1985 Read Online Free Page A

exterior reality into its organism, but it is deliberately reluctant to absorb its enemies. The war with Eastasia or Eurasia or both will never end, the treacherous Goldstein will never die, because Ingsoc needs enemies as a nutcracker needs nuts. Only over an enemy can power be satisfactorily exercised. The future is a boot perpetually crushing the face of a victim. All other pleasures will in time be subordinated to the pleasure of power – food, art, nature and, above all, sex.
    May nobody revolt against this monstrous denial of human freedom?
    Nobody. Except, of course, the occasional madman. It is the loving concern of Big Brother to restore such a deviate to sanity. And then to vaporize him as a flaw in the pattern, to convert him into an unperson. Rebellion belongs to the old way. And what is this
human freedom
? Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? A man may be free of illness as a dog may be free of fleas, but freedom as an absolute is freedom in a void. The watchwords of old revolutions were always nonsense. Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. The pursuit of happiness. Virtue. Knowledge. Power is different. Power makes sense. God is power. Power is for ever . . .

Intentions
    There are many who, not knowing Orwell’s novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, nevertheless know such terms as doublethink and Newspeak and Big Brother, and, above all, associate the cipher 1984 with a situation in which the individual has lost all his rights of moral choice (this is what
freedom
means) and is subject to the arbitrary power of some ruling body – not necessarily the State. That the year 1984 may come and go without the realization of the nightmare – with, indeed, an augmentation of personal freedom and a decay of corporate power – will not necessarily invalidate the horrible identification. Doublethink, which the art of fiction can abet, enables us to reconcile the most blatant disparities. In the film Stanley Kramer made of Nevil Shute’s novel
On The Beach
, the world comes to an end in 1962. Seeing the film in a television old-movie slot, we in the seventies can still shudder at what is going to happen in the sixties. In an idyllic 1984, the 1984 of Orwell’s vision will still serve as a symbol of humanity’s worst fears.
    1984 is used as a somewhat vague metaphor of social tyranny, and one has to regret the vagueness. American college students have said, ‘Like 1984, man,’ when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a little reading. By extension, the term Orwellian is made to apply to anything from a computer print-out to the functional coldness of a new airport. There are no computers on Airstrip One, and most of the buildings we hear of are decaying Victorian. Present-day Leningrad, with its façades in need of a lick of paint, its carious warehouses, is closer to the look of Big Brother’s London than is, say, Dallas International. For Orwellian read Wellsian – specifically the decor of the 1936 film
Things to Come.
The whole point of the urban scene in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is that it doesn’t matter what it looks like, since reality is all in the mind. And there is nothing ‘Orwellian’ about particular deprivations – like a ban on copulation in trams: it is the total and absolute, planned, philosophically consistent subordination of the individualto the collective that Orwell is projecting into a future that, though it is set in 1984, could be any time between now and 1962, when Nevil Shute brings the world to an end.
    We have the following tasks. To understand the waking origins of Orwell’s bad dream – in himself and in the phase of history that helped to make him. To see where he went wrong and where he seems likely to have been right. To contrive an alternative picture – using his own fictional technique – of the condition to which the seventies seem to be moving and which may well subsist in a real 1984 –