1984

by George Orwell

“The proles are human beings,” he said aloud. “We are not human.”

But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to.

But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people.

The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by Emmanuel Goldstein

War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth 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.

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 reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance.

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

the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society.

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 fifty years

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society.

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 caste.

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,

In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of ...

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.

a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.

the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

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.

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.

It follows that the three superstates 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.

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.

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High.

is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

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.

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.

schools of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life.

The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity.

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.

had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality.

In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization.

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.

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.

“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;

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.

Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as “the proles,” numbering perhaps eighty-five per cent of the population.

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