By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this
pattern had become obvious to many observers. There then rose
schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical
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 doctrine specifically
of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and
by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon
them, and it had generally been softened 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 human 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 estab
lished a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.
The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny
beforehand. 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
then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the
High would be able to maintain their position permanently.
The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation
of historical knowledge, and the growth of the historical
sense, which had hardly existed before the nineteenth 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 inevitable but
desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the
development of machine production, however, the case was
altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do
different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to
live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from
the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of
seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be
striven after, but a danger to be averted. In more primitive
ages, when a just and peaceful society was in fact not
possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of an
earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state
of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had
haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. And this
vision had had a certain hold even on the groups who actually
profited by each historical change. The heirs of the French,
English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their
own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech,
equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed
their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. 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 deportation of whole
populations-not only became common again, but were tolerated
and even defended by people who considered themselves
enlightened and progressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars,
revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world
that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out
political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the
various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had
appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the
world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long
been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had
been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the
most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union
organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers,
journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose
origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades
of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by
the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized
government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past
ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury,
hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what
they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This
last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing
today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and
inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some
extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends
everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested
in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church
of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of
the reason for this was that in the past no government had the
power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The
invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate
public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process
further. With the development of television, and the technical
advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an
end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough
to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day
under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official
propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.
The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the
will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all
subjects, now existed for the first time.
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 concentration of
property in far fewer hands than before: but with this
difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass
of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns
anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the
Party owns everything in Oceania, because 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 unopposed, 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 Socialist 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 economic inequality has been made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society 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 danger
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 easily 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 unnecessary and are not now
permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations
can and do happen without having political results, because
there is no way in which discontent can become articulate. As
fcr the problem of overproduction, 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,
therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a
new group of able, underemployed, power-hungry people, and the
growth of liberalism and scepticism in their own ranks. The
problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of
continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing
group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately
below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be
influenced in a negative way.
Given this background, one could infer, if one did not
know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At
the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is
infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement,
every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all
wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly
from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big
Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the
telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that he will never die,
and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when he was
born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to
exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a
focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which
are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an
organization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. 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 described as the
brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below
that come the dumb masses whom we habitually 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 equatorial lands who pass
constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or
necessary part of the structure.
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