Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
∞
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’
∞
‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly.
∞
‘The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.’
⋅ Nota Bene ⋅
(The funny thing is, even if people did lose the ability to express something, they still wouldn’t lose the ability to feel it. So after thoughtcrime, you’d get “feelcrime”. And even if you scrubbed all the words in existence, people would just invent new ones. Or how d’you imagine those multitude of words came into existence in the first place?
Also, as I’ve said before, you can’t feel superior if you don’t keep people you consider inferior around~. The elite may think proles or muggles are dumb bovines who aren’t even human, but they need them more than proles will ever need the elite.)
It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’
⋅ Nota Bene ⋅
(Or the modern version: ‘who controls the tv controls everything and everyone’.)
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
Hiraeth 