But why was Orwell frightened of the intellectuals? The intellectuals were not running the Labour Government in the late 1940s.
No. The Labour leaders weren't New Statesman fanatics. They'd no desire to turn Britain into a miniature Stalinist Russia. But there was a whisper, perhaps more than a whisper, of the danger that comes from more and more State control, a bigger bureaucracy, the devaluation of individuality that inevitably follows a doctrine of equality. Strictly, a Socialist government can only fulfil its ideal of total public ownership if granted a perpetual mandate. The very notion of Socialism is undemocratic, if by democracy we mean opposed parties, a free vote, periodic general elections. Parliament has increasingly the task of pushing through party legislation and ignoring such issues as the rights of the individual, which Members of Parliament are primarily there to protect. Orwell didn't live to see the compromise which English Socialism now represents - a minimum of public ownership, a social-security apparatus that costs too much, a mass of 'equalizing' laws not easily enforceable, and a necessary thwarting of individual, as opposed to collective, endeavour. But, not even in those first heady days of Socialism, could the concept of Ingsoc have begun to germinate - except in some university lecturer's lodgings.
You think it was purely an onomastic trick?
Yes, the taking over quite cynically of an honourable name and then debasing it. Who, after Hitler, can ever mention National Socialism again without a shudder? The link between the English Socialism of 1948 and that of 1984 is purely nominal. We have to imagine this - that a group of New Statesman intellectuals has taken over not just England but the entire English-speaking world. As England, or Airstrip One, cannot be more than a satellite of America, the assumption must be that the New Statesman oligarchs have first prevailed in the United States and then, armed with power, come home again. Nothing could be more absurd, and Orwell knows it. There's been a great atomic war, but it has left much of Victorian London still standing - absurd again. There are vague memories of political purges in the fifties, but Winston Smith's own reminiscences - and indeed those of practically everyone else - are of the indistinctness of a fading dream. Absurdity. Amnesia seems to have hit everyone, even when they're not exercising 'memory control'. It finds a sort of counterpart in our acceptance that we don't know, nor do we greatly care, how the revolution happened. It's just a necessary device to get the intellectuals into power. Absurd, comic. I'm back where I started.
So you think there's nothing, as it were, nineteeneightyfourish about Nineteen EightyFour? That it was all there waiting in 1948?
Yes, in a sense. What was merely in the newspapers or the official records - like torture and concentration camps - had to be imported into Britain. The intellectual totalitarianism had to be fictionally realized. But novels are really made out of day-to-day experience, and Winston Smith's frustrations were ours too - dirty streets, decaying buildings, sickening food in factory canteens, the government slogans on the walls -
Slogans? Like FREEDOM IS SLAVERY and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH?
Not quite like those. Those are pure Nazi Germany. But I remember when I came home from overseas army service that the first peace-time government poster I saw showed a haggard sorrowing woman in black, with the legend KEEP DEATH OFF THE ROADS. Naturally, somebody had crossed that out and substituted SHE VOTED SOCIALIST. We were used to posters put out by the Ministry of Information, mostly ham-handed, not subtly ambiguous like the Ingsoc ones, YOUR FORTITUDE, YOUR PATIENCE, YOUR ENDURANCE WILL BRING US VICTORY. You and us, you see. No wonder we all became bloody purple, BE LIKE DAD, KEEP MUM. That nearly provoked a riot among wage-earning mothers. Slogans had become part of the British way of life. Orwell gave us nothing new.
Wasn't the warning new?
What warning? He was only telling us what Milton told Cromwell's England - hang on to your liberties. Perhaps not even that. He was playing the intellectual, game of constructing a working model of a Utopia, or cacotopia. How far, he seems to say, can I push things without seeing the careful structure collapse? He'd already made animals play at the Russian Revolution. Another game. He was being the Swift de nos jours. Build your own horrible future, enjoy yourself. The thing works, and Orwell has to be pleased. But the pleasure has nothing to do with politics.
Thank you, Mr er -.
Ingsoc considered
It is, without doubt, an oligarchy of refined intellects that is running Oceania. It cultivates a subtle solipsistic philosophy; it knows how to manipulate language and memory and, through these, the nature of perceived reality; it is totally aware of its reasons for wanting power. It has learned how to subdue personal ambition in the interests of collective rule. There is no Hitlerian or Stalinist cult of personality: Big Brother is an invention, a fictional personage and hence immortal, and those who are contained in him partake of his immortality. The oligarchy has learned how to reconcile opposites, not through dialectic, which is diachronic and admits absence of control over time, but through the synchronic technique of doublethink. Ingsoc is the first professional government, hence the last.
Its doctrines are based on a metaphysic, not a mere ethic. To make a political system emerge logically out of a concept of reality is, of course, as old as Plato. The tricky thing about the Ingsoc view of reality is that it is appropriate to a single mind rather than a collective one. Before the metaphysic can assume validity, a collective must learn the technique of thinking in the manner of a single mind.
Solipsism - which derives from Latin stilus and ipse (lone self, self alone) - is a theory that posits reality as existing only in the self, or, more reasonably, states that only the self can be definitely known and verified. This means that nothing in the external world can be assumed to have independent existence. It goes further than mere idealism, which says that mind is real and matter no more than ideas, but does not necessarily reject the existence of many minds and, ultimately, the unifying mind of God. Solipsism teaches that minds other than that of the solus ipse cannot be proved to have existence. It does not, however, go so far as to permit temporal or spatial discontinuity within the individual mind, to deny logic, to admit contradiction or inconsistency. If the single mind is real, its memories cannot be illusions. The past is not malleable: it has true existence in the mind and cannot be altered by the present. Mathematical propositions have unchangeable validity, and 2 and 2 always make 4. The collective solipsism of Ingsoc will have none of this. 2 and 2 may sometimes be 4, but they are just as likely to add up to 3 or 5. This sounds like madness. But the Party teaches that madness is an attribute of the individual mind that will not merge itself into the collective one and accept its view of reality. Winston Smith holds fast to simple arithmetic as truth unassailable even by the Party, but part of his rehabilitation consists in learning how to be convinced - not merely to go through the motions of accepting - that 2 and 2 add up to whatever the Party says. Shakespeare, who foresaw most things, foresaw this:
PETRUCHIO:
I say it is the moon.
KATHERINA:
I know it is the moon.
PETRUCHIO:
Nay then you lie; it is the blessed sun.
KATHERINA:
Then God be blest, it is the blessed sun,
But sun it is not, when you say it is not;
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it nam'd, even that it is,
And so it shall be so for Katherine.
The self-willed Winston Smith has to be tamed, and O'Brien is his Petruchio.
The Party's solipsism is far saner - or certainly far more consistent - than anything the term was traditionally held to encompass. The solus ipse could be said to enclose space, but time lay outside it and was one of the conditions of its existence. But logically the single mind, if it is the only reality, must contain everything, and that includes time. It also includes logic. The senses are the mere instruments that serve the self, and they are subject to error. That sensory illusions exist non
e will deny: how can we distinguish between illusion and reality? It is unwise to rely at all on the evidence of the senses. The self only, that non-material verifiable entity, can state what is and is not real. To confer on the self the one attribute it requires to be ultimately real - fixed, unchanging, immortal, like God - it is necessary only to make that self a collective one.
There is something in this notion of an undying, omnipotent, omniscient, all-controlling human entity which lifts the heart rather than depresses it. The history of man is the tale of an arduous struggle to control his environment, and failure always comes from the limitations of the individual, whose brain grows tired, whose body decays. Exalt the collective and diminish the individual, and history will be a procession of human triumphs. Which is precisely what the history of Ingsoc is.
If the collective is to function in the manner of a single mind, all its members or cells must agree as to what they observe or remember. The technique known as doublethink is a device for bringing individual observation and memory into line with whatever the Party decrees, at any given moment, to be the truth. It is the given moment that contains reality. The past does not determine the present; the present modifies the past. This is not so monstrous as it appears. The memory of the collective mind has to be contained in records, and it is in the nature of records to be alterable. Take it further: the past does not exist, and so we are at liberty to create it. When one created past conflicts with another, doublethink has to be brought into operation. It is formally defined in the book attributed to Emmanuel Goldstein, Oceania's necessary and hence unkillable public enemy, and entitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism:
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 has also 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.
The existence of Goldstein's book - a creation of the Party as much as Goldstein himself - may be taken to be an act of doublethink of a very subtle kind. The Party is literally accusing itself of telling lies through the mouthpiece of an invented enemy. It is disclosing the motive of deception behind the telling of the truth. It is conflating two irreconcilable processes - the conscious and the unconscious. It is the repository of all virtue and yet admits the possibility of guilt. Doublethink is being employed to define doublethink.
Doublethink may not be laughed or shuddered off as a chilling fantasy of the author: Orwell knew he was doing little more than giving a formulation to a thought process that man has always found to be 'indispensably necessary' - and not merely a thought process either: we are more accustomed than we know to reconciling opposites in our emotional, even our sensory, experiences. 'Odi et amo,' said Catullus: I love and hate the same object and at the same time. Orwell himself once pointed out that meat is both delicious and disgusting. The sexual act is engaged in of the free will; at the same time one is driven to it by a biological urge; it is ecstatic, it is also bestial. Birth is the beginning of death. Man is a double creature, in whom flesh contradicts spirit and instinct opposes aspiration. Orwell recognized his own doubleness very sharply. He was both Eric Blair and George Orwell, a product of the fringe of the ruling class who tried to identify himself with the workers, an intellectual who distrusted intellectuals, a word-user who distrusted words. Doublethink, though rightly presented as an instrument of oppression, seems also a very reasonable technique. Our own attitude to doublethink is inevitably doublethinkful.
Hardly a single human experience is unequivocal. The philosophers of Ingsoc are as good as saying: We recognize that human life is partly a matter of juggling with opposites. We wish that new kind of human entity, the collective, to function as a unity. Unity of thought can only be achieved by forging a deliberate technique for dealing with contradictions. (Note that when you came to that word forge you had to perform a very rapid act of doublethink. You were, in a context that suggested cheating, ready to give it the meaning of falsifying a cheque or making counterfeit money. But then you had to give it the primary meaning of making, fashioning, with an aura of blacksmith honesty about it.) Let us control phenomena, not be controlled by them. Let there be total harmony between the past and the present. What is the past, that inert ill-understood mass of vague events, that it should exert an influence on the sunlit reality of now? It is a question of who is to be master.
Doublethink is a serious enough formulation of a mode of mental control, but it is also a grim joke. Orwell, like the rest of us, is sickened by the lies of politicians, but he knows that such lies rarely spring from genuine cynicism or contempt of the mob. A politician is wholly devoted to his party, and he has to find ways of making the worse cause seem the better. He does not want to lie, but he has to. He can evade bare-faced falsehood by gobbledygook or euphemism, by ambiguity or redefinition. There is only one sin, and that is to be caught out. The people complain of high prices and unemployment, and they are told: 'These are the growing pains of a new prosperity.' Sir Harold Wilson, when prime minister of Britain, was asked to give evidence of economic progress under Socialism. He said: 'You cannot quantify an elan.' The Pentagon is given to using expressions like 'anticipatory retaliation', meaning unprovoked assault. The communists use the term democracy to mean the opposite of what democrats mean by it. Orwell ironically deplores a lack of system, of logic and consistency, in political utterances. Compared to the amateurish evasions of most ministers of state, doublethink has a certain nobility.
Ingsoc may be thought of as being too sure of its own strength to have to stoop to dishonesty. It does not like verbal obfuscation: it insists on the utmost clarity of expression, both written and spoken. To this end it has manufactured a special kind of English called Newspeak. This is characterized by grammatical regularity, syntactical simplicity, and a vocabulary shorn of unnecessary synonyms and confusing nuances. Strong verbs have disappeared, so that all preterites and past participles end in -ed, as in swim, swimmed; fight, fighted; go, goed. Comparison of adjectives is always on the pattern of good, gooder, goodest. Plurals always end in -s - mans, oxes, childs. This rationalization was perhaps bound to occur of its own accord sooner or later, without the assistance of the State, but Ingsoc, claiming total control of all human activities, has kindly speeded up the process. The limitation of vocabulary is a godsend or statesend: there are far too many words in the traditional language. Bad is unnecessary when we can have ungood, and intensifies can be reduced to plus and, for greater emphasis, doubleplus. Doubleplusungood is a very efficient way of rendering 'terribly or extremely bad', and plusunlight expresses what great darkness is really about.
But the chief aim of the Ingsoc philologists is not to prune the language to a becoming spareness so much as to make it capable of expressing State orthodoxy so wholeheartedly that no shadow of the heretical can intrude. Free still exists, along with unfree and freeness and freewise, but the notion can now only be a relative one, as in 'free from pain'. Free meaning 'politically free' cannot make sense, since the concept no longer exists. A statement about political freedom, like the Declaration of Independence, cannot well be translated into Newspeak:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men a
re created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government. . . .
Orwell says that the nearest one can come to a Newspeak translation is to 'swallow the whole passage up in the single work crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.' Let us, anyway, try:
We say that truth writed is truth unwrited, that all mans are the same as each other, that their fathers and mothers maked them so that they are alive, free from all diseases and following not food but the feeling of having eated food. They are maked like this by their parents but Big Brother makes them like this. Big Brother cannot be killed but he is to be killed, and in his place there will be himself. . . .
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