'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They
are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if
we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the
centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.'
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did
not say anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a
spoken objection:
'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When
we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often
find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun
and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres
away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce
a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant,
according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians
are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'
Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the
swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he
knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing
exists outside your own mind -- surely there must be some way
of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed
long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he
had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's
mouth as he looked down at him.
'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not
your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is
solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism.
Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different
thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,'
he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we
have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but
over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of
a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man
assert his power over another, Winston?'
Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough.
Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying
your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and
humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and
putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?
It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that
the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is
torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world
which will grow not less but more merciless as it
refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards
more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded
on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world
there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-
abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already
we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived
from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child
and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.
No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.
But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.
Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one
takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated.
Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a
ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are
at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty
towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of
Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of
triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no
literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no
more need of science. There will be no distinction between
beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment
of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be
destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always
there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing
and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there
will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an
enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston
had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He
could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien
went on:
'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be
there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society,
will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated
over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have
been in our hands -- all that will continue, and worse. The
espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the
executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a
world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the
Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the
opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his
heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they
will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet
they will always survive. This drama that I have played out
with you during seven years will be played out over and over
again generation after generation, always in subtler forms.
Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming
with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly
penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own
accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A
world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after
triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve
of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that
world will be like. But in the end you will do more than
understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of
it.'
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You
can't!' he said weakly.
'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'
'You could not create such a world as you have just
described. It is a dream. It is impossible.'
'Why?'
'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and
hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It
would commit suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is
more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were,
what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear
ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of
human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference
would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the
individual is not death? The party is immortal.'
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into
helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in
his disagreement O'Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he
could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing
to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O'Brien
had said, he returned to the attack.
'I don't know -- I don't care. Somehow you will fail.
Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.'
'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are
imagining that there is something called human nature which
will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we
create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps
you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the
slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind.
They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The
others are outside -- irrelevant.'
'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or
later they will see you for what you are, and then they will
tear you to pieces.'
'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any
reason why it should?'
'No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There
is something in the universe -- I don't know, some spirit, some
principle -- that you will never overcome.'
'Do you believe in God, Winston?'
'No.'
'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?'
'I don't know. The spirit of Man.'
'And do you consider yourself a man?.'
'Yes.'
'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your
kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that
you are alone? You are outside history, you are
non-existent.' His manner changed and he said more harshly:
'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our
lies and our cruelty?'
'Yes, I consider myself superior.'
O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking.
After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own. It
was a sound-track of the conversation he had had with O'Brien,
on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood.
He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to
murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to
disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's
face. O'Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to say
that the demonstration was hardly worth making. Then he turned
a switch and the voices stopped.
'Get up from that bed,' he said.
The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself
to the floor and stood up unsteadily.
'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the
guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you
are. Take off your clothes.'
Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls
together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of
them. He could not remember whether at any time since his
arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath
the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags,
just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid
them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror
at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped
short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.
'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the
mirror. You shall see the side view as well.'
He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed,
greycoloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its
actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that
he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The
creature's face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent
carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby forehead
running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and
battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce
and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in
look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that
it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it
registered would be different from the ones he felt. He had
gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that
he had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was
grey. Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body
was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there
under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the
ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of
skin peeling off it. But the truly frightening thing was the
emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as
that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were
thicker than the thighs. He saw now what O'Brien had meant
about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was
astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to
make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be
bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he
would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty,
suffering from some malignant disease.
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