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פייסבוק כמובן. קבל עוד משהו מהפייס, שלא תחשוב שכל החברים
שלי רדודים...
Somehow everyone I know has read this book, but noone remembers it most important points, so here's one that's particularly relevant today:
Goods must be produced, but they must not be
distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the
products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the
stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to
make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when
weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of
expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating
Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargoships.
Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to
anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle
the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the
bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always
underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life;
but this is looked on as an advantage. It is 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. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party
lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his
large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and
drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter—set him in
a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party
have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the
proles’. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of
horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the
consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power
to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a
psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus
labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up
again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this
would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.
What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long
as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party
member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits,
but it is also necessary that he 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. It does not matter whether the
war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is 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 of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more
easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the
ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war
hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is
often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is
untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not
happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such
knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party
member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound
to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
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