Ignorance is Strength

Background: This is a compiled list of passages from Emmanueal Goldsteins treatise on oligarchal collectivism as found in the text 1984. Hopefully the quotations in this passage will help you to make sense of the meaning of this section as a whole.

Ignorance is Strength

“For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves, or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High.” (202).
“From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.” (202).
“There then arose a school of thinkers who interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that inequality was the unalterable law of human life.” (202).
“In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand.” (203).
“Ingsoc…had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality.” (203).
Draw Pendulum swing
“The cyclical movement 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 the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible.” (203).
“The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.” (204).
Insert of new technological luxury: constant surveillance
“But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy was collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property” which took place in the middle years of the century meant, n effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before; but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals.” (206).
In doing so: “economic inequality has been made permanent” (206) using the same fundamental ideas of socialism, just for a different purpose.
Problem arises of perpetuating a hierarchical society:
“Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern.” (207).
“A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.” (207).
“The first danger had in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in fact unconquerable” (207).
“The second danger, also is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison they never even become aware that they are oppressed.” (207).
“Therefore, the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able, underemployed power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and skepticism in their own ranks…it is a problem of continuously molding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it.” (207).
“Big Brother is the guise in which the party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt toward an individual than toward an organization.”
Description of 3 sects of The Party
“Membership in these three groups is not hereditary.” (208).
“Its rulers are not held together by blood ties but by adherence to a common doctrine.” (209).
“Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated.” (209).
“From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.” (210).
“They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.” (210).
“He (party members) 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.” (211).
Crimestop: the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. (Protective stupidity)
“Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the party is infallible.” (212).
“The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison.” (212)
“But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party.” (212).
“The mutability of the past is the central tenet of ingsoc.” (213).
“The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory.” (213).
“And since the party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the party chooses to make it.” (213).
“In oldspeak it is called, ‘reality control.’ In newspeak it is called doublethink” (214).
“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.” (214).
“For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.” (215).
“The party rejects and vilifies every principle for which socialist movement originally stood and it chooses to do this in the name of socialism.’ (216).
“For it is only be reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be forever averted – if they High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently- then the prevailing condition must be controlled insanity.” (216).

Why should human equality be averted? To be continued…..