All past oligarchies have fallen from power either
because
they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became
stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing
circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and
cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force,
and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say,
either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is
the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of
thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And
upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the
Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue
ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For
the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own
infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of
doublethink are those who invented doublethink
and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our
society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening
are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is.
In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the
delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear
illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in
intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose
attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the
subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people
the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro
over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a
matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a
change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the
same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same
manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers whom
we call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of the
war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of
fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable
of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is
in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party,
that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is
believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible.
This peculiar linking-together of opposites -- knowledge with
ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism-is one of the chief
distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology
abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical
reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every
principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood,
and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches
a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past,
and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time
peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It
systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it
calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the
sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four
Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence
in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of
Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with
lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of
Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not
accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they
are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only
by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained
indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be
broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the
High, as we have called them, are to keep their places
permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be
controlled insanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have
almost ignored. It is; why should human equality be
averted? Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been
rightly described, what is the motive for this huge, accurately
planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of
time?
Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen. the
mystique of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party,
depends upon doublethink. But deeper than this lies the
original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led
to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the
Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary
paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really
consists . . . Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes
aware of a new sound. It seemed to him that Julia had been very
still for some time past. She was lying on her side, naked from
the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed on her hand and one
dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose and fell
slowly and regularly.
'Julia.
No answer.
'Julia, are you awake?'
No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it
carefully on the floor, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over
both of them.
He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate
secret. He understood how; he did not understand
why. Chapter I, like Chapter III, had not actually told
him anything that he did not know, it had merely systematized
the knowledge that he possessed already. But after reading it
he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a
minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There
was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth
even against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellow beam
from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell
across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and
the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong,
sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all
right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,'
with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound
wisdom. When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept
for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told
him that it was only twenty- thirty. He lay dozing for a while;
then the usual deep- lunged singing struck up from the yard
below;
'It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'
The driveling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You
still heard it all over the place. It had outlived the Hate
Song. Julia woke at the sound, stretched herself luxuriously,
and got out of bed.
'I'm hungry,' she said. 'Let's make some more coffee.
Damn! The stove's gone out and the water's cold.' She picked
the stove up and shook it. 'There's no oil in it.'
'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.'
'The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to
put my clothes on,' she added. 'It seems to have got colder.'
Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable
voice sang on:
'They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!'
As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across
to the window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses;
it was not shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones
were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had the
feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was
the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman marched
to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling
silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He
wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely
the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come
across to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of
fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the
woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching
up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it
struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had
never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty,
blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then
hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain
like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so,
and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless
body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore
the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the
rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
'She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm.
From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of
their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing
they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind,
could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no
mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile
belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It
might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a
year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly
swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and
coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing,
darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing,
laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over
thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing.
The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed
up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away
behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was
curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in
Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the
sky were also very much the same -- everywhere, all over the
world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like
this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by
walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same --
people who had never learned to think but who were storing up
in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would
one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the
proles ! Without having read to the end of the book, he
knew that that must be Goldstein's final message. The future
belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their
time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien
to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because
at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is
equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen,
strength would change into consciousness. The proles were
immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that
valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would
come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand
years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds,
passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did
not share and could not kill.
'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us,
that first day, at the edge of the wood?'
'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to
please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.'
The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing.
All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and
Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the
frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages
of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan
-- everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made
monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death
and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of
conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs
was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept
alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the
secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
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