Orwell's Revenge (18 page)

Now the shadows were lengthening. They were nearing the huddle of streets where they lived. Their paces were matched, and they walked hand in hand. Women leaned out of their windows in the clear evening light, gazing at the street, or stood on their front doorsteps talking casually to neighbors. Through their open doors he could see into little back yards, where washing hung on lines and children played. He felt a warm familiarity and safety. E. A. Blair had disappeared from the Party and was no more. He had become a prole, in a prole's clothes, living in a prole's home. They had lost interest in him.

Blair thought again of his conversation with the phreak.

“How does one escape it?” he had asked.

“You turn it off,” the phreak had replied.

“But you can't,” Blair had said.

The phreak had laughed. “Any machine can be turned off,” he had said. “You just have to find the switch.”

It was a gigantic thought, which seemed to verge on doublethink. Silence was oppression; silence was also freedom. Freedom was solitude; freedom was also the company of others. The difference
between slavery and freedom was nothing more than a switch on the front of a screen. Freedom was the power to choose.

The sun began to set. The pavement turned pink, and even the pitted street and ramshackle houses seemed radiant. Abruptly, from the far distance, there came a hollow ringing sound, floating through the evening air and echoing over the roofs of London, filling the sky and the street with a rhythmic resonance. It started in only one place, far in the east, but in a moment it had surrounded them.

It was the sound of church bells. At first he thought he had never before heard church bells ringing. Then, with a rush of remembrance, he knew that once, long ago, when he had still been a child, church bells had often spoken to the community, ringing out sounds of danger and warning, worship and love.

“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clements,” he said. To his surprise, Kate immediately capped the line:

“You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martins. When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey—”

With a sort of grave courtesy, Blair completed the stanza:

“When I grow rich, say
the bells of Shoreditch.”

For a moment they stood quite still in the street. The pealing of the bells slowly died away, and then the echoes too. The light was golden, the sky a prussian blue. As they watched, the crimson ball of the sun sank from view, the scarlet fleece of clouds slowly changed hue, and the air was filled with
a crimson silence.

The sound of bells, O'Brien reflected, had not been heard in London for years. He wondered idly how the proles would react. They probably wouldn't. Proles were animals.

The bells had woken him from a light doze. As his mind cleared, a deep sense of misgiving crept through him, which he could not explain. Was he hanging someone he knew today? Was his chest bad again? His eyes fell on Smith's diary, which had slipped off his lap and lay closed on the floor. He looked at the book dully for a moment, then painfully reached down and picked it up. He opened it back at the third page and began to read again.

1.
Ignorance Is Strength

Among all the Party's lies there is one great truth: Strength in numbers. To survive a war a nation must be united. Patriotism—blind patriotism—is the single most important source of national power. As a positive force there is
nothing to set beside it. What is critical is emotional unity, a people's tendency to feel alike and act together, at least
in moments of supreme crisis.
The nation must he bound together by
an invisible chain.
It must have its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy
it must close its ranks. The whole nation must swing together and do the same
thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf, prepared for swift, unanimous action,
in perfect unison.

War is unique, but the need for unity is not. All great achievements of human civilization are creations of communities. A man with a woman, a child with his parents, a family among neighbors—all are stronger because they are together. Numbers are the strength of the town market. The community is
the spirit of the church.
Industrialism requires coordinated control. Philosophers, writers, and artists not only need encouragement and an audience, they need
constant stimulation from other people. The best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally,
by communities rather than by individuals. For any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about—survival, which is entirely
an index to majority opinion. Language itself is
a creation of common experience, and beauty of any kind is
meaningless until it is shared. Science, the pinnacle of peaceful civilization, exists only in the collective consciousness of a self-disciplined community. The Party is right about this at least: In science,
truth is indeed statistical.

Sanity is not. A man may be alone in holding a great belief, and if alone,
then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic
need not greatly trouble him. The horror is that
the belief might also be wrong. Like salvation, like charity, like love, sanity survives or perishes inside the individual brain. All scientific truths are statistical. Not all statisticians are truthful.

And it is on individual sanity that all else depends. The market is no more robust than its individual farmers and craftsmen, the culture no more creative than its solitary artist, the Army no more courageous than the soldier at the front line. Great prose
must be written in solitude. Science, above all, depends on solitary observation and the flash of insight within a few cubic centimeters of a single human skull.

Whom then shall we trust: The individual for his sanity, or the community for its numbers? What shall it be: the Darwinian horrors of unfettered competition, or a dedicated sect of central planners serving as
eternal guardians of the weak? A city teeming with police
patrols, or a city in which every armed citizen is a police force of one? Autocrats, who govern everything, or Anarchists, who govern nothing? The Communist's centralism and cutthroat efficiency, or the Anarchist's liberty and
cutthroat equality? The single-minded unity essential to a nation in times of war, or the suicidal herd instinct of the
Gadarene swine in times of peace?

O'Brien wiped his eyes and turned away from the book. It was appalling how Smith's diary had been found. With all the telescreens, with the whole gigantic array of the network behind them, it had taken the frumpish wife of Blair's neighbor to spot the book and mention it in all innocence to her half-wit husband. And then, instead of bringing the diary straight to O'Brien, the idiots from his own Ministry had gone out and beaten Blair to a pulp. Granted, it was standard procedure to soften up a thought criminal before an arrest,
so that he might then run to friends for help. A whole gang of saboteurs could often be rounded up this way. But there was no use in beating a man so hard he could barely be lifted off the street by a passing whore. With an exasperated grunt O'Brien turned back to the diary.

Until recently, collectivist oligarchy or something much like it was stronger than any of the alternatives. The successful state
was a beehive, a world of rabbits ruled by
a handful of stoats. People needed a king to promote stability and act
as a sort of keystone. The real power, of course, belonged to unprepossessing men in bowler hats: the creature who rode in a gilded coach behind soldiers in steel breastplates was
really a waxwork, a ventriloquist's dummy. But he was also the voice of the nation, and a nation needed a single voice. Government by Big Brother was not only inevitable but desirable: inequality was
the price of civilization. People gained more by anointing a king than they lost by submitting to his will. They were capable of wonderfully coordinated action, but only because they submitted absolutely to the will of their rulers. They lost their freedom, but they gained unity. No other social arrangement was as powerful. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to
hierarchy and regimentation.

In the countries that now comprise Oceania, the great autocracies eventually gave way to commercial oligopolies. At first, the new social structures were not very different from the old. Small businesses proliferated but then
quickly merged into large ones; and great monopoly companies swallowed up
hosts of petty traders. The giant corporation became a big brotherhood in itself, a homogeneous community dominated by a single, all-powerful leader, whose commands were followed unquestioningly by obedient drones. The clerks and typists, looking so unpleasantly like ants, streamed over London Bridge at the rush hour every morning, into their
steel and concrete nests. They were employed by collectivist commercial autocracies. These organizations inspired their workers with a drumbeat of simple slogans. They demanded uniformity of attire, appearance, habit, locution, and culture. Yet in their time, the great corporations proved stronger than what had come before. They eventually reached their apex in what we now call Eastasia—in the culture known by a Chinese word that translates roughly as “
Obliteration of the Self.”

The old autocracies all thrived because they solved a single, critical problem: how to unite and coordinate many people across time and space. The only really effective systems of memory and communication existed within a single human skull, or in small hermetic councils with access to central repositories of vital records; communication among larger, more dispersed groups was too slow and unreliable. So mankind turned to kings, oligarchs, or plutocratic captains of industry, and lodged all important thought in a single dominant city or palace, a single citadel, a single executive suite, often a single human brain. All superfluous communication was avoided because it was just too inefficient. The masses were not to question, negotiate, or respond; they were to follow orders. Industrialism meant oligarchical collectivism. The only practical alternatives were slave-state socialism and slave-state fascism, which were in fact identical.

The slave state remains the essence of Party rule. The slavery is not physical, of course—machines now do most of the menial work—the
slavery is of the mind. What is required of the individual is utter submission, escape from his own identity, and complete submergence in the Party. The individual's ignorance is the Party's strength. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

O'Brien's thoughts turned back to the engineer in the pub.

“ 'Cos the screens worked,” the man had said. What could he possibly have meant? At first, O'Brien hesitated even to crystallize the thought in his own mind. He began reading again.

The Party's pursuit of ignorance began in schools, which were staffed by loyal Party drones. We inculcated in our children a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world without good or evil, where the rules were such that it is
actually not possible to keep them. We taught history as a series of
unrelated and unintelligible facts. Our universities studied the oral traditions of lesbian headhunters in New Guinea, not the great classics on human freedom. Whatever students did—whether they laughed or sniveled or went into frenzies of gratitude for small favors—their
only true feeling was hatred.

At all levels, our educational system neglected mathematics and
did not teach science in any form. Empirical thought was opposed to the most fundamental
principles of Ingsoc. For Party purposes the earth was the center of the universe. The Party conceded that to navigate the ocean it was often convenient to assume that the earth went round the sun, but Party mathematicians and astronomers were quite capable of producing
a dual system of astronomy. Outside our steadily shrinking scientific communities, all talk of science disappeared.

By cutting off memory, the Party halted the accumulation of knowledge. By cutting off communication, the Party prevented its spread. To that end, the Party limited travel, outlawed private meetings, suppressed love, and condemned sex. Instead, it filled the air with official sights and sounds: mass rallies, posters, lectures, and the ceaseless jabber from the telescreens, so as to crowd out every competing private thought or communication.

To crown it all, the Party had Newspeak. Newspeak served Party purposes perfectly By stripping the English language of its subtle texture and richness, the Party deprived people of their power to think and communicate. By controlling language and all ancillary means of communication, the Party controlled the ends.

But now there is the telescreen.

O'Brien looked up from the book. He found himself thinking again that he knew what was coming next: a sort of anarchistic Utopia, another tired exhibition of machine worship in its most vulgar, ignorant, and half-baked form. The individual will be set free from the sordid necessity of living for others. There will be no want and no insecurity, no drudgery, no disease, no ugliness, no wastage of the human spirit in futile enmities and rivalries. There will be no disorder, no loose ends, no wildernesses, no wild animals,
no weeds, no poverty, no pain—and so on and so forth. The telescreened world will be above all things an ordered world,
an efficient world. Telescreens to save work, telescreens to save thought, telescreens to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency,
more organization, more telescreens.

It would never happen. The people at the Ministry, even idiots like Burgess, still knew how to make the network serve the Party's will. The proles weren't interested in telescreens. With a steady diet of indifferent food, sex, and violence, the proles wanted nothing more. Only the elite of the Inner Party understood the pursuit of power. Telescreens offered power only to those with the will to use it.

O'Brien rose stiffly from his chair, dragged his vast bulk to the side table, and poured a glass of wine. Almost as an afterthought, he made his way over to the telescreen. “COMM-TWO-OFFICE,” he growled. And a few seconds later: “Cooper—double the guard around the Ministry.” He walked slowly back to his chair, sat down heavily, and turned back to the diary.