THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by Emmanuel Goldstein

Chapter 1: Ignorance is Strength

The first chapter, Ignorance is Strength, begins with the observation that throughout history, all
societies have been divided into a caste system. The three groups or classes: The High, who are
the rulers; the Middle, who yearn to take over the position of the High; and the Low, who are
typically so suppressed that in their drudgery they have no goals beyond day-to-day survival (if
they are at all able to formulate any political agenda, it is to establish a society where all people
are equal). Time and time again down the ages, the Middle have overthrown the High by
enlisting the Low on their side, pretending to the Low that after the revolution a just society will
emerge. However, once the Middle have taken over, they simply become the new High and thrust
the Low back into servitude, and as a new Middle group eventually splits off, the pattern repeats.
The Middle only speak of justice and human brotherhood as long as they are seeking power;
once they are in power, they simply become the new oppressors of the Low.

In the first half of the twentieth century, there was however an alarming development: Even
before they were in control, the current Middle group did not pretend to others or to themselves
that they were seeking freedom and justice for everyone or anyone. "In each variant of
Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality
was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years
of the century...had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality." The real goal
was to freeze history once the Middle had once again overthrown the High and become the new
High themselves: This would be the last revolution ever; the new High would stay in power
indefinitely by a conscious strategy. The people who aspired to become this new aristocracy are
described as "bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts,
sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians", with their origins in "the salaried
middle class and the upper grades of the working class".

In the twentieth century, technological developments had for the first time made an absolutely
totalitarian society possible. Electronic gadgets like two-way television (the "telescreens" of the
novel) allowed the authorities to keep citizens under constant surveillance and in the equally
constant sound of official propaganda. "The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience
to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the
first time." After the revolutionary period of the fifties and the sixties (the future as Orwell
imagined it), society inevitably regrouped itself into High, Middle, and Low, and the emerging
High group used the new technology and other strategies to safeguard its position permanently.

The new High group, the Inner Party, enjoyed and guarded their privileges as a collective group,
not as a mass of individuals. Old-style Socialists failed to perceive that when the Party took over,
property was actually concentrated in far fewer hands than had been the case under capitalism.
They thought that since there were not now any individual owners, the expropriated property
had become public property so that Socialism had in fact been established. In reality, economic
inequality had been made permanent, for the sole concern of the Party was to maintain its own
power not to distribute wealth to all citizens. (As will be discussed in Chapter 3 of The Book,
the Party deliberately creates poverty so that the masses must struggle to stay alive: thus they
will not have the leisure to start thinking for themselves.)
The Party does not have to fear that the superstate of Oceania will be overthrown from without,
despite the endless conflicts with rival superstates Eurasia and Eastasia: all three states are too
evenly matched for any of them to successfully invade the other. The proletarian masses of
Oceania itself will not rise up against the Party, for they are denied any standards of comparison
and are thus not even aware that they are suppressed. The sole potential threats against the
rule of the Party are therefore "the splitting-off of a new group of able, under-employed, power-
hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and skepticism in their own ranks".

The pyramidal structure of the society of Oceania is reviewed: The top leader is Big Brother, a
semi-divine figure that The Book strongly suggests is not at all a real person, but rather a
phantom created by the Party to serve as a focusing-point for love and fear. Under Big Brother
comes the Inner Party, numbering less than two per cent of the total population (The Book
explicitly states that the Inner Party never numbers more than 6 million). If Big Brother is
dismissed as a state-crafted phantom, the Inner Party are the real rulers, in firm control of
everything (according to the former classification, they are the High). The Inner Party controls
the larger Outer Party, the servicemen who execute the orders of the Inner Party (the Outer
Party are thus the Middle). Outside the Party altogether are the "proles" or proletarians, the
masses numbering perhaps 85% of the population (the Low).

The ignorant, uneducated masses outside the Party are not normally subjected to its
propaganda: "They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect", and hence
no impulse to rebel either. Party members, on the other hand, cannot be allowed any deviation
of opinion whatsoever. The danger of growing liberalism or scepticism within the Party is
eliminated by massive indoctrination and constant surveillance of every member. A Party
member "is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is
supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors,
triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party."

To safeguard the essential notions that Big Brother is omnipotent and the Party is infallible,
history is constantly rewritten. The Party insists that the past has no objective existence anyway.
It exists only in records and in peoples' memories, and since the Party claims the ability to
control not only written records but also the minds of its members, it follows that the Party can
actually define the past according to preference. In particular, all predictions ever made by the
Party or Big Brother turn out to be entirely correct according to the version of history
approved by the Party.

Special mental disciplines are taught to Party members to quench any unorthodox tendencies,
including the ability to instinctively stop short at the threshold of any dangerous thought. Even
more important is doublethink, a mental technique allowing Party members to stay orthodox
even when their own memory or very obvious facts contradict the claims of the Party:
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind, and accepting
both of them." For instance, a Party member who needs to "revise" his own memories to
conform with the Party's latest revision of history will necessarily know that he is playing tricks
with reality, "but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not
violated... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has
become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary, 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. Even in using the
word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink." Using this technique, the Party can
stay in power indefinitely "for the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own
infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes... The prevailing mental condition must be
controlled insanity."

The last lines of this chapter that Winston Smith reads promise to reveal the innermost secret
and motivation for the policies of the Party. Frustratingly for the reader, Winston at this point
notices that Julia has fallen asleep, and therefore he stops reading just as the big secret was
about to be revealed.

Chapter 2: Freedom is Slavery.

As aforementioned, Chapter 2 of The Book would presumably be titled Freedom is Slavery, but
Winston never reads any of it. Some of the ideas here presented could be much the same as the
ones O'Brien later explains to Winston (especially in the light of the true authorship of
"Goldstein's" book, as revealed later). As the Party sees it, a human being that is alone or "free"
is always defeated, since every individual must die. Those who are "free" remain enslaved to
their impermanent mortal frame. On the other hand, the slogan can be reversed as "Slavery is
Freedom", for those who become the slaves of the Party and make such a complete submission
that they fully identify with the Party will also be able to enjoy the Party's omnipotence and
immortality the ultimate freedom.

Chapter 3: War is Peace

Winston reads Chapter 3, War is Peace before he reads the first chapter. Chapter 3 explains the
full meaning of the Party slogan after which it is named. The author reviews how the three
superstates of the world came into being: The United States absorbed the British Empire to form
Oceania, Russia absorbed Europe to form Eurasia, and "after a decade of confused fighting"
Eastasia emerged as the third superstate; it comprises China, Japan and some other adjacent
areas. In various combinations, these superstates have been at war for twenty-five years (no
concrete years are mentioned, but since the present is supposed to be 1984, the implication is
that the war began at the end of the fifties and to make room for the "decade of confused
fighting", Oceania and Eurasia must have come into being virtually immediately after Orwell
published his novel in 1949).

The never-ending war between the superstates is seemingly pointless "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". (As this chapter of
The Book reveals, all three superstates are based on very much the same totalitarian ideology as
Big Brother's Oceania.) However, the Party and its counterparts in the rival superstates have
excellent reasons to keep the war going.

Again, the author reviews the (non-fictional) history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, how the use of machines in production raised "the living standards of the average
human being very greatly". It was "clear to all thinking people that the need for human
drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared...hunger,
overwork, dirt, illiteracy and disease could be eliminated within a few generations". However,
since the Party wants to maintain a hierarchical society with itself on top, this real possibility of
eliminating poverty and inequality is a deadly threat rather than something to be desired: "If
leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally
stupefied by poverty would learn to think for themselves" eventually sweeping away the
oligarchy ruling them. "In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of
poverty and ignorance."

Since large-scale machine production could not be eliminated once invented, the Party must see
to it that the products are destroyed before they can make "the masses too comfortable, and
hence, in the long run, too intelligent". A permanent state of war takes care of this problem:
resources are deliberately wasted on warfare, and the war effort "is always so planned as to eat
up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population... It is a
deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship,
because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus
magnifies the distinction between one group and another."

Moreover, the state of war creates a mentality that suits the Party well. A Party member should
be "a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and
orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to
a state of war." Though "the entire war is spurious...and waged for purposes quite other than the
declared ones", even Inner Party members who potentially could know better passionately
believe that the war is real and will "end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the
entire world". Research into new weapons therefore continues but using doublethink, Inner
Party administrators are also in some sense aware that the war must never be allowed to end.
There can never be any large-scale invasion of enemy territory, so that citizens of one superstate
would come face to face with citizens of another and discover that conditions there are very
much the same as in their own superstate: Even the prevailing ideologies are almost identical.
To maintain the image of the enemy as a monster whose ideology is a barbarous outrage on
common sense, all sides realize that "the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything
except bombs"!

Since the war is a sham and each superstate is unconquerable, the ongoing "conflict" has no
sobering effect on the oligarchies ruling the three superstates: "Each is in effect a separate
universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practiced... The rulers of
such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to
prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and
they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once
that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they chose."

Thus, the war is actually "waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of
the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society
intact". As far as the lack of any genuine outside threat is concerned, the superstates might just
as well agree to live in permanent peace; then they would still be "freed for ever from the
sobering influence of external danger" (the kind of danger that might force the rulers to behave
somewhat responsibly). This, according to the author, "is the inner meaning of the Party slogan:
War is Peace."

(Interestingly, the novel allows the possibility that there is in fact no war being waged. The
evidence of a war comes mainly from fanatical media and assurances from O'Brien. At one point
Winston sees a missile strike the city, but by the end there is little reason to think that the party
could not arrange that as well. As we never truly see outside Oceania except through the Party's
own media, the novel itself leaves open the question whether there really are three states and a
war, or whether this too is the ultimate sham. O'Brien admits that if the war ceased to serve its
purpose, the Party would simply erase the other states from history.)

Later chapters

Winston never gets the chance to read through the entire book before he is arrested by the
Thought Police. But he believes the proletarians or "proles" will one day rise up and overturn the
world: "If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of The Book, he
knew that that must be Goldstein's final message." O'Brien later confirms to Winston that the
program set out in The Book involves "the secret accumulation of knowledge a gradual spread
of enlightenment ultimately a proletarian revolution the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw
yourself that was what it would say."

Nineteen Eighty-Four.