Orwell's Revenge (19 page)

But now there is the telescreen. When Orwell proposed the new machine the Party was ecstatic. Private life could now come to an end. For the first time in history, it would be possible to enforce not only
complete obedience to the will of the State but complete
uniformity of opinion on all subjects. The tele-ocratic Ministry would be the Party's new citadel and palace, its center of power. The telescreen would forge Party unity as no instrument of governance
had ever forged unity before.

But the Party was wrong about the telescreen. What fools you were! You, the technological determinists, you who maintained that technology was destiny,
that machines made history, that all politics and economics revolved around the means of production! The Party, which believed in machines above all else, completely failed to understand the most revolutionary machine of all. The masters of doublethink neglected to doublethink the machine itself.

The important medium of communication is no longer Oldspeak or Newspeak—it is Viewspeak, the telescreen. While you denuded the language of its adjectives and verbs, of its texture and color, Orwell filled the tunnels with a new power of expression richer than ever before imagined. While you destroyed hundreds of words, Orwell created millions of pictures.

You idiots! You fantasized that with boundless power to communicate, you could somehow end all communication. You dreamed that if the Party could watch, listen, and connect with everyone all the time, no one else would be able to watch, listen, or connect at all. But the telescreen Orwell designed was not imprinted with your faith in oligarchical collectivism. It couldn't have been; it wouldn't have worked if it had.

The Party understood that telescreens could connect the Ministries to the people. But it failed to grasp that telescreens could equally well connect people to each other, to form new communities, new alliances, new collaborations of every kind outside the Ministry The telescreen contains the power to forge a new kind of brotherhood, an equal dignity among people who choose freely to collaborate among themselves.

With the telescreen in hand, mankind has finally solved the age-old problem of human isolation. We have reached a time when thought
can be free, and when men can be different from one another
and yet still not live alone. The tenet is wrong which says that a man is the quotient of one million divided by one million. The telescreen creates an altogether new kind of arithmetic based on multiplication: on the joining of a million individuals to form a new entity which, no longer an amorphous mass, will develop an individuality of its own, a consciousness increased a millionfold, in unlimited yet
self-contained space. Strength no longer requires ignorance. For the first time in history, it is possible to have brotherhood without Big Brother.

O'Brien felt a cold sweat
start out on his backbone. For a moment he was afraid—afraid that something was about to break. For some wild reason, his fear at that instant was that it would be his own spine. With a sense of growing panic he turned to the next page of the diary.

Party texts recognized four ways in which
a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows another strong and discontented group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself. This is why the Party's paramount mission is to suppress the growth of liberalism and skepticism in its own ranks. This is why we have the Thought Police. But in a telescreened world, the Party is doomed.

You can still be conquered from outside. You have easily averted slow demographic changes in our society, but alien cultures no longer invade by land or sea—they invade through the ether. You have persuaded yourselves that your natural defenses are too formidable, that Eurasia will be forever protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the
fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. But land masses and oceans are irrelevant; the images on a telescreen can circle the globe in one-seventh of a second. Fecundity is irrelevant; telescreen signals can reach any number of people. What is relevant now is not the power of a Party but the power of the ideas that unite a nation.
With the telescreen, no Party state is safe from attack by a new way of thinking.

The second danger is graver still. So long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, the masses may remain unaware that they are oppressed. But the telescreen, like a telescope, exposes what otherwise would not be seen. Before the telescope, people might believe that Mars, like Earth, had artificial canals, or that every celestial body revolved around our planet, but after the telescope they could not. A telescreen is a gigantic telescope that allows men to see other men. It supplies standards of comparison. And like a telescope, it builds memory. A telescope peers into the past, even into man's own past, when light that left the earth a million years ago is bent back on its own path by a massive object in
the great nebula in Orion. Like Orion, the telescreen creates memory by dispersing and reflecting information. It builds collective memory

And it compels us to learn. With the telescreen, the masses will discover that the lottery is a fraud, and understand that members of the Inner Party live vastly better than they do. With the telescreen, oppression will inevitably have political consequences, because
discontent can now become articulate.

The third threat to Party rule is that a strong and discontented group will arise from the lower ranks of the bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers,
journalists, and professional politicians. The Party has made these groups the targets of all its indoctrination, all its relentless propaganda. But with the telescreen, political alliances can be as fluid and changeable as pictures in a glass bottle. Now the voice and visage of any rebellious member of the Outer Party can travel as far and wide as Big Brother himself.

The last threat to the Party comes from within. The strength of the Party is determined ultimately by its mental attitude. The Party dies when its members lose their self-confidence and willingness to govern. Today, the Party's confidence depends on the telescreen, the machine that allows you to see all, hear all, and reach everywhere. But your confidence will not last; sooner or later you will recognize
that the masters of doublethink cannot also be the masters of telescreens. Orwell's network cannot be maintained by people committed to mental cheating. You may assert that black is white, but no act of antiscientific will can make a color picture materialize on a screen. You may deny the existence of objective reality, but you cannot master reality without facing it squarely every hour of the day.

The essence of Party rule is doublethink,
the linking together of opposites. The essence of the telescreen is the linking together of identities: one telescreen displays exactly what another views, and does so with perfect fidelity. If telescreens function at all, they function truthfully. Science itself depends on singlethink—pure, rigorous, incorruptible. Science
is
singlethink. Without singlethinkers, there will be no telescreen. With singlethinkers, there will be no Party.

Today, the Party no longer reads books. But sooner or later you will read this one. Your self-confidence will evaporate. The outside powers will not need to invade. The proles will not need to revolt. The new groups from within will not need to grow strong. Once you recognize you have lost control of communication in your society, the Party will collapse in an instant.

You have asked: “What is it,
this principle that will defeat us?” It is the principle that the past does not belong to the present. It is the principle that what is inside a man is separate from what is outside, and that what is believed does not determine what is. It is the principle that two plus two equals four.

O'Brien sat slumped in the armchair. Perhaps Smith had glimpsed revolutionary possibilities, but what of it? No one else would even conceive of such things. Orwell's network might even have a capacity for revolution built into its wires, but what was still missing was the will. The network would not set the proles free until they understood its power. But they could not understand its power until they were free. However explosive the telescreen might be, it would not explode without a spark of understanding. And there was no spark.

The face of Winston Smith floated back into O'Brien's mind. He
found himself remembering how he had broken the man. In the end, there had been nothing left in Smith except sorrow for what he had done, and love of Big Brother. It had been
touching to see such love. O'Brien glanced again at the slim black volume of Smith's diary. There were undoubtedly other copies of it in circulation, he thought.

And then it struck him: the diary was the spark. When the proles read it, they would understand the power of the telescreen. And once they understood that power, it would be over.

O'Brien turned to his telescreen. “COMM-TWO-OFFICE,” he barked. The screen flickered into life. “Get me Cooper.”

O'Brien noticed with some surprise that his voice was breaking as he spoke the name. He turned back to Smith's book. He had still not learned the ultimate secret. He understood why; he did not understand how. The why was obvious now: the network was dangerous because it might bring consciousness to the masses. But how it would do so was still a mystery. The first part of the diary, like the third, had not actually told him anything that he did not know; it had merely systematized
the suspicions he had long possessed. He flipped the page and began to read again, in a desperate hurry

There is one question which until this moment
I have almost ignored. What is it about Orwell's telescreen that makes freedom inevitable?

Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen, the mystique of the telescreen, and above all the Thought Police, depends on the telescreen's power to watch every citizen at every moment of time. But behind that power lies the original structure of the device itself, the never-questioned design that made it possible to place telescreens everywhere, and to monitor any screen at will from any other place. The secret of the telescreen is . . .

A soft buzz issued from O'Brien's own screen. He heaved his vast bulk from the chair. A moment later, a face came into focus on the screen.

“Cooper,” said O'Brien, “Destroy the underground press. Locate and eliminate every last copy of Winston Smith's diary. This is of the utmost urgency.”

The face on the screen said nothing.

“Surely we have some leads,” O'Brien exclaimed, his voice rising unexpectedly. “What about Blair? What about the whore? Does she have anything to do with it?”

“I don't believe so,” Cooper answered slowly. “We've been watching them both.”

O'Brien stared back at the screen. Perhaps the time had come. O'Brien had long prepared for this day, though he had always hoped it would never arrive.

He turned and shuffled painfully back to his armchair as his telescreen faded into darkness. A white-jacketed servant moved silently across the room, picking up a glass and emptying an ashtray.

Suddenly the telescreen burst into sound again. O'Brien looked up, startled. Five men in black uniforms had appeared on the screen. In front of them, apparently unaware of their presence, shambled an insubstantial figure, his slight frame frail in his oversized overalls. O'Brien had a vague feeling he had seen the man before. In a moment, the others had fallen upon him and were beating him mercilessly with their truncheons. O'Brien felt a faint but
definitely pleasant thrill. A kick landed squarely in the man's groin, and vomit spewed from his mouth.

The picture abruptly froze, with the face of one of the black-coated men filling the screen. The man's tongue was protruding slightly from his mouth, and he was grinning sadistically. After a few seconds, there appeared at the bottom of the screen, like a noose around a condemned man's neck, the words:

THE PROLES ARE WATCHING YOU

It happened
on the sixth day. On the sixth day of Love Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the sit-ins, the demonstrations, the sensitivity sessions, the consciousness raisings—after six days of celebrating Big Brother's all-embracing love, his nurturing of the young, his caring for the old, his generosity to the poor, his feeding of the hungry, his ministrations to the sick, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general revulsion of all oppression and exploitation, all callousness and insensitivity, had boiled up into delirium—at just this moment it was announced that
Big Brother had been overthrown. Big Brother was a renegade and backslider, a traitor and a spy. Kenneth Blythe had returned.

There had not exactly been an
admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Big Brother was gone. It was night, and the white faces and scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square had been packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the green uniform of the Huggers. On a scarlet-draped platform stood an orator of the Inner Party, an androgynous woman with wire-rimmed glasses and thin brown hair dragged into a bun. She bent over the
microphone, her black overalls loose on her bony frame. Her voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, whined forth an endless catalog of oppressions and iniquities, harassments, discriminations, and deportations, a never-ending account of supercilious wealth, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions—a vast litany of injustice.

The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried onto the platform and a scrap of paper was
slipped into the speaker's hand. She unrolled and read it without pausing in her speech. Nothing altered in her voice or manner, or in the content of what she was saying, but suddenly the names were different. The next moment the face of Kenneth Blythe, the former Enemy of the People, flashed onto a giant screen behind the speaker. Blythe looked different now. His once-lean face had filled out; the great fuzzy aureole of white hair was tamed, brushed back, silvery; the small goatee was gone; the old look of cleverness had given way to a new one of wisdom. He was now full of power and mysterious calm.