connected with
warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but
experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the
ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have nev-
er 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 think-
ing 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,
overwork, 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 humand being very greatly over a period of
about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the begin-
ning of the twentieth centuries.
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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 per-
haps 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 pos-
sessions 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 sta-
ble. 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 pov-
erty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as
some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury 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 indus-
trially backward was helpless in a military sense and was
bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more
advanced rivals.
1984
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, rough-
ly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries
was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital
equipment was not added to, great blocks of the popula-
tion were prevented from working and kept half alive by
State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and
since the privations it inflicted were obviously unneces-
sary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how
to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing
the real wealth of the world. 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 labour. 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 labour power without pro-
ducing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress,
for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build
several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as
obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to any-
body, and with further enormous labours another Floating
Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so
planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meet-
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ing the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs
of the population are always underestimated, with the re-
sult 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 favoured groups somewhere near
the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity
increases the importance of small privileges and thus mag-
nifies the distinction between one group and another. By
the standards of the early twentieth century, even a mem-
ber of the Inner Party lives an 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 bet-
ter quality of his food and drink and 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 the submerged masses whom we call
'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city,
where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the dif-
ference 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 seem
the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruc-
tion, 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 produc-
ing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them.
1984
But this would provide only the economic and not the emo-
tional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned
here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unim-
portant 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 intel-
ligent 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 mental-
ity 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 ex-
ist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires
of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an at-
mosphere 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 administra-
tor, 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. Mean-
while no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his
mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to
end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of
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the entire world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming
conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by
gradually acquiring more and more territory and so build-
ing 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 Ocea-
nia at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost
ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'.
The empirical method of thought, on which all the scien-
tific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to
the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even tech-
nological progress only happens when its products can in
some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In
all the useful arts the world is either standing still or go-
ing backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs
while books are written by machinery. But in matters of
vital importance — meaning, in effect, war and police espio-
nage — 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 once 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 his will, what another human be-
ing is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred
million people in a few seconds without giving warning be-
forehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this
1984
is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture
of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary
minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and
tones of voice, and testing the truth-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 are relevant to the taking
of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and
in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests,
or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Ant-
arctic, 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 impen-
etrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier
gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in
such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole con-
tinents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against
all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle
that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine un-
der the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base
as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities
such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended
thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artifi-
cial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the
earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near re-
alization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a
significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is
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that all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb,
a weapon far more powerful than any that their present
researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, ac-
cording to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic
bombs first appeared as early as the nineteen-forties, and
were first used on a large scale about ten years later. At that
time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on indus-
trial centres, 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 hence of their own
power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever
made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three
powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store
them up against the decisive opportunity which they all
believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art
of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty
years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly,
bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-pro-
pelled 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 end-
less slaughters 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 a
few weeks, have never been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any ma-
246 1984
noeuvre which involves the risk of serious defeat. When
any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise
attack 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, bar-
gaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a
ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the ri-
val states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that
rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to
lull 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 pact of friendship with the remaining world-
power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is
hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of
realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the
disputed areas round 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 Vistula. But this would
violate the principle, followed on all sides though never
formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to con-
quer the areas that used once to be known as France and
Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate the
inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimi-
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late a population of about a hundred million people, who,
so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the
Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super-
states. It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there
should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited
extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the of-
ficial ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest
suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Ocea-
nia never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia,
and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If
he were allowed 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 would be broken, and the fear, hatred,
and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might
evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however
often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands,
the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything ex-
cept bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly
understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of
life in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oce-
ania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia
it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by
a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but
perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citi-
zen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets
of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate
them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common
248 1984
sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distin-
guishable, and the social systems which they support are
not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same py-
ramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader,
the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.
It follows that the three super-states not only cannot con-
quer 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 simultane-
ously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their 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 Ingsoc 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, a war, almost by definition, was something
that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistak-
able 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 held
to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be
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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 designing a gun or an aeroplane they
had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered
sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimi-
cal 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. Newspa-
pers and history books were, of course, always coloured and
biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised 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. While wars
could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely ir-
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, researches that could be called scientific
are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are es-
sentially 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 super-states is
unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within
which almost any perversion of thought can be safely prac-
tised. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of
everyday life — the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and
1984
clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top -
storey windows, and the like. 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
outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is
like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of know-
ing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of
such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars
could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers
from starving to death in numbers large enough to be in-
convenient, 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 pre-
vious 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 anoth-
er. 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 an-
other, 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
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conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society
intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become mislead-
ing. 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 twentieth century has disappeared and been
replaced by something quite different. The effect would be
much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting
one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each
inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each
would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from
the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was
truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
This — although the vast majority of Party members under-
stand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of
the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in
remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feel-
ing of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with
no telescreen, 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 it reassured him. In
a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part
of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had
been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in or-
der. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but
enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-rid-
1984
den. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you
what you know already.
He had just turned back to Chapter
I when he heard Julia's footstep 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 them-
selves.
'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 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 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-'
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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 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 count-
less 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
'Julia, are you awake? ' said Winston.
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous. '
He continued reading:
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcil-
able. 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 distinc-
tions 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
1984
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 en-
list 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.
It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history
there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today,
in a period of decline, the average human being is physical-
ly better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance
in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolu-
tion has ever brought human equality a millimetre 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 pat-
tern had become obvious to many observers. There then
rose schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cy-
clical 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 doc-
trine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings
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and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who
were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been soft-
ened 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 hu-
man 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 be-
forehand. 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 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 the century, Ingsoc
in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as
it is commonly called, in Eastasia, 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 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
256 1984
then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy,
the High would be able to maintain their position perma-
nently.
The new doctrines arose partly because of the accu-
mulation of historical knowledge, and the growth of the
historical sense, which had hardly existed before the nine-
teenth 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 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 inevi-
table 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 neces-
sary 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 seizing power, human equality was no
longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be avert-
ed. 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 with-
out brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for
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thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain hold
even on the groups who actually profited by each histori-
cal 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. 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
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 confessions, the use of hostages, and the depor-
tation 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
258 1984
was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists,
technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, so-
ciologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.
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 in-
dustry and centralized government. As compared with
their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avari-
cious, 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 lib-
eral 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 manipu-
late 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
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of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not
only complete obedience to the will of the State, but com-
plete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed 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 realized 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 con-
centration of property in far fewer hands than before: but
with this difference, that the new owners were a group in-
stead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of
the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings.
Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, be-
cause 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 unop-
posed, because the whole process was represented as an act
of collectivization. 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. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier So-
1984
cialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact
carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with
the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that econom-
ic inequality has been made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical soci-
ety 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 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 dan-
ger 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 easi-
ly 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 crises of past times were totally un-
necessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other
and equally large dislocations can and do happen without
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having political results, because there is no way in which
discontent can become articulate. As for the problem of
over-production, 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, there-
fore, 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 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 in-
fallible 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 choos-
es 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
1984
organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. Its
numbers limited to six millions, or something less than
2 per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner
Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is de-
scribed as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the
hands. Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitu-
ally refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of
the population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the
proles are the Low: for the slave population of the equatori-
al 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 he-
reditary. 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 sixteen. Nor is
there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination
of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Ameri-
cans 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 Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are
a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Ocea-
nia has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose
whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief
LINGUA FRANCA and Newspeak its official language, it is
not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together
by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It
is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly strat-
ified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines.
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There is far less to-and-fro movement between the differ-
ent groups than happened under capitalism or even in the
pre-industrial age. Between the two branches 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 nu-
clei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought
Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not neces-
sarily permanent, 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 neutralize opposition. The older kind of So-
cialist, who had been trained to fight against something
called 'class privilege' assumed that what is not hereditary
cannot be permanent. 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 short-
lived, whereas adoptive organizations 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
264 1984
ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its
successors. 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 characterize our time are really designed to sustain the
mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of pres-
ent-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 gener-
ation 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 in-
dustrial 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. In a Party
member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation
of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be toler-
ated.
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
FreeeBooksatPlaneteBook. com 265
without warning and without knowing that he is being in-
spected. 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 mis-
demeanour, 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 regulated 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, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations
are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have ac-
tually 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. 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 circumstanc-
es know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or
the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate men-
tal training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself
round the Newspeak words CRIMESTOP, BLACKWHITE,
and DOUBLETHINK, makes him unwilling and unable to
1984
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 pro-
duced 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 chil-
dren, 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 logi-
cal 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 protec-
tive stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary,
orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's
own mental processes as complete as that of a contortion-
ist over his body. 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 unwea-
rying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of
facts. The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many
Free eBooks at Planet eBook. com 267
Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradicto-
ry 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 de-
mands 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, precaution-
ary.
Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles,
Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia,
smaller than the others and with a less definite western
frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of
1984
it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion
of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states
are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twen-
ty-five years. 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 genu-
ine ideological difference This is not to say that either the
conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has be-
come 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 com-
mitted by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.
But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of
people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes com-
paratively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any,
takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the
average man can only guess at, or round the Floating For-
tresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the
centres of civilization war means no more than a contin-
uous 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 its character. More exactly,
the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their
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order of importance. Motives which were already present
to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth
centuury 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 al-
ways the same war — one must realize in the first place that
it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three su-
per-states could be definitively conquered even by the other
two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their
natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by
its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic
and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and indus tri-
ousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in
a material sense, anything to fight about. With the estab-
lishment of self-contained economies, in which production
and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble
for markets which was a main cause 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 super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the
materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far
as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for la-
bour power. Between the frontiers of the super-states, and
not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies
a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazza-
ville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about
a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the posses-
sion of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern
236 1984
ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In
practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disput-
ed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and
it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sud-
den stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of
alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals,
and some of them yield important vegetable products such
as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to syn-
thesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all
they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Which-
ever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries
of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian
Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hun-
dreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The
inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to
the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to con-
queror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the
race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory,
to control more labour 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 the
northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the In-
dian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured
and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the
dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable;
round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous terri-
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tories which in fact are largely unihabited and unexplored:
but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and
the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state
always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the ex-
ploited 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 bet-
ter position in which to wage another war. By their labour
the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous war-
fare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure
of world society, and the process by which it maintains it-
self, would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance
with the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simul-
taneously recognized and not recognized by the directing
brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the
machine without raising the general standard of living.
Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of
what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been
latent in industrial society. At present, when few human be-
ings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artifi-
cial 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 com-
pared with the imaginary future to which the people of that
period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the
vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly,
238 1984
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 a
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 fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced,
and various devices, always in some way connected with
warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but
experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the
ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have nev-
er 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 think-
ing 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,
overwork, 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 humand being very greatly over a period of
about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the begin-
ning of the twentieth centuries.
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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 per-
haps 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 pos-
sessions 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 sta-
ble. 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 pov-
erty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as
some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury 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 indus-
trially backward was helpless in a military sense and was
bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more
advanced rivals.
1984
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, rough-
ly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries
was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital
equipment was not added to, great blocks of the popula-
tion were prevented from working and kept half alive by
State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and
since the privations it inflicted were obviously unneces-
sary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how
to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing
the real wealth of the world. 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 labour. 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 labour power without pro-
ducing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress,
for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build
several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as
obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to any-
body, and with further enormous labours another Floating
Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so
planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meet-
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ing the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs
of the population are always underestimated, with the re-
sult 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 favoured groups somewhere near
the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity
increases the importance of small privileges and thus mag-
nifies the distinction between one group and another. By
the standards of the early twentieth century, even a mem-
ber of the Inner Party lives an 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 bet-
ter quality of his food and drink and 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 the submerged masses whom we call
'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city,
where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the dif-
ference 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 seem
the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruc-
tion, 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 produc-
ing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them.
1984
But this would provide only the economic and not the emo-
tional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned
here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unim-
portant 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 intel-
ligent 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 mental-
ity 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 ex-
ist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires
of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an at-
mosphere 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 administra-
tor, 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. Mean-
while no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his
mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to
end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of
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the entire world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming
conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by
gradually acquiring more and more territory and so build-
ing 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 Ocea-
nia at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost
ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'.
The empirical method of thought, on which all the scien-
tific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to
the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even tech-
nological progress only happens when its products can in
some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In
all the useful arts the world is either standing still or go-
ing backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs
while books are written by machinery. But in matters of
vital importance — meaning, in effect, war and police espio-
nage — 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 once 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 his will, what another human be-
ing is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred
million people in a few seconds without giving warning be-
forehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this
1984
is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture
of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary
minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and
tones of voice, and testing the truth-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 are relevant to the taking
of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and
in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests,
or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Ant-
arctic, 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 impen-
etrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier
gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in
such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole con-
tinents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against
all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle
that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine un-
der the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base
as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities
such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended
thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artifi-
cial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the
earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near re-
alization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a
significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is
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that all three powers already possess, in the atomic bomb,
a weapon far more powerful than any that their present
researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, ac-
cording to its habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic
bombs first appeared as early as the nineteen-forties, and
were first used on a large scale about ten years later. At that
time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on indus-
trial centres, 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 hence of their own
power. Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever
made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three
powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store
them up against the decisive opportunity which they all
believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile the art
of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty
years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly,
bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-pro-
pelled 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 end-
less slaughters 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 a
few weeks, have never been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any ma-
246 1984
noeuvre which involves the risk of serious defeat. When
any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise
attack 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, bar-
gaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a
ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the ri-
val states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that
rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to
lull 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 pact of friendship with the remaining world-
power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it is
hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of
realization. Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the
disputed areas round 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 Vistula. But this would
violate the principle, followed on all sides though never
formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to con-
quer the areas that used once to be known as France and
Germany, it would be necessary either to exterminate the
inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimi-
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late a population of about a hundred million people, who,
so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the
Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super-
states. It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there
should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited
extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves. Even the of-
ficial ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest
suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Ocea-
nia never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia,
and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If
he were allowed 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 would be broken, and the fear, hatred,
and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might
evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however
often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands,
the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything ex-
cept bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly
understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of
life in all three super-states are very much the same. In Oce-
ania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia
it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by
a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but
perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citi-
zen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets
of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate
them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common
248 1984
sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distin-
guishable, and the social systems which they support are
not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same py-
ramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader,
the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.
It follows that the three super-states not only cannot con-
quer 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 simultane-
ously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their 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 Ingsoc 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, a war, almost by definition, was something
that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistak-
able 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 held
to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be
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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 designing a gun or an aeroplane they
had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered
sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimi-
cal 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. Newspa-
pers and history books were, of course, always coloured and
biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised 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. While wars
could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely ir-
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, researches that could be called scientific
are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are es-
sentially 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 super-states is
unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within
which almost any perversion of thought can be safely prac-
tised. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of
everyday life — the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and
1984
clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top -
storey windows, and the like. 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
outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is
like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of know-
ing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of
such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars
could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers
from starving to death in numbers large enough to be in-
convenient, 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 pre-
vious 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 anoth-
er. 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 an-
other, 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
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conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society
intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become mislead-
ing. 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 twentieth century has disappeared and been
replaced by something quite different. The effect would be
much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting
one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each
inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each
would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from
the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was
truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
This — although the vast majority of Party members under-
stand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of
the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in
remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feel-
ing of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with
no telescreen, 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 it reassured him. In
a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part
of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had
been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in or-
der. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but
enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-rid-
1984
den. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you
what you know already.
He had just turned back to Chapter
I when he heard Julia's footstep 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 them-
selves.
'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 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 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-'
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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 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 count-
less 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
'Julia, are you awake? ' said Winston.
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous. '
He continued reading:
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcil-
able. 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 distinc-
tions 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
1984
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 en-
list 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.
It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history
there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today,
in a period of decline, the average human being is physical-
ly better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance
in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolu-
tion has ever brought human equality a millimetre 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 pat-
tern had become obvious to many observers. There then
rose schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cy-
clical 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 doc-
trine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings
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and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who
were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been soft-
ened 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 hu-
man 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 be-
forehand. 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 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 the century, Ingsoc
in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as
it is commonly called, in Eastasia, 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 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
256 1984
then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy,
the High would be able to maintain their position perma-
nently.
The new doctrines arose partly because of the accu-
mulation of historical knowledge, and the growth of the
historical sense, which had hardly existed before the nine-
teenth 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 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 inevi-
table 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 neces-
sary 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 seizing power, human equality was no
longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be avert-
ed. 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 with-
out brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for
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thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain hold
even on the groups who actually profited by each histori-
cal 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. 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
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 confessions, the use of hostages, and the depor-
tation 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
258 1984
was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists,
technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, so-
ciologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.
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 in-
dustry and centralized government. As compared with
their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avari-
cious, 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 lib-
eral 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 manipu-
late 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
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of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not
only complete obedience to the will of the State, but com-
plete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed 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 realized 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 con-
centration of property in far fewer hands than before: but
with this difference, that the new owners were a group in-
stead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of
the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings.
Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, be-
cause 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 unop-
posed, because the whole process was represented as an act
of collectivization. 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. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier So-
1984
cialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact
carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with
the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that econom-
ic inequality has been made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical soci-
ety 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 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 dan-
ger 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 easi-
ly 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 crises of past times were totally un-
necessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other
and equally large dislocations can and do happen without
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having political results, because there is no way in which
discontent can become articulate. As for the problem of
over-production, 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, there-
fore, 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 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 in-
fallible 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 choos-
es 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
1984
organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. Its
numbers limited to six millions, or something less than
2 per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner
Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is de-
scribed as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the
hands. Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitu-
ally refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of
the population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the
proles are the Low: for the slave population of the equatori-
al 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 he-
reditary. 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 sixteen. Nor is
there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination
of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Ameri-
cans 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 Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are
a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Ocea-
nia has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose
whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief
LINGUA FRANCA and Newspeak its official language, it is
not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together
by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It
is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly strat-
ified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines.
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There is far less to-and-fro movement between the differ-
ent groups than happened under capitalism or even in the
pre-industrial age. Between the two branches 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 nu-
clei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought
Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not neces-
sarily permanent, 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 neutralize opposition. The older kind of So-
cialist, who had been trained to fight against something
called 'class privilege' assumed that what is not hereditary
cannot be permanent. 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 short-
lived, whereas adoptive organizations 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
264 1984
ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its
successors. 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 characterize our time are really designed to sustain the
mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of pres-
ent-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 gener-
ation 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 in-
dustrial 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. In a Party
member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation
of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be toler-
ated.
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
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without warning and without knowing that he is being in-
spected. 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 mis-
demeanour, 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 regulated 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, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations
are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have ac-
tually 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. 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 circumstanc-
es know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or
the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate men-
tal training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself
round the Newspeak words CRIMESTOP, BLACKWHITE,
and DOUBLETHINK, makes him unwilling and unable to
1984
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 pro-
duced 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 chil-
dren, 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 logi-
cal 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 protec-
tive stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary,
orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's
own mental processes as complete as that of a contortion-
ist over his body. 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 unwea-
rying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of
facts. The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many
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Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradicto-
ry 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 de-
mands 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, precaution-
ary.
