“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. In small clumsy letters he wrote: April 4th, 1984. He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain. Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens. We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. We make the laws of Nature. Nothing exists except through human consciousness. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.”
“In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
And if all others accepted the lie — if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.
‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink.‘
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence.
Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact.
And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.
He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time
It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move, the face of Big Brother, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen.
the caption beneath it ran. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
What can you do against the lunatic who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
no one ever seizes 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.
—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.”
