It would probably be accurate to say that by becomingcontinuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that itexerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by somethingquite different. The effect would be much the same if the threesuper-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live inperpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For inthat case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for everfrom the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that wastruly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This —although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in ashallower sense — is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remotedistance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of beingalone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, hadnot worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixedup somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of thechair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that playedupon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly itreassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, butthat was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if ithad been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. Itwas the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously morepowerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, heperceived, are those that tell you what you know already. He hadjust turned back to Chapter I when he heard Julia’s footstep on thestair and started out of his chair to meet her. She dumped herbrown tool-bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It wasmore than a week since they had seen one another.‘I’ve got THE BOOK,’ he said as they disentangled themselves.‘Oh, you’ve got it? Good,’ she said without much interest, andalmost immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to make thecoffee. They did not return to the subject until they had been in bedfor half an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make itworth while to pull up the counterpane. From below came thefamiliar sound of singing and the scrape of boots on the flagstones.The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston had seen there onhis first visit was almost a fixture in the yard. There seemed to beno hour of daylight when she was not marching to and fro betweenthe washtub and the line, alternately gagging herself with clothespegs and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down onher side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. Hereached out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat upagainst the bedhead.‘We must read it,’ he said. ‘You too. All members of theBrotherhood have to read it.’‘You read it,’ she said with her eyes shut. ‘Read it aloud. That’sthe best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.’The clock’s hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had threeor four hours ahead of them. He propped the book against hisknees and began reading:

Chapter IIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of theNeolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world,the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided inmany ways, they have borne countless different names, and theirrelative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, havevaried from age to age: but the essential structure of society hasnever altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seeminglyirrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself,just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other‘Julia, are you awake?’ said Winston.‘Yes, my love, I’m listening. Go on. It’s marvellous.’He continued reading:The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. Theaim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middleis to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when theyhave an aim — for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low thatthey are too much crushed by drudgery to be more thanintermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives — isto abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all menshall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is thesame in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For longperiods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or laterthere always comes a moment when they lose either their belief inthemselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They arethen overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side bypretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. Assoon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust theLow back into their old position of servitude, and themselvesbecome the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from oneof the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle beginsover again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never eventemporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be anexaggeration to say that throughout history there has been noprogress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, theaverage human being is physically better off than he was a fewcenturies ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners,no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality amillimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name oftheir masters.By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this patternhad become obvious to many observers. There then rose schools ofthinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimedto show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life. Thisdoctrine, of course, had always had its adherents, but in themanner in which it was now put forward there was a significantchange. In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society hadbeen the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached bykings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like whowere parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened bypromises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave.The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had alwaysmade use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now,however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailedby people who were not yet in positions of command, but merelyhoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had maderevolutions under the banner of equality, and then had establisheda fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The newMiddle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand.Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth centuryand was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to theslave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by theUtopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism thatappeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing libertyand equality was more and more openly abandoned. The newmovements which appeared in the middle years of the century,Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, asit is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating UNfreedom and INequality. These new movements,of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their namesand pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purpose of all of themwas to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. Thefamiliar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop.As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who wouldthen become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, theHigh would be able to maintain their position permanently.The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation ofhistorical knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, whichhad hardly existed before the nineteenth century. The cyclicalmovement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so;and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable. But the principal,underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of thetwentieth century, human equality had become technicallypossible. It was still true that men were not equal in their nativetalents and that functions had to be specialized in ways thatfavoured some individuals against others; but there was no longerany real need for class distinctions or for large differences ofwealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not onlyinevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization.With the development of machine production, however, the casewas altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to dodifferent kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to liveat different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point ofview of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power,human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but adanger to be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just andpeaceful society was in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy tobelieve it. The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brutelabour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands ofyears. And this vision had had a certain hold even on the groupswho actually profited by each historical change. The heirs of theFrench, English, and American revolutions had partly believed intheir own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech,equality before the law, and the like, and have even allowed theirconduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourthdecade of the twentieth century all the main currents of politicalthought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had beendiscredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Everynew political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back tohierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening ofoutlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had beenlong abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years —imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves,public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use ofhostages, and the deportation of whole populations — not onlybecame common again, but were tolerated and even defended bypeople who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars,revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world thatIngsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories.But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generallycalled totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, andthe main outlines of the world which would emerge from theprevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people wouldcontrol this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracywas made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists,technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people,whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper gradesof the working class, had been shaped and brought together by thebarren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. Ascompared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were lessavaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and,above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intenton crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. Bycomparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the pastwere half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were alwaysinfected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leaveloose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to beuninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even theCatholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modernstandards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past nogovernment had the power to keep its citizens under constantsurveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier tomanipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried theprocess further. With the development of television, and thetechnical advance which made it possible to receive and transmitsimultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to anend. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to beworth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day underthe eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, withall other channels of communication closed. The possibility ofenforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, butcomplete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for thefirst time.After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, societyregrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act uponinstinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It hadlong been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy iscollectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended whenthey are possessed jointly. The so-called ‘abolition of privateproperty’ which took place in the middle years of the centurymeant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer handsthan before: but with this difference, that the new owners were agroup instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member ofthe Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings.Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because itcontrols everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. Inthe years following the Revolution it was able to step into thiscommanding position almost unopposed, because the wholeprocess was represented as an act of collectivization. It had alwaysbeen assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated,Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had beenexpropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport —everything had been taken away from them: and since these thingswere no longer private property, it followed that they must bepublic property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialistmovement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out themain item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseenand intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been madepermanent.But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society godeeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling groupcan fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or itgoverns so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or itallows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. Thesecauses do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them arepresent in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against allof them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately thedetermining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.After the middle of the present century, the first danger had inreality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide theworld is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerablethrough slow demographic changes which a government with widepowers can easily avert. The second danger, also, is only atheoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, andthey never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, solong as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison,they never even become aware that they are oppressed. Therecurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessaryand are not now permitted to happen, but other and equally largedislocations can and do happen without having political results,because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate.As for the problem of over-production, which has been latent inour society since the development of machine technique, it issolved by the device of continuous warfare (see Chapter III), whichis also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch.From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore, the onlygenuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, underemployed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism andscepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, iseducational. It is a problem of continuously moulding theconsciousness both of the directing group and of the largerexecutive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousnessof the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way. Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know italready, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of thepyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and allpowerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, everyscientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, allvirtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership andinspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big Brother. He is a face on thehoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably surethat he will never die, and there is already considerable uncertaintyas to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise in which the Partychooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as afocusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which aremore easily felt towards an individual than towards anorganization. Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. Itsnumbers limited to six millions, or something less than 2 per centof the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Party comes theOuter Party, which, if the Inner Party is described as the brain ofthe State, may be justly likened to the hands. Below that come thedumb masses whom we habitually refer to as ‘the proles’,numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. In the terms ofour earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slavepopulation of the equatorial lands who pass constantly fromconqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part ofthe structure.In principle, membership of these three groups is nothereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not borninto the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is byexamination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racialdiscrimination, or any marked domination of one province byanother. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and theadministrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitantsof that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have thefeeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distantcapital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a personwhose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chiefLINGUA FRANCA and Newspeak its official language, it is notcentralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by blood-tiesbut by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our societyis stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appearto be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro movementbetween the different groups than happened under capitalism oreven in the pre-industrial age. Between the two branches of theParty there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much aswill ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party andthat ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless byallowing them to rise. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed tograduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who mightpossibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down bythe Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is notnecessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party isnot a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim attransmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there wereno other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would beperfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from theranks of the proletariat. In the crucial years, the fact that the Partywas not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition.The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight againstsomething called ‘class privilege’ assumed that what is nothereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuityof an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereasadoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church havesometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essenceof oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but thepersistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life,imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a rulinggroup so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is notconcerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself.WHO wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchicalstructure remains always the same.All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes thatcharacterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique ofthe Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society frombeing perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary movetowards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletariansnothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue fromgeneration to generation and from century to century, working,breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, butwithout the power of grasping that the world could be other than itis. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrialtechnique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but,since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, thelevel of popular education is actually declining. What opinions themasses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter ofindifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because theyhave no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not eventhe smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subjectcan be tolerated.A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of theThought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting,in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning andwithout knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does isindifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towardshis wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone,the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movementsof his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actualmisdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change ofhabits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be thesymptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has nofreedom of choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand hisactions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated codeof behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actionswhich, when detected, mean certain death are not formallyforbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures,imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishmentfor crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely thewiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at sometime in the future. A Party member is required to have not only theright opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs andattitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could notbe stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc.If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak aGOODTHINKER), he will in all circumstances know, withouttaking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion.But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone inchildhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak wordsCRIMESTOP, BLACKWHITE, and DOUBLETHINK, makes himunwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in acontinuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internaltraitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before thepower and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by hisbare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards anddissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and thespeculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebelliousattitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline.The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taughteven to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP.CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though byinstinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes thepower of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors,of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical toIngsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thoughtwhich is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, inshort, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. Onthe contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control overone’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionistover his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief thatBig Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But sincein reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is notinfallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-momentflexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here isBLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has twomutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it meansthe habit of impudently claiming that black is white, incontradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, itmeans a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Partydiscipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVEthat black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands acontinuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system ofthought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known inNewspeak as DOUBLETHINK.