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, roughly
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 population 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 unnecessary, 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 producing
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 anybody,
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 meeting the bare
needs of the population. In practice the needs of the
population are always underestimated, with the result 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 magnifies the
distinction between one group and another. By the standards of
the early twentieth century, even a member 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 better 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 difference 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
destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically
acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste
the surplus labour of the world by building temples and
pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even
by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to
them. But this would provide only the economic and not the
emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned
here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant
so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of
the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to
be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow
limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous
and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred,
adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is
necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a
state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually
happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does
not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is
needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of
the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and
which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now
almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the
more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that
war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his
capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a
member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war
news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire
war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged
for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such
knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of
doublethink. Meanwhile 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 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 building 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 Oceania 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 scientific achievements of the past were founded,
is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And
even technological 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 going
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 espionage --
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 being is
thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million
people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In
so far as scientific research still continues, this 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
Antarctic, 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 impenetrable
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 continents, 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 under 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 artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by
tapping the heat at the earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near
realization, and none of the three super-states ever gains a
significant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is 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, according 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 industrial 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-propelled
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 endless 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 manoeuvre
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,
bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a
ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival
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 conquer
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 assimilate 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 official ally of the
moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War
prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania 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 except bombs.
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