It was possible, nodoubt, to imagine a society in which WEALTH, in the sense ofpersonal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while POWER remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. Butin practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisureand security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of humanbeings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literateand would learn to think for themselves; and when once they haddone this, they would sooner or later realize that the privilegedminority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the longrun, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of povertyand ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkersabout the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, wasnot a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towardsmechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughoutalmost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remainedindustrially backward was helpless in a military sense and wasbound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advancedrivals.Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in povertyby restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extentduring the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, landwent out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, greatblocks of the population were prevented from working and kept halfalive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, andsince the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it madeopposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels ofindustry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world.Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And inpractice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily ofhuman lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way ofshattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking inthe depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used tomake the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, toointelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labourpower without producing anything that can be consumed. AFloating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour thatwould build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrappedas obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody,and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress isbuilt. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up anysurplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of thepopulation. In practice the needs of the population are alwaysunderestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage ofhalf the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It isdeliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere nearthe brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increasesthe importance of small privileges and thus magnifies thedistinction between one group and another. By the standards of theearly twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives anaustere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that hedoes enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of hisclothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his twoor three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter — set him in adifferent world from a member of the Outer Party, and the membersof the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with thesubmerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’. The social atmosphereis that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump ofhorseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And atthe same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore indanger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seemthe natural, unavoidable condition of survival.War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction,but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principleit would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world bybuilding temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them upagain, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and thensetting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concernedhere is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant solong as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Partyitself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to becompetent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits,but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorantfanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, andorgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should havethe mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matterwhether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victoryis 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 ofthe intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and whichis more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almostuniversal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked itbecomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria andhatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as anadministrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Partyto know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he mayoften be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either nothappening or is being waged for purposes quite other than thedeclared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by thetechnique of DOUBLETHINK. Meanwhile no Inner Party memberwavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, andthat it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputedmaster of the entire world.All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquestas an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by graduallyacquiring more and more territory and so building up anoverwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of somenew and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weaponscontinues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remainingactivities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can findany 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 thescientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to themost fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technologicalprogress only happens when its products can in some way be usedfor the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the worldis either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivatedwith horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But inmatters of vital importance — meaning, in effect, war and policeespionage — the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at leasttolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the wholesurface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibilityof independent thought. There are therefore two great problemswhich the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover,against his will, what another human being is thinking, and theother is how to kill several hundred million people in a few secondswithout giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific researchstill continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today iseither a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with realordinary 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 hisspecial subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vastlaboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimentalstations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert,or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts areindefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning thelogistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocketbombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and moreimpenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadliergases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in suchquantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or forbreeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under thesoil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane asindependent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore evenremoter possibilities such as focusing the sun’s rays through lensessuspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producingartificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at theearth’s centre.But none of these projects ever comes anywhere nearrealization, and none of the three super-states ever gains asignificant lead on the others. What is more remarkable is that allthree powers already possess, in the atomic bomb, a weapon farmore powerful than any that their present researches are likely todiscover. Although the Party, according to its habit, claims theinvention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as early as thenineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten yearslater. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped onindustrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, andNorth America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of allcountries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end oforganized society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter,although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no morebombs were dropped. All three powers merely continue to produceatomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunitywhich they all believe will come sooner or later. And meanwhile theart of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years.Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing planeshave been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and thefragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkableFloating Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development.The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even therifle and the hand grenade are still in use. And in spite of the endlessslaughters reported in the Press and on the telescreens, thedesperate battles of earlier wars, in which hundreds of thousands oreven millions of men were often killed in a few weeks, have never been repeated.None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvrewhich involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operationis undertaken, it is usually a surprise attack against an ally. Thestrategy that all three powers are following, or pretend tothemselves that they are following, is the same. The plan is, by acombination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes oftreachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one orother of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship withthat rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lullsuspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomicbombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will allbe fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to makeretaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign a pact offriendship with the remaining world-power, in preparation foranother attack. This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a meredaydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no fighting everoccurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the Pole:no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. This explains thefact that in some places the frontiers between the super-states arearbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the BritishIsles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other handit would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine oreven to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed onall sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceaniawere to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France andGermany, it would be necessary either to exterminate theinhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate apopulation of about a hundred million people, who, so far astechnical development goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level.
Theproblem is the same for all three super-states. It is absolutelynecessary to their structure that there should be no contact withforeigners, except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners andcoloured slaves. Even the official ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners apart, theaverage citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of eitherEurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreignlanguages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he woulddiscover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most ofwhat he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in whichhe lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and selfrighteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It istherefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, orJava, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must neverbe crossed by anything except bombs.Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitlyunderstood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in allthree super-states are very much the same. In Oceania theprevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called NeoBolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usuallytranslated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered asObliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed toknow anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he istaught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality andcommon sense. Actually the three philosophies are barelydistinguishable, and the social systems which they support are notdistinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidalstructure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the sameeconomy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that thethree super-states not only cannot conquer one another, but wouldgain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as theyremain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves ofcorn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers aresimultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Theirlives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it isnecessary that the war should continue everlastingly and withoutvictory. Meanwhile the fact that there IS no danger of conquestmakes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary torepeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous warhas fundamentally changed its character.In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something thatsooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory ordefeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments bywhich human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. Allrulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upontheir followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusionthat tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant theloss of independence, or some other result generally held to beundesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious.Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, orethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one wasdesigning a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficientnations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle forefficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it wasnecessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having afairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapersand history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, butfalsification of the kind that is practised today would have beenimpossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as theruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important ofall safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling classcould be completely irresponsible.But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to bedangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing asmilitary necessity. Technical progress can cease and the mostpalpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen,researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for thepurposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, andtheir failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, evenmilitary efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient inOceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three super states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe withinwhich almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised.Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life —the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoidswallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and thelike. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure andphysical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off fromcontact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen ofOceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way ofknowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers ofsuch a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could notbe. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving todeath in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they areobliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as theirrivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality intowhatever shape they choose.The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previouswars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certainruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they areincapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is notmeaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and ithelps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchicalsociety needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. Inthe past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they mightrecognize their common interest and therefore limit thedestructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victoralways plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are notfighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each rulinggroup against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not tomake or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure ofsociety intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has becomemisleading.