CHAPTER 3

‘There are three stages in your reintegration,’ said O’Brien.
‘There is learning, there is understanding, and there is
acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second
stage.’
As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his
bonds were looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could
move his knees a little and could turn his head from side to side
and raise his arms from the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be
less of a terror. He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted
enough: it was chiefly when he showed stupidity that O’Brien
pulled the lever. Sometimes they got through a whole session
without use of the dial. He could not remember how many sessions
there had been. The whole process seemed to stretch out over a
long, indefinite time — weeks, possibly — and the intervals
between the sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes
only an hour or two.
‘As you lie there,’ said O’Brien, ‘you have often wondered —
you have even asked me — why the Ministry of Love should expend
so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you
were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could
grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its
underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, “I
understand HOW: I do not understand WHY”? It was when you
thought about “why” that you doubted your own sanity. You have
read THE BOOK, Goldstein’s book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?’
‘You have read it?’ said Winston.
‘I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book
is produced individually, as you know.’
‘Is it true, what it says?’
‘As description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense.
The secret accumulation of knowledge — a gradual spread of
enlightenment — ultimately a proletarian rebellion — the
overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself that that was what it
would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not
in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell
you the reason: you know it already. If you have ever cherished any
dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There is
no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party
is for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.’
He came closer to the bed. ‘For ever!’ he repeated. ‘And now let
us get back to the question of “how” and “why”. You understand
well enough HOW the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me
WHY we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want
power? Go on, speak,’ he added as Winston remained silent.
Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or
two. A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad
gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O’Brien’s face. He knew
in advance what O’Brien would say. That the Party did not seek
power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That
it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly
creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must
be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were
stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between
freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of
the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come,
sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing,
thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O’Brien said
this he would believe it. You could see it in his face. O’Brien knew
everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what
the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human
beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them
there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no
difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you
do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent
than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then
simply persists in his lunacy?
‘You are ruling over us for our own good,’ he said feebly. ‘You
believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and
therefore ——’
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot
through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to
thirty-five.
‘That was stupid, Winston, stupid!’ he said. ‘You should know
better than to say a thing like that.’
He pulled the lever back and continued:
‘Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The
Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested
in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth
or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What
pure power means you will understand presently. We are different
from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are
doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were
cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never
had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended,
perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly
and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a
paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not
like that. We know that 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. Now do you begin
to understand me?’
Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the
tiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it
was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before
which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches
under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O’Brien
leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.
‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that my face is old and tired. You
are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to
prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand,
Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the
cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your
fingernails?’
He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down
again, one hand in his pocket.
‘We are the priests of power,’ he said. ‘God is power. But at
present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time
for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing
you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party
slogan: “Freedom is Slavery”. Has it ever occurred to you that it is
reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone — free — the human being is
always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is
doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can
make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his
identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the
Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for
you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the
body — but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter — external
reality, as you would call it — is not important. Already our control
over matter is absolute.’
For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent
effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded
in wrenching his body painfully.
‘But how can you control matter?’ he burst out. ‘You don’t
even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are
disease, pain, death ——’
O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We control
matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You
will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not
do. Invisibility, levitation — anything. I could float off this floor
like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party
does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century
ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’
‘But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What
about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.’
‘Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if
we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out
of existence. Oceania is the world.’ ‘But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny —
helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years
the earth was uninhabited.’
‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it
be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.’
‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals —
mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here
long before man was ever heard of.’
‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not.
Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there
was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be
nothing. Outside man there is nothing.’
‘But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some
of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach
for ever.’
‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits
of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted
to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the
universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did
not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken
objection:
‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we
navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it
convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that
the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what
of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of
astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need
them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that?
Have you forgotten doublethink?’ Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the
swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he
KNEW, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists
outside your own mind — surely there must be some way of
demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago
as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten.
A faint smile twitched the corners of O’Brien’s mouth as he looked
down at him.
‘I told you, Winston,’ he said, ‘that metaphysics is not your
strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But
you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you
like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this
is a digression,’ he added in a different tone. ‘The real power, the
power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things,
but over men.’ He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air
of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one
man assert his power over another, Winston?’
Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough.
Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your
will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them
together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin
to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact
opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers
imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of
trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not
less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world
will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed
that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage,
triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy —
everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought
which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the
links between child and parent, and between man and man, and
between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a
friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no
friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one
takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated.
Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration
card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work
upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the
Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There
will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated
enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are
omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be
no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no
curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing
pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this,
Winston — 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. If you want a picture of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston
had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could
not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. O’Brien went on:
‘And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there
to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always
be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our
hands — all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the
betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the
disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much
as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it
will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the
despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day,
at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat
upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have
played out with you during seven years will be played out over and
over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms.
Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with
pain, broken up, contemptible — and in the end utterly penitent,
saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is
the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after
victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing,
pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I
can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you
will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it,
become part of it.’
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. ‘You
can’t!’ he said weakly.
‘What do you mean by that remark, Winston?’
‘You could not create such a world as you have just described.
It is a dream. It is impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and
cruelty. It would never endure.’
‘Why not?’
‘It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.’
‘Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more
exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what
difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear
ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human
life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it
make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is
not death? The party is immortal.’
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness.
Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement
O’Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep
silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him
except his inarticulate horror of what O’Brien had said, he returned
to the attack.
‘I don’t know — I don’t care. Somehow you will fail. Something
will defeat you. Life will defeat you.’
‘We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining
that there is something called human nature which will be
outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create
human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have
returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will
arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless,
like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside —
irrelevant.’
‘I don’t care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they
will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.’
‘Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any
reason why it should?’
‘No. I believe it. I KNOW that you will fail. There is something
in the universe — I don’t know, some spirit, some principle — that you will never overcome.’
‘Do you believe in God, Winston?’
‘No.’
‘Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’
‘I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’
‘And do you consider yourself a man?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is
extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are
ALONE? You are outside history, you are non-existent.’ His
manner changed and he said more harshly: ‘And you consider
yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?’
‘Yes, I consider myself superior.’
O’Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a
moment Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a
sound-track of the conversation he had had with O’Brien, on the
night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood. He heard
himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage
drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to
throw vitriol in a child’s face. O’Brien made a small impatient
gesture, as though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth
making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.
‘Get up from that bed,’ he said.
The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself
to the floor and stood up unsteadily.
‘You are the last man,’ said O’Brien. ‘You are the guardian of
the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your
clothes.’
Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He
could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had
taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body
was looped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the
remnants of underclothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw
that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He
approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken
out of him.
‘Go on,’ said O’Brien. ‘Stand between the wings of the mirror.
You shall see the side view as well.’
He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, greycoloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual
appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it
to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature’s face
seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn,
jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp,
a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his
eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth
had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to
him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The
emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt. He
had gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that
he had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was grey.
Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was grey all
over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt
there were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose
ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it. But
the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The
barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had
shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He saw now what O’Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The curvature
of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched
forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck
seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At a
guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty,
suffering from some malignant disease.
‘You have thought sometimes,’ said O’Brien, ‘that my face —
the face of a member of the Inner Party — looks old and worn.
What do you think of your own face?’
He seized Winston’s shoulder and spun him round so that he
was facing him.
‘Look at the condition you are in!’ he said. ‘Look at this filthy
grime all over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look
at that disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that you
stink like a goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at
your emaciation. Do you see? I can make my thumb and forefinger
meet round your bicep. I could snap your neck like a carrot. Do you
know that you have lost twenty-five kilograms since you have been
in our hands? Even your hair is coming out in handfuls. Look!’ He
plucked at Winston’s head and brought away a tuft of hair. ‘Open
your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many had you when
you came to us? And the few you have left are dropping out of your
head. Look here!’
He seized one of Winston’s remaining front teeth between his
powerful thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through
Winston’s jaw. O’Brien had wrenched the loose tooth out by the
roots. He tossed it across the cell.
‘You are rotting away,’ he said; ‘you are falling to pieces. What
are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror
again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.’
Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements.
Until now he had not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was.
Only one thought stirred in his mind: that he must have been in
this place longer than he had imagined. Then suddenly as he fixed
the miserable rags round himself a feeling of pity for his ruined
body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing he had
collapsed on to a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst
into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle
of bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white
light: but he could not stop himself. O’Brien laid a hand on his
shoulder, almost kindly.
‘It will not last for ever,’ he said. ‘You can escape from it
whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself.’
‘You did it!’ sobbed Winston. ‘You reduced me to this state.’
‘No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you
accepted when you set yourself up against the Party. It was all
contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not
foresee.’
He paused, and then went on:
‘We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You
have seen what your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I
do not think there can be much pride left in you. You have been
kicked and flogged and insulted, you have screamed with pain, you
have rolled on the floor in your own blood and vomit. You have
whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed everybody and
everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has not
happened to you?’
Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still
oozing out of his eyes. He looked up at O’Brien. ‘I have not betrayed Julia,’ he said.
O’Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. ‘No,’ he said; ‘no;
that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.’
The peculiar reverence for O’Brien, which nothing seemed able
to destroy, flooded Winston’s heart again. How intelligent, he
thought, how intelligent! Never did O’Brien fail to understand what
was said to him. Anyone else on earth would have answered
promptly that he HAD betrayed Julia. For what was there that they
had not screwed out of him under the torture? He had told them
everything he knew about her, her habits, her character, her past
life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything that had
happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her and she to
him, their black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague
plottings against the Party — everything. And yet, in the sense in
which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not
stopped loving her; his feelings towards her had remained the
same. O’Brien had seen what he meant without the need for
explanation.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how soon will they shoot me?’
‘It might be a long time,’ said O’Brien. ‘You are a difficult case.
But don’t give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the
end we shall shoot you.’