As even a quick glimpse into the Headscratchers page would note, for all the claims of the Party's omnipotence and hyper-efficiency, it's arguable that the very fact that Oceanian society is clearly falling apart in several fundamental ways means that even if the Party is omnipotent and hyper-efficient, realistically it wouldn't be able to remain so for very long no matter how much the Party boasts that it will last forever. Keep in mind, however, that our primary viewpoint character is a somewhat credulous and weak-willed man who has been subjected to bombastic, self-aggrandising state propaganda about how powerful and omnipotent and untouchable the Party and Big Brother is almost his entire life — whether it's true or not, he's going to believe it almost despite himself, even if he doesn't want to.
Goldstein's book says that, in all revolutions, the Low are exploited by the Middle so the latter can switch places with the High, at which point the Low are promptly forced back into their original position of enslavement and oppression. When you take into account that it was written by the Party, you realize that it's part of the Party's strategy to stop future rebellions. After all, why bother rebelling against this government when the next one is going to be just as bad, if not worse?
Goldstein's comment about how all revolutions involve the Middle Class manipulating the Lower Class against the Upper only for them to be supplanted is a very effective observation of totalitarianism, but it's also the truth for 2 party democracy. One party is in government while the opposition gains the trust of the populace so they can replace the government, only to become much the same type of government themselves. It's our healthy way of dealing with this psychological need.
It's only a hypothesis, but: Remember at the end, when Winston contemplates the ongoing war with Eurasia? Namely, if part of the Oceanian forces could ambush the Eurasian armies from behind? And then exactly that is announced?. Well, then Winston declares he "loves Big Brother" because he doesn't even need to doublethink anymore; he sees the world the way he is "supposed" to, with an eternal and invincible Party.
The name "Winston Smith." "Winston" would immediately call to mind the name of Winston Churchill, one of the heroes of World War II, to the reader when it was first published. "Smith" is a surname for the generic everyman. Orwell deliberately chose this character's name to demonstrate how powerful and how total the Party's control of this world is.
Winston freaking out at the thought of sex near the end. Why? Well, consider that extreme psychological trauma can cause impotence note The phenomenon has been observed in Holocaust survivors.. Now consider everything Winston went through in the Miniluv, from near-daily beatings (including repeated Groin Attacks) to selling out his love under threat of being devoured by rats. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: Winston was rendered impotent by the Ministry of Love.
Also that Winston has finally accepted The Party's ideal view of sex, that it's a disgusting act which should only ever be done for breeding purposes, the exact reason he hated his wife so much. He has become everything he used to hate.
Also Winston visited a prostitute at one point. It is likely such an experience would convince him sex for pleasure is a degrading act.
On a similar (though probably not intentional) note, the Party's tactic of discouraging sexuality and family ties to eliminate competing loyalties actually has historical precedent. Why did so many monarchs throughout history employ eunuchs in their retinues? Well, the theory was that men who couldn't produce heirs wouldn't try to start their own dynasties (or knock up the ladies of the Royal Harem), and that men without families be loyal to the crown alone (though this part of the theory turned out to be pretty naïve, hence the Eunuchs Are Evil trope).
God Is Power. Orwell wrote the book. Therefore Orwell is god of everything that happens within, and has the power to keep the dystopia running.
O'Brien could "float off the ground like a soap bubble if he wanted to". Well, if Orwell wanted him to, he really would.
The very fact that Charrington's shop is still in business really makes no sense until you find out he's a member of the Thought Police and thus the whole store is most likely secretly run by The Party as a trap to draw out thought criminals: It's basically an antique shop in an area where people seem to have very little interest in the past, and the odd Outer Party member wandering in and surreptitiously buying things probably wouldn't bring in enough money to pay rent, let alone turn a profit - Winston himself points out that he never sees any other customers. Furthermore, while Charrington rents Winston a room and shows him things from the past, he doesn't really try to sell him anything more: If you were a struggling business owner, and one of the few people who seemed interested in your wares was now making frequent stops in your store, you'd probably be making more effort to unload some of your old stock on him.
The government doesn't just turn a blind eye to the Proles out of pragmatism: the Proles have an underground economy that is likely the only source of reliable goods and services that even evil assholes like the Inner Party would crave. This is Truth in Television for many totalitarian states: North Korea and Cuba both have an unofficial underground market economy that its government turns a blind eye too out of pure pragmatism. Hilariously, Cuba's off-the-books entrepreneurs earn more money from driving cabs and cutting hair than doctors and engineers do.
This also explains why the Inner Party is able to have some semblance of luxury at all, such as the wine. Sooner or later, they'd run out of whatever they had saved from before the revolution and would have to procure new luxuries from somewhere. That the Proles being underground producers provides some plausible deniability by virtue of being seen as less-than-human while keeping Outer Party members out of the loop also hits two birds with one stone.
It is established almost immediately in the book that Ingsoc is incompetent in anything that doesn't maintain its own power. Windows take years to fix, working elevators are a luxury, and as Winston laments, even working boots can become a rarity. Why is this? Because the people in these committees that are in charge of these levels of production and maintenance are former visitors to the Ministry of Love! Soulless Ingsoc-approved puppets who get appointed to "pointless" committees to keep them out of trouble. At the end of the book, Winston's new position very well could be "Senior Window Maintenance Subcommittee Administrator"!
In general totalitarian states have low standards of living not just because loyalty is more important than competence, but the leadership of these organization ignore economics in favor of their own utopian fantasy worlds.
This likewise explains why even the Inner Party permits just enough in the way of creature comforts and luxuries. Beyond keeping up a facade, it subtly reminds themselves of the price paid to keep their power, and how that could be taken away if they don't actively sustain the system.
In Radford's film adaptation, many of the Oceanian soldiers seen up-close are not only shown with impeccable uniforms and equipment, but also don't look particularly fit. Some look outright chubby. Meanwhile, though the Thought Police have the same gear, its members look much more fit and intimidating. While likely due to the military being treated better than the average Outer Party member, it's also another hint that the war being sold by Ingsoc is in actuality being used against Oceania's own people.
O'Brien tells Winston "they got me long ago." This implies that O'Brien was like Winston: a former dissident who was tortured and brainwashed into being nothing but an empty tool of the state. There are quite a few signs:
O'Brien is clearly a very intelligent person who is aware of what the Party does and is able to feign being an empathetic man who hates the Party too. The reason he can do this is because he was genuinely that kind of person, only to have his empathy and compassion beaten out of him.
While O'Brien spends a lot of time torturing Winston, the few times he gets genuinely vicious toward Winston is when the poor guy talks about any hope for humanity. It is possible O'Brien hates the kind of person he's become, and projects this hatred onto Winston whenever he shows a shred of humanity.
A totalitarian regime being able to control Britain makes a good deal of sense: it is an island nation that historically has been very difficult to invade, and its geographic isolation makes it hard for anyone to get in or out.
Oceania insisting that it is in a Forever War with the rest of the world is probably a complete lie, but it makes sense for them to lie about it: a constant war for struggle not only allows Oceania to justify its economic failures, rally the population around it, and brutally suppress dissent, but it also prevents another thing: defection. By claiming much of the world is a violent hellscape war, it prevents people from wanting to leave.
This is very much Truth in Television: Totalitarian regimes such as North Korea portray themselves in perpetual conflict to their populace to excuse their economic failures, control the population, and prevent defection by insisting the world is far worse outside the country. Your life may be pretty bad, but if it's worse outside, why risk it?
One theory about Oceania's geographic reality is that Oceania only consists of Britain (Wales, Scotland, and England) rather than all of the Americas, Southern Africa, and parts of Oceania. Claiming those lands isn't just a random made up lie by Party.
Much of those lands are lands that Britain controlled at one point or another in its history note When Orwell published 1984, Australia, Canada, and parts of Southern Africa were still British domains. Oceania's leaders saying those lands were still part of England not only makes their country look strong, but appeals to some nostalgia for the British Empire parts of the population might hold.
The Inner Party are sadistic assholes who love to torment and brutalize their population. The idea of conquering America, a former colony and self-declared "Land of the Free," appeals to their sadistic totalitarian fantasies.
Orwell noted how the supposedly anti-imperialist USSR behaved no differently from any other imperialist state. Orwell could imagine Oceania, another supposedly revolutionary state, becoming just as imperialist and land-hungry as the British Empire he knew and loathed.
The last two verses of the arc rhyme "Oranges and Lemons" foreshadow Mr. Charrington's betrayal of Winston:
"Here comes a candle to light you to bed." In the darkness that is Airstrip one, the bed in which he is free to love whom he loves in the room where he can think what he thinks comes as a light to Winston from Mr. Charrington in the impenetrable darkness that is Oceania. The line immediately after that goes "Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.". Mr. Charrington is actually a member of the Thought Police. There was a telescreen hidden behind a carving in the room the entire time. Because of that room, Winston and Julia are arrested, tortured until they lose all personhood, and then left destined to die by gunshot.
And then there is the actual true last verse of the rhyme "Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead". This has a threefold meaning. The first is that Party is not in fact all-knowing as they don't remember the last line themselves. The second is that, just like Winston's implied death at the end, the death is not in the text of the book. And the third is that it shows that Winston is "The Last Man" from Nietzsche's writings. A person who is "tired of life, takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security". Describes Winston perfectly. He didn't believe in the party and didn't believe in anything. When confronted with his fear of rats he immediately broke and sold out Julia just to spare himself rather than even try to endure it.
Fridge horror abounds when you read back the passages that Winston reads from Theory and Practices of Oligarchical Collectivism with the knowledge that O'Brien collaborated with other Party intellectuals in writing it; whilst it mostly dispenses with the Party lies and doublethink and tells the truth about the perpetual war, there is nothing in it that actually CRITICISES the Party at all. It’s very likely to have been their manifesto from before they seized power!
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of "Theory and Practices" is that it must have been written in doublethink, meaning the people who wrote it were both aware and not aware that they were writing it. This is the only possibility if you assume the book's claims about doublethink are accurate, which O'Brien says is the case. At first Orwell sets the reader up to think the Inner Party members are above their own deception, given that they even wrote a book describing the exact reality of their regime. But then when O'Brien reveals that he is constantly using doublethink even when he explains doblethink, you realize his contributions to the book, including the parts about doublethink, were both conscious and unconscious. And since the book was written not just by O'Brien but by a committee, that means at some point there was a room of Inner Party members openly discussing how they gaslight themselves while being both aware and not aware that they were doing so. According to "the Book" itself, "The subtlest practicioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are further from seeing the world as it is. The greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane."
Notably, "Theory and Practices" is not written in Newspeak but in plain but eloquent language, which means it's even possible that the people who wrote it believed they were part of Goldstein's resistance group while they were writing it, but also didn't.
This fridge horror applies also to the other interactions with O'Brien. While consciously decieving Winston by pretending to be a member of the Brotherood, it's possible that he also believed that he was. He talks about how the Party has existed forever and that there is no such thing as objective history, while using the examples of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to illustrate why this is important. There is probably not a waking moment when O'Brien is not actively gaslighting himself.
Try as you might, you can't find a way for the side of "Truth" to defeat The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Think about the very concept of The Party itself. It is an all-seeing, all-knowing, incomprehensible entity that can essentially bend the reality of those it controls. Any naysayers or free thinkers? It WILL find them, it WILL rape their very souls and WILL bend them to its will. It likely will never die, and could likely claim that it had been around since the dawn of eternity. Sounds more like an Eldritch Abomination than a government.
Humanity creates its own 'cosmic horror.' The punchline to 1984 is that Humans Are Cthulhu.
The Party defeated itself with eleven words: "When we are omnipotent, we will have no need for science."
Quite a big horror moment comes when you realise that Orwell created the world of Oceania by extrapolating the real world rise of Nazism and Stalinism. This rooting in the real world is absolutely terrifying.
A similar In-Universe horror is that the founders of the Party looked at Nazism and Stalinism and decide they hadn't gone far enough.
Even if you're in the Inner Party, you're leading a shallow life of self-gratification at the expense of others, with nothing to show for it because as soon as you die, you will be written out of history so that your successors can be the ones who made your accomplishments and have always been around until the same thing happens to them. If doublethink were a beverage, you'd be downing it faster than your liquor.
Even if the reader can console themselves with the implication, real or imagined, that Oceania will eventually one day fall and the reign of Big Brother cannot last, the novel is still brimming with Fridge Horror — the horror of Ingsoc might end one day, but that's cold consolation for Winston Smith and the millions more like him who are broken, defeated and ultimately destroyed by it on a daily basis until it does. And even if it does collapse, the way it collapses — and what's left after it does — is most likely not going to be very pleasant...
Replace “Ingsoc” with “North Korea”, and you have something Truth in Television.
There are subtle hints throughout the book that O'Brien wasn't just monitoring Smith, but that he actively set Winston up to commit Party treason just so that O'Brien could catch him and break him, seemingly just for his own amusement. Gets even more chilling when you consider the "How does one man prove his power over another?" dialogue they have in the Ministry of Love.
Mind you, it's not for amusement. The Party needs enemies of the people so that it can uphold the perpetual crusade against traitors and Goldsteinists. So, what should it do after there are no enemies left as a result of the Purges? But of course, create new ones!
At the end when Winston's last encounter with Julia is described, the narration mentions her having a scar across her forehead and temple. This, combined with the seemingly-devoid-of-emotion-and-rebellion mindset, implies the Party found despite Room 101, Julia needed further brainwashing. Thus, she had her pre-frontal cortex removed in a lobotomy.
Of course, it could have been that the notion of a lobotomy may have been as anathema to her as the rats were to Winston — after all, something so "crude" as a lobotomy seems like it would be below the Party's tastes in methods.
Given how horrid the children in this world are to their own parents, who's to say Parson's daughter was telling the truth when she reported him for sleep talking? He isn't the kind of guy to oppose or even doubt the Party, and it's been established that kids in this world will lie and turn their own parents in to the Party if they don't do as the children want.
People talk about the Appendix being written in past tense as something of a Happy Ending, in that the Party clearly met its end and the world the Appendix lives in is looking back on the world the Party tried to create. But with Goldstein's book talking about how the Middle conspires to replace the Top's tyranny, only for the Middle (now the new-Top) to be tyrannical in their own right, AND how the Book and O'Brien talk about how previous states failed because they didn't adhere to their rules as strictly as they should... This may mean that Ingsoc may have been replaced by an even MORE tyrannical government (which is the world that the Appendix lives in).
...Except that, whatever that world might be like, they don't appear to use language to conceal reality, but speak perfectly normal English. Therefore, the Party's attempt at thought control has clearly failed; therefore, whatever replaced Ingsoc can't possibly be even more tyrannical.
Many people have pointed out that there's no way the Party could survive, since the inability to even verbalize their own philosophy makes it impossible to insure that its always passed on 100% correctly... Then you realize, they DO verbalize it... Within a very short period. Winston was promoted after his treason. Committing treason is part of the initiation into the Inner Party. That's why Goldstein's book so thoroughly described the workings of the Party: It allows the Inner Party to be made up of people who fully understand the philosophy, while no Inner Party members have to verbalize it.
Imagine how HORRID the toilets are! It never gets mentioned in the novel, but considering how everything else is utterly grotty, I bet the toilets are horrific.
On a related note, if such minor things as razor blades or shoelaces (the ones specifically mentioned) are nearly impossible to obtain, how do women in this world cope with menstrual sanitation?
Think back to all the proles that Winston meets; the ones Winston talks to in the course of the story seem almost incapable of forming coherent thoughts. The only prole who seems to have any decent mental faculties is Mr. Charrington, and he later turns out to be a member of the Thought Police. So perhaps O'Brien is correct in assuming that the proles will never be a threat to the Party.
It's worth mentioning that the Thought Police also actively targets any prole intelligent or popular enough to not only stir unrest but make a disjointed mob into an organized movement. By taking them out of the equation, the Party is able to keep the proles too divided to pose a serious threat, while also playing into its claims of them being idiots.
The entire Brotherhood is set up to fail, even if their reach did expand. As long as they have no means of identifying each other, and can't help captured members, the Party would continue even if every person in Oceania was converted. The Party rigged the game in more ways than one.
The wickedness of Ingsoc means anyone whose brainwashing doesn’t stick is identified as a child. What horrors does Miniluv inflict on any who refuse to be corrupted?
The fact that O'Brien is set up as the dominating antagonist of the story is especially chilling when you realise that he'll also inevitably meet the same fate as Winston.
He mentions Syme and speaks about how rats used to be used for torture before the rule of the Party. If Parsons was tortured just for whispering in his sleep, O'Brien would likely have already been taken by the end of the book.
A special kind of horror creeps in when you realize that, although it's not quite as awful as in the book yet, Real Life is very much headed in this direction. Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four may have been terrifying and depressing in its day, but today (late in 2018) it's easy to shrug and think "what's the big deal? Seems pretty familiar". The only thing that isn't about to be implemented (as far as we know) is the deliberate destruction of languagesnote the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia tried this back when they were in power as part of their anti-intellectual campaign, but since then no additional examples have cropped up again.
Omnipresent surveillance? Commonplace today in a myriad ways, and it gets worse with every little so-called anti-terrorism law the governments sneak behind their peoples' back. You can never be sure that whatever you say, do or write isn't recorded to be used against you later, even when you're at home.
Political alliances forged out of pure opportunism is nothing new. Even the freedom-loving United States has a really nasty habit of forming alliances with corrupt and autocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Somoza's Nicaragua. Hell the United States gave diplomatic support to the extremely unfree Khmer Rouge regime just because they were enemies with the Vietnamese government.
Perpetual war far away from the populaces' eyes, most of it waged for meaningless ideological reasons? Yeah, we have that, too, all over the world. Hundreds, if not thousands die every day in distant regions of the globe, and most people have become so numb or oblivious to it that they don't much care about it anymore, just like the people of Ingsoc. Sometimes a bomb goes off in a major population center, or another act of terrorism happens, a bunch of people die, there's the usual outrage, the governments waste no time to enact even more surveillance laws for the sake of security, and soon everything's back to business as usual - just like in Ingsoc. Studies have found that people are becoming increasingly blasé to extreme levels of violence due to the overexposure to it in the media, which may one day result in folks kicking severed body parts into the gutter without even noticing, just like Winston does after the missile strike.
Poverty and income inequality is on the rise world-wide despite the world's accumulated wealth being larger than ever. Even in most first-world countries (the US being one of the worst examples), a horrifyingly large percentage of the population is barely making ends meet. A single medical emergency or natural disaster can ruin these people beyond recovery, making them either dependent on the government or possibly slide into crime to survive. Claiming that this is engineered by the higher-ups goes deep into conspiracy theory territory, but it's still a worrying development no matter where it's coming from.
Pervasive ideological indoctrination of the populace is pretty much mandatory for any authoritarian government worth its salt, and since authoritarianism is on the rise world-wide, indoctrination is, too. Many people also tend to swallow everything the media tell them without questioning, which, coupled with how Internet search engines prioritize results that fit your world view, makes it even easier to manipulate what people think and possibly even who they elect, as the Cambridge Analytica affair about the 2016 presidential election in the US showed. It's still far from Ingsoc-levels of mindfuck, but everything started small one day.
The manipulation of language for political purposes and to promote horrible policies is common in our world today. Republican politicians often use buzzwords like "welfare queen" and "socialized medicine" to discourage social welfare policies, and corporations use astroturfing, or imagined grassroots, to get people to support corporate power.
Nations erasing historical truth in favor of ideological pseudo-histories that promote political agendas is quite common. Look no further than Lost Cause revisionism, in which neo-Confederates promoted a historical narrative framing the Confederate States as a noble rebellion against Northern tyranny. Or Putin promoting his own pseudo-historical narrative that insists that Ukrainians are really Russians in order to justify an invasion of Ukraine. Or Turkey denying its persecution of Armenians to the point of claiming the mass murders were self-defense.
Then there is the Cultural Revolution, which saw a Chinese dictator trash his own nation's history and culture to condition the population to be unquestioningly obedient to him.
O'Brien insists the Brotherhood is a fake resistance cooked up by the Party to make dissidents feal comfortable and lure them out of their hiding to snuff them out. Throughout the Cold War, the United States government infiltrated dissident organizations like the Communist Party and the Civil Rights Movement to snuff out dissent.
Corrupt politicians blame the problems of society on invented scapegoats in order to gain power. Donald Trump stoking fears of immigration to gain political power and China's Warrior Wolf diplomacy, which involves making hysterical threats on the world stage to rally the Chinese population, are just two examples of opportunistic power-seekers using fear and manufactured threats to gain power.
Children being indoctrinated to the point that they have more loyalty to the state than to their own families, on top being turned into violent killers, is also a tragic reality in some parts of the world. The children unlucky enough to be drafted as child soldiers and shooting in America are a testament to that.
Finally, as has been mentioned before, look no further than states like North Korea if you want proof of how close some parts of the world have already come to implementing the Ingsoc handbook in Real Life. Most of the globe may be shunning these extreme examples - for now - but it's ultimately only a matter of time until more power-hungry leaders realize how awesome that is to stay in power forever, especially now that some major Western powers have begun cozying up to North Korea for certain reasons.
The scene in the Ministry of Love with a starved prisoner struggling against being dragged to room 101? His pleads to take someone else in his place? It foreshadows Winston's future betrayal of Julia even more completely once we realize who the prisoner asks to get punished instead of him: First his wife and children, then the fat co-prisoner. Note that the fat prisoner was the one who attempted to share a piece of bread with him (and got subsequently beaten up for that). Room 101's ultimate purpose is conditioning people to betray specifically the ones who care and show compassion to them.
Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia's explicit war motives involve consuming massive quantities of resources on a perpetual stalemate to maintain power. Orwell wrote the book decades before Environmentalism and Climate Change reached public consciousness. With the massive amount of resources the three powers are burning through, one can only imagine the Gaia's Lament that may happen within a few years of the events of the book.
The '84 film's Strange Salute of crossing the arms overhead at the wrists isn't a sign of defiance; it's a sign of submission, as in how a prisoner would be tied up to be executed. The Party has taken a pose of capitulation and turned it into a national symbol under the guise of national pride, and their citizens have embraced it completely.
affair about the 2016 presidential election in the US showed. It's still far from Ingsoc-levels of mindfuck, but everything started small one day.