In principle, membership of these three groups is
not
hereditary. 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 Americans 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. Oceania 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 stratified, on
what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far
less to- and-fro movement between the different 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
nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought
Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not
necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. 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
Socialist, 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 shortlived,
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 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 present-day society from being perceived. Physical
rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at
present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be
feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation
to generation and from century to century, working, breeding,
and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without
the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial
technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but,
since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important,
the level of popu lar 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 tolerated.
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of
the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure
that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working
or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without
warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing
that he does is indifferent. 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 misdemeanour, 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 actually 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
circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true
belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate
mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself
round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite, and
doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too
deeply on any subject whatever.
A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and
no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a
continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal
traitors, triumph over victories, and selfabasement before the
power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his
bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and
dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the
speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or
rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired
inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the
discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is
called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the
faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the
threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of
not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors,
of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical
to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But
stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full
sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as
complete as that of a contortionist 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 unwearying, moment-to-moment
flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is
blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has
two mutually contradictory 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 demands a continuous alteration of the past,
made possible by the system of thought which really embraces
all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as
doublethink.
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons,
one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The
subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the
proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he
has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the
past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries,
because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better
off than his ancestors and that the average level of material
comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important
reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to
safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that
speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be
constantly brought up to date in order to show that the
predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also
that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever
be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is
a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia
(whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country
must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise
then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously
rewritten. This day- to-day falsification of the past, carried
out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability
of the re/gime as the work of repression and espionage carried
out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.
Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but
survive only in written records and in human memories. The past
is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since
the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full
control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past
is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that
though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any
specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever
shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is
the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This
holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to
be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a
year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute
truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different
from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the
past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure
that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment
is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to
remember that events happened in the desired manner. And
if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper
with written records, then it is necessary to forget
that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned
like any other mental technique. It is learned by the
majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are
intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called,
quite frankly, 'reality control'. In Newspeak it is called
doublethink, though doublethink comprises much
else as well.
Doublethink means the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and
accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which
direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that
he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of
doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is
not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not
be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be
unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of
Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use
conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose
that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while
genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to
draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to
deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to
take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is
indispensably necessary. Even in using the word
doublethink it is necessary to exercise
doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one
is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink
one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie
always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means
of doublethink that the Party has been able -- and may,
for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years --
to arrest the course of history.
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