Analyzing Evil: INGSOC From 1984

hello everyone and welcome to the 88th episode of analyzing evil featuring ingsoc from 1984. george orwell created this masterpiece to serve as a precautionary tale regarding the authoritarian bent present within his own political alignment socialism crafting a story that presents us with a horrific dystopian world born out of the likes of nazism and soviet communism an extreme prediction of what could have been had stalinism and other similar tracts of thought taken hold over the political apparatuses of the world a world where our every move is watched by an overreaching totalitarian government that seeks to control everything we think and feel one that's more than willing to completely annihilate any person whom they deem to be a threat to their absolute power in this video we're going to explore the principles that guides the despotic force that is ingsoc and the way they put them into practice and to do that effectively i believe that it's important that we familiarize ourselves with the passages given to us by orwell that denote the methods and thought processes of those pulling the strings of big brother now i apologize in advance but this is going to be a rather long introduction as this is quite the long video and there's a few things you need to know before continuing any further in a later part of this story winston is given a book titled the theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism that was supposedly written by goldstein and though this book is actually a fabrication in this book we are given information that winston our protagonist was already well aware of which means everything we're given here about the party's motivations and ideology is factual and though we never learn the entire contents of this book what excerpts we do receive are vital in understanding the methods ingsoc employs to hold on to and advance its absolute power so with that in mind the first section of this video will be a reading of the two chapters of that book that we're given which has of course inflated this video's run time if you're already intimately familiar with the intricacies of this story i have separated this video into chapters so you can skip the reading if you like and if you're interested in a more condensed version of this reading i will be summarizing what we learn in the first section in the second section of this video but for those of you who may have only seen the film or aren't familiar with either the book or the film i do think that the information given to us in these fictionalized chapters in their entirety is quite important when trying to understand the intricacies of ingsoc so consider giving the first section a listen if you have the time so as i said only a moment ago this video will be divided into various sections so you can skip right to the analysis if you aren't interested in a direct reading from the novel or a summation of that reading and those sections are going to be in order the theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism a summary of the aforementioned book the world of 1984 ingsoc personified and finally an overview of everything we've learned and a breakdown of the morality of ingsoc now there have been several different adaptations of the book over the years and while each of them has something to offer in terms of bringing this story to life the real meat of any character or organization that was first featured in a novel can be found in that novel so while you will be seeing clips from the adaptation made in 1984 on screen everything you're going to hear in this video comes directly from the novel and outside of the first section i'm still going to be reading a few different passages directly from the novel as there's no point in explaining something in my own words when george orwell explained it perfectly in his own so keep that in mind as we move forward also i didn't think it was too necessary for there to be random clips bombarding you while you're listening to my reading of the book so in the first section of the video this is what you'll be seeing on screen but before we begin let's first talk about our sponsor for this video polygens polygens is a research academy founded by two stanford graduates that aims to help students at the high school level looking for one-on-one mentorship from top-tier academics and practitioners in 10 or more hour long sessions over a period of three to six months polygenses a great way for any student interested in any field to get more familiar with a subject they're interested in and while polygense is a great way to help any student prepare for college polygens is more about getting students interested in learning for learning's sake for example fans of this channel might be interested in delving deeper into psychology and this project on schizophrenia and its link to neuroplasticity is a great example of the in-depth work a student can undergo when taking on a mentorship at polygense i'm always interested in learning more about mental health disorders and how they apply to the characters i cover and this is an incredible project that was even featured in the youth medical journal that any of you can read through right now to gain better insight into schizophrenia i'm a lifelong learner and i think valuable resources like polygens is just what a voracious student needs to get a leg up in their field and i highly recommend that any student who wants to gain insight into that field from an expert to give polygens a shot and right now if you use the link down below you can take 250 dollars off of your purchase of a polygens program so don't wait get paired with an expert mentor in your industry of choice to make your passion project a reality with polygens by clicking the link down below thank you polygens for sponsoring this video now without further ado let's begin chapter 1 ignorance is strength throughout recorded time and probably since the end of the neolithic age there have been three kinds of people in the world the high the middle and the low they have been subdivided in many ways they have borne countless different names and their relative numbers as well as their attitude towards one another have varied from age to age but the essential structure of society has never altered even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes the same pattern has always reasserted itself just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium however far it is pushed one way or the other the aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable the aim of the high is to remain where they are the aim of the middle is to change places with the high the aim of the low when they have an aim for it is an abiding characteristic of the low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again for long periods the high seem to be securely in power but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently or both they are then overthrown by the middle who enlist the low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice as soon as they have reached their objective the middle thrust the low back into their old position of servitude and themselves become the high presently a new middle group splits off from one of the other groups or from both of them and the struggle begins over again of the three groups only the low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims it would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind even today in a period of decline the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago but no advance in wealth no softening of manners no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer from the point of view of the low no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters by the late 19th 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 adherence 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 established 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 19th century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity was still deeply inaffected 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 and oceania neo-bolshevism and eurasia death worship as it is commonly called in east asia 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 19th 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 principle underlying cause was that as early as the beginning of the 20th 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 favored 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 labor 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 20th 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 around about 1930 practices which had been long abandoned in some cases for hundreds of years like 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 consider 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 in 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 24 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 but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects now existed for the first time after the revolutionary period of the 50s and 60s 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 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 program 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 mass is 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 for 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 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 skepticism in their own ranks the problem that is to say is educational it is a problem of continuously molding 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 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 guys 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 two percent 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 percent 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 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 16 nor is there any racial discrimination or any market domination of one province by another jews black people 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 rules 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 appears 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 ableist 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 short-lived 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 worldview 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 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 popular 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 behavior 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 misdemeanor 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 behavior 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 persian naturally orthodox that is in newspeak a good thinker 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 around the new speak words crime stop black white 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 self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the party the discontents produced by his bear unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the two minutes hate and the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical 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 crime stop crime stop 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 enemicol deingsock and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction crime stop 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 key word here is black white like so many new speak 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 east asia 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 regime 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 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 doublething 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 a 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 continued to be able for thousands of years to arrest the course of history 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's 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 favored workers whom we call the proles are only intermittently conscious of the war when it's 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 has found world conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible this peculiar thinking 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 on example 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 a 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 forever 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 the splitting up of the world into three great super states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the 20th century with the absorption of europe by russia and of the british empire by the united states two of the three existing powers eurasia and oceania were already effectively in being the third east asia only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting the frontiers between the three super states are in some places arbitrary and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war but in general they follow geographical lines eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the european and asiatic landmass from portugal to the bering strait oceania comprises the americas the atlantic islands including the british isles australasia and the southern portion of africa east asia smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier comprises china and the countries to the south of it the japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of manchuria mongolia and tibet in one combination or another these three super states are permanently at war and have been so for the past 25 years war however is no longer the desperate annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the 20th century it is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference this is not to say that either the conduct of war or the prevailing attitude towards it has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous on the contrary war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries and horrid war crimes and acts of slavery are looked upon as normal and when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy meritorious but in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people mostly highly trained specialists and causes comparatively few casualties the fighting when there is any takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at or around the floating fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes in the centers of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths war has in fact changed its character more exactly the reason for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early 20th century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon to understand the nature of the present war for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years it is always the same war one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive none of the three super states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination they are too evenly matched and their natural defenses are too formidable eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces oceania by the width of the atlantic and the pacific east asia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants secondly there is no longer in a material sense anything to fight about with the establishment of self-contained economies in which production and consumption are geared to one another the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death in any case each of the three super states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries insofar as the war has a direct economic purpose it is war for labor power between the frontiers of the super states and not permanently in the possession of any of them there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at tangier brazzaville darwin and hong kong containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth it's for the possession of these thickly populated regions and of the northern ice cap that the three powers are constantly struggling in practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area portions of it are constantly changing hands and it's the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment all of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods but above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labor whichever power controls equatorial africa or the countries of the middle east or southern india or the indonesian archipelago disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies the inhabitants of these areas reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves pass continually from conqueror to conqueror and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments to capture more territory to control more labor power to turn out more armaments to capture more territory and so on indefinitely it should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas the frontiers of eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the congo and the northern shore of the mediterranean the islands of the indian ocean and the pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by oceania or by east asia in mongolia the dividing line between eurasia and east asia is never stable around the pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored but the balance of power always remains roughly even and the territory which forms the heartland of each super state always remains invalid moreover the labor of the exploited peoples around the equator is not really necessary to the world's economy they add nothing to the wealth of the world is used for purposes of war and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war by their labor the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up but if they did not exist the structure of world society and the process by which it maintains itself would not be essentially different the primary aim of modern warfare in accordance with the principles of doublethink this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the inner party is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living ever since the end of the 19th century the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods had been latent in industrial society at present when few human beings even have enough to eat this problem is obviously not urgent and it might not have become so even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work the world of today is a bare hungry dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914 and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward in the early 20th century the vision of a future society unbelievably rich leisured orderly and efficient a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing this failed to happen partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought which could not survive in a strictly regimented society as a whole the world is more primitive today than it was 50 years ago certain backward areas have advanced and various devices always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage have been developed but experiment and invention have largely stopped and the ravages of the atomic war of the 1950s have never been fully repaired nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there from the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery and therefore to a great extent for human inequality had disappeared if the machine were used deliberately for that end hunger over work dirt illiteracy and disease could be eliminated within a few generations and in fact without being used for any such purpose but by a sort of automatic process by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute the machine did raise the living standards of the average human very greatly over a period of about 50 years at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries but it was also clear that an all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction indeed in some sense was the destruction of a hierarchical society in a world in which everyone worked short hours had enough to eat lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator and possessed a motorcar or even an aeroplane the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared if it once became general wealth would confer no distinction it was possible no doubt to imagine a society in which wealth in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries should be evenly distributed while power remained in the hands of a small privileged cast but in practice such a society could not long remain stable for if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves and when once they had done this they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function and they would sweep it away in the long run a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance to return to the agricultural past as some thinkers about the beginning of the 20th century dreamed of doing was not a practicable solution it conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world and moreover any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated directly or indirectly by its more advanced rivals 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 labor 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 labor power without producing anything that can be consumed a floating fortress for example has locked up in it the labor 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 labors 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 bear 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 favored 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 20th century even a member of the inner party lives in 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 horse flesh 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 cast 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 labor 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 orgyastic 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 market 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 waivers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real and that it's 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 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 plows 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 insofar 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 a 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 armor 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 kilometers away in space or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's center 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 1940s and were first used on a large scale about 10 years later at that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centers 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 30 or 40 years helicopters are more used than they were formerly bombing planes have largely been 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 maneuver 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 low 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 around 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 super states 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 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 100 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 colored 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 east asia and he has 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 cylon may change hands the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud but tacitly understood and acted upon namely that the conditions of life in all three super states are very much the same in oceania the prevailing philosophy is called ingsoc in eurasia it is called neo-bolshevism and in east asia it is called by a chinese name usually translated as death worship but perhaps better rendered as obliteration of the self the citizen of oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure the same worship of semi-divine leader the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare it follows that the three super states not only cannot conquer one another but would gain no advantage by doing so on the contrary so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up like three sheaves of corn and as usual the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing their lives are dedicated to world conquest but they also know that the war should continue everlastingly and without victory meanwhile the fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of ingsoc and its rival systems of thought here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character in past ages a war almost by definition was something that sooner or later came to an end usually an unmistakable victory or defeat in the past also war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality all rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency so long as defeat meant the loss of independence or some other result generally held to be undesirable the precautions against defeat had to be serious physical facts could not be ignored in philosophy or religion or ethics or politics two and two might make five but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions moreover to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past newspapers and history books were of course always colored and biased but falsification of the kind that is practiced today would have been impossible war was a sure safeguard of sanity and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards while wars could be won or lost no ruling class could be completely irresponsible but when war became literally continuous it also ceases to be dangerous when war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded as we have seen researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming and their failure to show results is not important efficiency even military efficiency is no longer needed nothing is efficient in oceania except the thought police since each of the three super states is unconquerable each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practiced reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life the need to eat and drink to get shelter in clothing to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top story windows and the like between life and death and between physical pleasure and physical pain there is still a distinction but that is all cut off from contact with the outer world and with the past the citizen of oceania is like a man in interstellar space who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down the rulers of such a state are absolute as the pharaohs or the caesars could not be they are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals but once that minimum is achieved they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose the war therefore if we judge it by the standards of previous wars is merely an imposture it is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another but though it is unreal it is not meaningless it eats up the surplus of consumable goods and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs war it will be seen is now a purely internal affair in the past the ruling groups of all countries although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war did fight against one another and the victor always plundered the vanquished in our own day they are not fighting against one another at all the war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory but to keep the structure of society intact the very word war therefore has become misleading it would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist the peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the neolithic age and the early 20th century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different the effect would be much the same if the three super states instead of fighting one another should agree to live in perpetual peace each invalid within its own boundaries for in that case each would still be a self-contained universe freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger a peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war this although the vast majority of party members understand it only in a shallower sense is the inner meaning of the party slogan war is peace and now before we move on i'd like to read an excerpt from the index of this book that gives us some more insight into newspeak the purpose of newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of ingsoc but to make all other modes of thought impossible it was intended that when newspeak had been adopted once and for all and old speak forgotten a heretical thought that is a thought diverging from the principles of ingsoc should be literally unthinkable at least so far as thought is dependent on words its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a party member could properly wish to express while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods this was done partly by the invention of new words but chiefly by eliminating undesired but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever to give a single example the word free still existed in newspeak but it could only be used in such statements as this dog is free from lice or this field is free from weeds it could not be used in its old sense of politically free or intellectually free since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts and were therefore of necessity nameless quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum and now onto a summary of this section in this alternate version of earth the world is divided between three different superpowers that emerged after an atomic war in the 1950s oceania which is comprised of north america south america australia southern africa and england eurasia which encompasses the former soviet union and all of mainland europe and then east asia the smallest of the three that rules over much of china and other various asian countries the world in this universe is to put it simply a hellscape since the atomic war these three super states have been engaged in constant warfare with one another though the war is never as bad as it seems when presented through propaganda as the need for large-scale warfare has largely become obsolete owing to the fact that significant exchanges of territory actually serve as a detriment to each respective super state due to the logistics of integrating or eliminating large groups of people so the never-ending war being fought across the world is in reality only fought by a handful of soldiers on a handful of frontiers and the real casualties come from bombing campaigns that are orchestrated by the governments of each state against their own people to perpetuate the illusion of war if you happen to live outside these states though conditions are inherently worse as the people that are unfortunate enough to live within the borders of the disputed lands are frequently enslaved by each of these powers and find themselves the subject of various horrific war crimes this state of perpetual warfare is something that's integral to each respective parties hold on power in their spheres of influence now in each of these states there is one central authority a political party that's in control of every aspect of human life each of which professes their own brand of socialism ingsoc and oceania neo-bolshevism in eurasia and death worship or obliteration of the self in east asia each of these parties professed to hold traditional socialist beliefs but authoritarianism gradually infected nearly every mode of political thought across the world these parties therefore begin to reject the basic principles that underpins all of socialism freedom and equality in favor of absolute power and control over their respective populations while still paying lip service to socialist ideology each of them subsequently claiming to be the true representation of socialism though in reality they're all nearly identical and the conditions in each of these super states are quite similar as well now as was lined out in these chapters the authoritarian goal of ingsoc is to create a permanent hierarchical society that will allow ingsoc to remain the dominant power in oceania and perhaps eventually the world for time eternal ingsoc recognizes that society has always been organized in three different social classes the high the middle and the low and the cyclical nature of the world that being that the middle eventually overthrows the high with the help of the low and becomes the new high is something they wish to eliminate in order to ensure that ingsoc remains firmly within the highest class of society until the end of time they recognize that the advent of advanced machine technology has essentially made equality a possibility if the world could point their efforts towards using machines to better the lives of everyone but because equality would invariably mean a loss of power for the respective overlords of the world equality gradually became something to be averted rather than embraced and the introduction of authoritarianism all across the world eliminated all possibilities of equality ever usurping the power of the powerful with absolute power ingsoc is able to exert an unprecedented amount of control over its population through a combination of propaganda constant surveillance continuous warfare the stifling of scientific progress the manufactured stupidity brought about by the continued advent of newspeak and most important of all the immutability of the past the party's constant effort to alter the past so that it suits its aims the alteration of the past is accomplished through the constant destruction or correction of documents and the stupefication of the masses through newspeak is summed up beautifully by orwell in the index of the novel where he states that and i quote the purpose of newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the view and mental habits proper to the devotees of ingsoc but to make all other modes of thought impossible it was intended that when newspeak had been adopted once and for all and old speak forgotten a heretical thought that is a thought diverging from the principles of ingsoc should be literally unthinkable at least so far as thought is dependent on words its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a party member could properly wish to express while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods this was done partly by the invention of new words but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and so far is possible of all secondary meanings whatever to give a single example the word free still existed in newspeak but it could only be used in such statements as this dog is free from lice or this field is free from weeds it could not be used in its old sense of politically free or intellectually free since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts and were therefore of necessity nameless quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive new speak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum now although the party claims that it's led by the mysterious figure that is big brother in reality big brother is simply an idol the avatar of the party who doesn't actually exist but serves his purpose as a figure to be idolized as instilling the adulation of an individual into one's populace is much easier than training them to put all their faith into a faceless organization in truth the party has no central authority and its inner workings could be likened to that of an automated system with independent working parts that labor towards achieving the same goal perpetuating the absolute power of the metaphysical party and its death grip over the lives of every citizen of oceania the party through its thin veil of socialism is able to claim that everything in oceania is collectively owned by the masses but in reality the party owns and controls everything society is still divided along the lines of the high middle and the low the high being what is known as the inner party the small number of people that can be seen as the brains of the party who decide the course of party policy the outer party which are the hands of the party the everyday workers who carry out the will of the inner party and the pros who are both outside the control of the party and under its thumb in every way imaginable the proles in their doings matter little to the party within the pro sectors of oceania crime is rampant and people mostly do as they please but through the careful organization of society and the prevailing opinion that the pros have no intellect the party has ensured that the pros have no standard of comparison that could cause them to yearn for a better life absolutely no upward mobility outside of potential membership in the party and in education that eliminates all adversarial thoughts to the party however the members of the inner and outer party are another matter entirely a member of the party is watched 24 7 and every thought feeling and action is intensely scrutinized by the thought police party members aren't permitted even the slightest deviation in opinion but a party member is expected to not only hold the correct opinions but the correct instincts as the beliefs a party member is supposed to hold are never plainly stated as otherwise the contradictions in ingsoc would become apparent a party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respite from party enthusiasm he is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors triumph over victories and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the party the discontents produced by his bear unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the two minutes hate and the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline the expected attitudes of party members are accurately summed up by three new speak words crime stop which means the faculty of stopping short as though by instinct at the threshold of any dangerous thought or put simply protective stupidity black white which means to either label an opponent as someone who will blatantly claim black is white in contradiction of the facts or for a party member it means a loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this and most importantly to believe it to be so and to know that black is white and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary and both these concepts are invariably supported by doublethink which is the mechanism with which the party alters the past yet keeps those alterations within the minds of its members in case they should become necessary to the party's mission once again doublethink is reality control the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them the organs of the party responsible for ensuring that party members are held accountable for their actions and that the flow of information to the masses is controlled are the ministry of peace which 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 did they result from ordinary hypocrisy they are deliberate exercises in doublethink for it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely this is the party as outlined by goldstein's book but now let's examine how these policies have affected the world through the eyes of our protagonist winston and his companion julia winston describes the bleak world of airstrip one that is the official party name for england as a drab run down and wholly depressing place to live in one where rats and dilapidated gray buildings are permanent fixtures of the scenery a place where rockets fall periodically to annihilate scores of party members and proles alike the police are regularly seen in both the prole sectors and the party sectors of society but the real danger lies with the thought police the secret police of the party who are known for whisking party members away in the middle of the night for committing thought crime the act of having dangerous thoughts against the party telescreens the 1984 equivalent of a television are to be found in every habitation and place of work in the party sectors and one is never truly alone with their thoughts and actions so long as they are within sight of a telescreen or close enough to it that it can hear you and the telescreens are even able to detect a person's heartbeat so trying to get past them is not so easily done society is highly regimented with daily workouts beamed through the telescreens rations for the bearish necessities that are always in short supply even though the populace is constantly bombarded with news of enormous feats in production and everyone at least in public acts as the worst kind of sycophantic fanatics every waking hour of every day propaganda is spoon-fed to party members constantly through the telescreens news bulletins abound praising big brother for impossible feats like exponentially increasing production or the standard of living intermixed of course with accounts of the never-ending war against whichever superstate that oceania is currently in conflict with but that isn't to say that party members are completely deprived of entertainment for there are numerous war films screened on a daily basis to keep war fervor at the absolute maximum and one can attend frequent public hangings or watch them on their telescreen to keep their hatred of the enemy at its peak winston's life is one of tedium lies and placation at the run-down victory mansion that always smells of boiled cabbage which he calls home one that he shares with numerous other outer party members he's plied with a steady stream of victory gin a caustic alcoholic drink that only serves to numb the drinker and at the work cafeteria he's provided the same access to this dreadful drink in order to both dull the senses and keep the mind always muddled his work like the work of all other party members is to create lies and winston labors in the ministry of truth to alter current or past events winston receives newspaper articles that are contradictory to the reality of life in oceania on a near daily basis and alters them before destroying the original copy and he does the same thing with war records manufacturing false individuals like comrade oglevy a supposed hero of the malabar front with numerous achievements to his name whose image is used as a source of inspiration for the rest of oceania people who can only aspire to have the privilege of fighting in the wars let alone as valiantly as a man like comrade oglevy workers are allowed some respite from their drudgery though like their daily intake of highly processed sludge and the two minutes hate a solid two minutes of televised propaganda aimed at keeping that ever-present hate for all things on ingsoc at the forefront of a party member's mind next to their love of big brother of course in the home men and women are still expected to form long-lasting relationships with one another and procreate however sex has been reduced to a horrid act that strays one's thoughts away from the party and sex is pushed down by the likes of the anti-sex league who aim to eliminate all the pleasure to be found in intercourse in favor of keeping it relegated to occasional procreation with the eventual goal of eliminating human contact altogether by breeding humans through artificial insemination vilifying sex also serves another purpose though in that a person who is forced into sexual privation has their pent-up sexual urges transformed into hysteria which the party can use as a vehicle to further drive its people into a state of war hysteria and fanaticism now the thought police are the central threat in this world but what's perhaps worse than the thought police and the constant presence of sycophantic fools are the children of party members little devils who are indoctrinated from birth to be the perfect party drones and virtual extensions of the thought police abusive to their parents and filling their days with party functions these children frequently betray their parents and turn them into the thought police for no other reason than suspected thought crime tips that the thought police always assume are made with the utmost sincerity however one might try no one can escape the all-consuming grasp of the thought police if they show even a modicum of dissent in their actions or speech less so if a person decides to blatantly disobey the unspoken laws of the party as we see when winston begins deviating significantly from party protocol by illegally engaging with julia and attempting to become a part of the resistance with the help of a hopeful ally in the inner party member o'brien a man who unfortunately turns out to be a member of the thought police who is entirely entrenched in party ideology winston was our eyes and ears regarding the world of 1984 and the darkness that surrounds it but o'brien is the party personified a man who for all intents and purposes might as well be the real big brother and it's through him that we really get to see the horrid tenants and practices of the party as well as the actions of the people who cling to them as an absolute truth during winston's dreadful imprisonment and interrogation we see him abused physically and mentally in horrifying ways that no human should ever have to endure and the desired result of this process is to wear down the individual so completely that they totally transform into a paragon of the party and who better to explain this process to us than o'brien himself do not imagine that you will save yourself winston however completely you surrender to us no one who has once gone astray is ever spared and even if we choose to let you live out the natural term of your life still you would never escape from us what happens to you here is forever understand that in advance we shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back things will happen to you from which you could not recover even if you lived a thousand years never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling everything will be dead inside you never again will you be capable of love or friendship or joy of living or laughter or curiosity or courage or integrity you will be hollow we shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves as for why o'brien and the thought police are subjecting people to this horrendous treatment we're given an answer when o'brien poses this question to winston and answers it himself once winston incorrectly answers that the party treats people this way for their supposed own good then o'brien says now i will tell you the answer to my question it is this the party seeks power entirely for its own sake we are not interested in the good of others we are interested solely in power not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness only power pure power what pure power means you will understand presently we are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing all the others even those who resembled ourselves were cowards and hypocrites the german nazis and the russian communists came very close to us in their methods but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives they pretended perhaps they even believed that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal we are not like that we know that no one ever sees his power with the intention of relinquishing it power is not a means it is an end one does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship the object of persecution is persecution the object of torture is torture the object of power is power we are the priests of power god is power but at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned it is time for you to gather some idea of what power means the first thing you must realize is that power is collective the individual only has power insofar as he ceases to be an individual you know the party slogan freedom is slavery has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible slavery is freedom alone free the human being is always defeated it must be so because every human being is doomed to die which is the greatest of all failures but if he can make complete utter submission if he can merge himself in the party so that he is the party then he is all-powerful and immortal the second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings but above all over the mind power over matter external reality as you would call it is not important already our control over matter is absolute now what o'brien means by this control over reality is answered by the constant effort of the party to reinvent history and current events to suit their aims no matter how false their claims may be for if they can walk the line between contradiction and truth and master both they essentially control reality so far as the average human is concerned for in the view of the party there is no alternate reality so long as the reality invented by the party can be cemented as an absolute we control matter because we control the mind reality is inside the skull you will learn by degrees winston there is nothing that we could not do invisibility levitation anything i could float off this floor like a soap bubble if i wish to i do not wish to because the party does not wish it you must get rid of those 19th century ideas about the laws of nature here o'brien even goes so far as to claim that humanity was the beginning of life on earth and any evidence to the contrary is a fabrication concocted by enemies of the state and he says as much when winston challenges o'brien on the existence of fossils after which o'brien asks if winston had ever seen any and when he replies that he hasn't then he asks him how he could possibly know then that they exist and he even manages to extend this bizarre line of thinking towards the cosmos when winston declares that the whole universe is outside of the influence of the party noting the existence of the stars to which o'brien says what are the stars they are bits of fire a few kilometers away we could reach them if we wanted to or we could blot them out the earth is the center of the universe the sun and the stars go round it 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 kilometers 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 have you forgotten doublethink and of course it all comes back to doublethink the tool that the party uses to distort reality in any way it sees fit but the physical and metaphysical nature of the universe isn't even a chief concern of the party it's men and the minds that lie inside of them the real power the power we have to fight for night and day is not power over things but over men power is an 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 and 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 claim 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 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 processes 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 forever and remember that it is forever 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 forever 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 and 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 in his helpless state winston still manages to find it in himself to challenge the indomitable will of o'brien by stating that the party is destined to lose eventually that some force perhaps the human spirit will eventually break the shackles that have been clamped around the ankles of humanity but o'brien is not impressed in the slightest and gives winston this in reply 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 and indeed it would appear that o'brien is correct as even the ever defiant winston is eventually made to humble himself before the party and declare his love of big brother after which of course he's sent to the dreaded room 101 the arena where the unfortunate are brought to live out their worst fears after revealing them to the thought police during their confessions or through espionage via the telescreens and winston is inevitably broken down to the point where he betrays his love of julia and replaces that love with the love of big brother a final capitulation that would finally allow winston the freedom to be shot so after everything we've learned about ingsoc and the world that it lords over what is there to say about this monstrous creation well right off the bat there's not a single positive thing to be said about ingsoc but whatever pinprick of light that manages to penetrate the all-consuming darkness of the party doesn't even begin to provide any sort of redemption to this diabolical organization the world is run by ingsoc is nothing short of a nightmare torture rape murder espionage pitiful living conditions wrongful imprisonment indoctrination forced labor purges and endless warfare are all sponsored by a state that only cares about advancing the power of an immaterial human construct that will ensure the subjugation of humanity through an endless cycle of violence and systemic stupefication but the sad truth is that at varying points in our own history there have been millions if not billions of people that have been made to suffer under the yoke of despots dictators and their cronies who seek to cement themselves in positions of power through the suffering of their people george orwell was partially inspired to write this novel by what he had heard was happening in stalin's soviet union a country that was pressed under the thumb of their leader in almost the same way as the people of oceania are pressed under ingsoc the ministry of truth is basically a representation of the lubianca the dreaded prison that the nkvd and later kgb used to torture and kill supposed enemies of the state the worship of big brother is akin to a cult of personality allah stalin the near-ever-present surveillance of citizens and frequent purges were as much of a problem in stolen soviet union as they were in ingsock's oceania starvation labor camps and falsified statistics were the norm and there was even a kgb agent who went under the code name o'brien that was sent to spy on george orwell though the soviet union under stalin may have been the inspiration for this tale it is unfortunately not the only example of power-hungry individuals seeking to amass power at the expense of innocence in the americas you had raphael trujillo of the dominican republic papadoc duvalier in haiti and fidel castro in cuba in africa you had mobutu sesiseko in the democratic republic of the congo robert mugabe in zimbabwe idi amin in uganda and the dreaded durg under mangitsuhali mariam in ethiopia in asia there was pol pot in cambodia corlugin choi basan in mongolia mao zeitung in china hideki tojo in japan and kim il-sung in north korea in europe you of course had stalin and hitler but there was also the likes of anverhocha in albania nikolai ciaosku in romania and francisco franco in spain in the middle east has been plagued by dictators unending men like muammar gaddafi in libya hafez al-assad in syria saddam hussein in iraq this is only a small list of dictators that ruled in the 1900s who implemented policies that would feel right at home in ing socks oceania but an even more unfortunate truth than the dreadful realities of the past are the current sad state of affairs in the present cuba is still ruled in the shadows by fidel castro's brother and venezuela is still suffering under the weight of the rule of nicolas maduro bashar al-assad inherited the brutality of his father and has been ravaging the people of syria in a brutal civil war for over a decade now and the taliban is resurgent in afghanistan in thailand and myanmar military strongmen reign supreme and keep a stranglehold over their people kim jong-un who heads a state that is likely the closest thing we've ever seen to being a representation of 1984 has inherited the death grip over the north korean people and in china repression of bounds in xinjiang and elsewhere at the behest of xi jinping and the communist party of china in africa teodoro obiang in basogo in equatorial guinea claims to be a god and in uganda eritrea and the republic of congo yawari musoveni isaiah safwerki and denny sasao and geso respectively have been abusing their people for decades only recently in kazakhstan were the people able to shirk off some of the influence of their longtime leader nur sultan nazarbayev and other former soviet states like belarus tajikistan and turkmenistan are dominated by strongmen like alexander lukashenko imo mali ramon and gurban guli birdie mohammedao and his son serdar respectively and we of course can forget the tyrannical reign of vladimir putin who as of the making of this video is looking as if he'll have his title changed from president of russia to the more appropriate ruler of russia but again these are only a few examples of the barbarity that continues to play out all across the world and though none of these states and their leaders save for perhaps north korea are exactly like ingsoc and big brother the fact remains that vestiges of what we see in this story are still prevalent in our society so what do every single one of these regimes and despots have in common well they're evil plain and simple and to study these horrible men and the policies that they perpetuated in the name of power for power's sake is to become intimately familiar with the greatest horrors ever inflicted upon mankind but they also have something else in common the pursuit of power just like ingsoc you'd be hard-pressed to find any of these dictators and their regimes to be representatives of any sort of ideology sure they implement a few policies that align with their supposed political affiliation but they work far harder to enact policies to grant their citizens the illusion that their best interests are being served along the lines of whatever ideology their overlords choose to espouse but even if we know these organizations and people to be evil there's still something that we need to address that serves as an anchoring point for any would-be evil entity that being that it's entirely possible that one organization could potentially bring reality under their control if a political party like ingsoc is able to exert its enormous influence over all aspects of life and order the world in the way that it sees fit doesn't it stand to reason then that they truly decide what is and isn't moral as o'brien claims i've mentioned this in a previous video but morality in the absence of the divine is a man-made construct i'm not trying to say that there isn't some sort of divinity out there but if it is the case that there isn't then the universe unending doesn't care whether or not we who are small specks of dust in the grand scheme of things kill or harm one another in any way you can imagine morality is derived from the fact that we care if someone kills or harms or harms yourself or someone else whether or not something is good or evil can be typically divined by examining whether or not the majority of people believe something to be wrong for example if 99.9 of people can agree that murdering someone in cold blood is wrong then the opinion of the 0.1 percent of people who disagree doesn't matter all too much when determining if something is moral or not obviously morality has evolved over time as there are horrid things that occurred in the past that were considered acceptable and moral things to do and morality will continue to evolve but the fact remains that morality is what we make it and if that's the case then any entity that manages to shift the opinion of the majority into believing what it is doing is right has the monopoly on right and wrong and in the world of 1984 ingsoc has made it so that all the terrifying things they're doing are not only seen as acceptable but righteous here's the thing though no matter how large a majority may be you cannot overcome the inherent desire for freedom and the safety and security of yourself or of your loved ones you may be able to mask it and push it down with endless streams of propaganda and manipulation but the will to overcome injustice will always be present within each and every one of us human beings are flawed some are nasty horrid people who would revel at the chance to hold the reins over us like ingsoc does over the citizens of oceania but as winston said to o'brien there is something within humanity that simply won't allow for overwhelming injustice to flourish in our society and sooner or later the human spirit or whatever it may be will overcome all obstacles that are put in its path one of the best examples of this is the collapse of the soviet union no matter how much they might have tried they eventually failed and i believe that attempts to take this same course is sooner or later doomed to fail or maybe winston and i are wrong maybe there are certain places in the world that are doomed to flounder in the wake of their oppressors perhaps the future is owned by those who would have a boot heel stamping on the face of humanity for eternity but i refuse to believe that to be so ing sock may be a very realistic nightmare that some people have lived through or are currently living through but like many of the dictatorships that had a stranglehold over countless countries during the 1900s and beyond i believe the day of reckoning for these tyrants is not just a possibility but an inevitability perhaps we're destined to flirt with totalitarianism for as long as humanity persists maybe the struggle against those who would see us in chains or in holes in the ground will never end but with any luck as time goes on evil like this may become a dark relic of the past in any case the evidence is clear 1984 presents us with a nightmare scenario that would spell the end of humanity as we know it a dark portent of a future that might be lorded over by an all-consuming political machine fed by misery and death and there's absolutely no doubt that ingsoc and any state or organization that employs similar practices is nothing short of pure evil thank you all for tuning in to this episode of analyzing evil and i hope you've enjoyed what are your thoughts on ingsoc did i miss anything let me know down below and leave a suggestion for a villain you'd like to see featured while you're at it if you like this video hit that thumbs up button and make sure to subscribe if you haven't already a big thank you to all of my subscribers and to my patrons and a most vile thank you to those whose names you're seeing on screen now join the channel's discord server and reddit to interact with myself and the community and follow me on the social media platforms listed below to keep up with the channel and of course don't forget to check out the new merchandise that you're seeing on screen now by clicking the link down below as always thanks for watching and i'll be seeing you soon [Music] you

Channel: The Vile Eye

Views: 201,162

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Id: URoaK6RAfb0

Length: 98min 45sec (5925 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022