1984第3部3-4

Chapter 3
‘There are three stages in your reintegration,’ said O’Brien.
‘There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance.
It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.’
As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late
his bonds were looser. They still held him to the bed, but
he could move his knees a little and could turn his head
from side to side and raise his arms from the elbow. The
dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could evade its
pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he
showed stupidity that O’Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes
they got through a whole session without use of the dial.
He could not remember how many sessions there had been.
The whole process seemed to stretch out over a long, indefinite
time—weeks, possibly—and the intervals between the
sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only
an hour or two.
‘As you lie there,’ said O’Brien, ‘you have often wondered—
you have even asked me—why the Ministry of Love
should expend so much time and trouble on you. And when
you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the
same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society
you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you
remember writing in your diary, ‘I understand HOW: I do
not understand WHY’? It was when you thought about
‘why’ that you doubted your own sanity. You have read THE
BOOK, Goldstein’s book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell
you anything that you did not know already?’
‘You have read it?’ said Winston.
‘I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No
book is produced individually, as you know.’
‘Is it true, what it says?’
‘As description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense.
The secret accumulation of knowledge—a gradual
spread of enlightenment—ultimately a proletarian rebellion—
the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself that
that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians
will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million.
They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: you know
it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent
insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in
which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is
for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.’
He came closer to the bed. ‘For ever!’ he repeated. ‘And
now let us get back to the question of ‘how’ and ‘why”. You
understand well enough HOW the Party maintains itself
in power. Now tell me WHY we cling to power. What is
our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,’ he
added as Winston remained silent.
Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment
or two. A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him.
The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into
O’Brien’s face. He knew in advance what O’Brien would say.
That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only
for the good of the majority. That it sought power because
men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could
not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over
and systematically deceived by others who were stronger
than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between
freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind,
happiness was better. That the party was the eternal
guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good
might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others.
The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing
was that when O’Brien said this he would believe it. You
could see it in his face. O’Brien knew everything. A thousand
times better than Winston he knew what the world
was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings
lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept
them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it
made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose.
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who
is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments
a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
‘You are ruling over us for our own good,’ he said feebly.
‘You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves,
and therefore——’
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot
through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial
up to thirty-five.
‘That was stupid, Winston, stupid!’ he said. ‘You should
know better than to say a thing like that.’
He pulled the lever back and continued:
‘Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this.
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not
interested in the good of others; we are interested solely
in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness:
only power, pure power. What pure power means you will
understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies
of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All
the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards
and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian
Communists came very close to us in their methods, but
they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.
They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had
seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that
just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings
would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know
that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing
it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not
establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
The object of persecution is persecution. The object of
torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you
begin to understand me?’
Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the
tiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal,
it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion
before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There
were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the
cheekbones. O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing
the worn face nearer.
‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that my face is old and tired.
You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even
able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand,
Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The
weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you
die when you cut your fingernails?’
He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and
down again, one hand in his pocket.
‘We are the priests of power,’ he said. ‘God is power. But
at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned.
It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means.
The first thing you must realize is that power is collective.
The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an
individual. You know the Party slogan: ‘Freedom is Slavery”.
Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is
freedom. Alone—free—the human being is always defeated.
It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die,
which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete,
utter submission, if he can escape from his identity,
if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the Party,
then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for
you to realize is that power is power over human beings.
Over the body—but, above all, over the mind. Power over
matter—external reality, as you would call it—is not important.
Already our control over matter is absolute.’
For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent
effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely
succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.
‘But how can you control matter?’ he burst out. ‘You don’t
even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are
disease, pain, death——’
O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We
control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside
the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is
nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything.
I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish
to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You
must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the
laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’
‘But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet.
What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered
them yet.’
‘Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us.
And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can
shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.’
‘But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is
tiny—helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions
of years the earth was uninhabited.’
‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How
could it be older? Nothing exists except through human
consciousness.’
‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals—
mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which
lived here long before man was ever heard of.’
‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not.
Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man
there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end,
there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.’
‘But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars!
Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of
our reach for ever.’
‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are
bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we
wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre
of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time
he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering
a spoken objection:
‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When
we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often
find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round
the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres
away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond
us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be
near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose
our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten
doublethink?’
Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said,
the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he
knew, he KNEW, that he was in the right. The belief that
nothing exists outside your own mind—surely there must
be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not
been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name
for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the
corners of O’Brien’s mouth as he looked down at him.