Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think



Big brother is watching you

Doublethink, newspeak vs oldspeak

Has a telescreen in his house which normally could see and hear everything he was doing, even pick up his heartbeat, but he has a slight alcove where it cannot see and he writes in his Journal, down with Big Brother.

VI

Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Ingsoc=orthodoxy

Was he then alone in the possession of a memory?

Your worst enemy was your own nervous system.

In preventing sex, the party’s real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party (no physical attraction).

Sex with his wife Katherine was simply her submitting, though pushing him away with every muscle tense. Desire was thoughtcrime.

VII

If there is hope, it must lie in the proles (discarded masses).

The Party freed the Proles from the Capitalists.

Films, football, beer and especially gambling are their time spenders, they are thought to pass through the world working hard but having no significance. They are easy to control.

The past not only changed, it changed continually.

The thought of being a lunatic did not trouble him, the horror was that he might also be wrong.

The Party’s final, most essential command was to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

VIII.

In principle, a party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. “ownlife”=individualism and eccentricity

Was life better before the revolution than it is now?

Anything old or beautiful was suspected-Winston buys a coral paperweight.

He is followed by the beautiful, cold young lady.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Watched an episode of Tyra. They had on a group similar to Mylie’s group who were extremely legalistic and separatist. They were then characterized as neonatzi’s. This reminded me that I need to really push people to examine the Bible, but not just do that but also to engage the world and really show others love, even if you must stand on what you believe. Love the person, hate the sin that is destroying them.

“Strut” Spread “love” not “hate”.

Big noodles, citrus

Spatula, tongs, no fork!

Varicose=swollen/of the lower body

Sincecure=to be slighted

p. 129 How easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy, while havening no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant

p. 132 The end was contained in the beginning

p. 136 What mattered were individual relationships

p. 145 Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible; it sustains you.

Inner Party, Outer Party, Proles=High, Middle and Lower class, each have different aims

p. 154 War was carried out by highly trained specialists, for labor power since no decisive victory was possible. The primary aim for war was to use up the products of the machine w/o raising the general standard of living.

Sci and tech progress depended on empirical habits of thought which cannot survive in a strictly regimented society.

Power and wealth evenly distributed is questioned.

War: the destruction of the products of human labor, not just lives, is used so that people would never become wealthy and therefore more intelligent.

Yet you must provide both economic AND an emotional basis for a hierarchical society and therefore not just fill in ditches.

They do still search for new weapons, where inventive minds can be used.

Aim of the Party: to conquer the world and extinguish independent thought, therefore 2 problems arise:

1. How to discover people’s thoughts against their will

2. How to kill hundreds of millions instantly

Neither sides attempt maneuvers which involve a risk of serious defeat.

They also never allow contact w/foreigners, otherwise people would find they are similar to others and that most of what was told to them about the “other side” was lies.

Ingsoc, Neo-Bolshevism, and Obliteration of the Self are the three philosophies which have developed and people are encouraged to execrate the others without knowing anything about what they say.

Aim of the:

1. High class: keep their status

2. Middle class: to become part of the high class

3. Low class: to have equality for all

The inept have been overthrown by the inability to rule, now former middle class arose w/o complacency and w/the ability to monitor and control thoughts

There are 4 ways the ruling class falls from power:

1. They are conquered from without

2. They govern inefficiently and fall to a revolt from within

3. A strong, discontented middle class rises up and replaces them

4. They lose their self confidence and willingness to govern

p. 175 Crimestop def. protective stupidity

blackwhite def. to have a subjective enemy

doublethink def. the power to hold in ones mind two contradictory ideas

history is altered so the party is always right

The greater the understanding, the greater the delusion.

Why should human equality be averted?

Final message: if there was hope, it lay in the proles.

Where there is equality, there can be sanity.

The party prisoners were silent and terrified, while the others yelled at the guards.

In the ministry of love there were no windows.

Never could you wish for an increase of pain, you could only wish one thing, that it would stop.

Now came constant pain, but their main aim was to humiliate and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning.

Voices in dreams: we shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

Don’t worry Winston, you are in my keeping for 7 years I have watched over you. Now the turning point has come. I shall save you. I shall make you perfect.

O’Brien says Winston’s problem is that though he fights against it, he is mentally deranged, suffers from defective memory, unable to remember real events and persuades himself that you remember other events which never happened.

You believe the nature of reality is self evident.

When you delude yourself into thinking you see something, you assume that everyone sees the same as you.

Whatever the party holds to be truth is truth.

Brought to ministry of love to cure him to make him sane, and is not interested in the overt act, the thought is all the Party cares about. We don’t destroy our enemies we change them.

The inquisition killed unrepentant people in public.

Confessions were obviously untrue, so they were still martyred.

You will be annihilated in past and future, so it raises the question: why torture him?

They would have him submit of his own free will before they are done with him. They never destroy a prisoner before he is converted.

The old despots: thou shalt not, totalitarians: thou shalt, and now: thou art

Julia betrayed him, she was a perfect conversion, a textbook case says O’Brien.

The steps of reintegration are learning, understanding, acceptance.

You know how the party maintains power-why do we cling to power?

The party does not seek it for its own ends for the good of the majority.

Men are frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or the truth and must be ruled over by someone stronger.

What can you do against a lunatic more intelligent than yourself; who give your arguments a fair hearing, then simply persists in lunacy?

No: party seeks power for itself; they know no one seizes power with the intention of releasing it. Power is not a means, it is an end.

Freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom.

If one can merge himself into the Party, so he is the party, he is immortal and all powerful.

We control matter because we control the mind.

Nothing exists except through human conciousness: Winston responds that he knew he was in the right; surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it (collective solipsism) was false.

The real power, which have to fight for night and day is not power over things, but over men, which they do by making them suffer.

The opposite of hedonistic utopia had been implemented, now a world of fear, treachery and torment. P.220 everything else we shall destroy.

The heretic will always be there to be defeated and humiliated again.

Winston cries: “you can’t”, I cry that this is pointless

The death of the individual is not death.

Humanisms failure is exposed here completely.

You are rotting away; that is the last man (as Winston looks at his wasted body in a mirror): this happened when you set yourself against the party.

I have not betrayed Julia: he had not stopped loving her (I was thinking this curiously)

Merely to be alone was completely satisfying.

He had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision.

I said “but you are wrong”, while he said “anything could be true”.

The one certainty was that death would come, but it never came at an expected moment.

For the final step, O’Brian states, Your emotions are not yet there. Pain is not always enough after Winston cries out for Julia, so he brings in the rats to eat off his head.

What is it thinks Winston? How can I do it if I don’t know what it is? Suddenly he screams “Do it to Julia, not to me!”

White always wins (mates) in chess.

All you care about is yourself.

Victory was achieved. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

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