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Goldstein's book
Goldstein's book is a fictional book which
is an important element in both the plot and the overall theme
of George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell's novel describes a totalitarian society ruled by the all-powerful
Party. Emmanuel Goldstein figures in state propaganda as
the chief enemy of the state — a former Party member
who conspires against the "wise" leadership of
Big Brother. Early in the novel, Orwell introduces the concept
of the book supposedly written by Goldstein: "There
were...whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium
of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and
which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a
book without a title. People referred to it, if at all,
simply as The Book." In the text of the novel, The
Book is always written in italics.
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Content
Winston reads two long excerpts from chapters 1 and 3 of The Book.
These two chapters are named after Party slogans, Ignorance is Strength
and War is Peace. Chapter 2, which we never get to read, would presumably
be named after the Party slogan Freedom is Slavery. (The three slogans
are listed several times in the novel.) Since The Book is described
as a thick volume, it must be assumed that there are more chapters
than just these three.
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, and 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 dumb, 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
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."
Latter 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."
