The Thought-Crime Monopoly

 In Part III we get to see the long-anticipated revelation occur: Winston discovers just to what extent his words and actions have been tracked by the Thought Police. But Orwell delivers us this realization in a striking way. We find along with Winston that not only are we dead when the hidden telescreen reveals itself, we were dead from the very beginning. That sounds like the Ingsoc rhetoric of manipulating one's own knowledge of the past, but in this instance we must concede that our vision of all past events relating to opposing the Party are completely wrong. I have compiled a short list of the actions Winston has done that betray his thought-crime below:

  1. Buy a diary from Mr. Charrington.
  2. Write lots of anti-Party stuff in there.
  3. Buy a paperweight from Mr. Charrington.
  4. Rent Mr. Charrington's upstairs room to continue his affair with Julia.
  5. Go to O'Brien's house (with Julia!) to be inducted into the Brotherhood.
  6. Pick up a copy of the book.
  7. Read the book.

Winston gets no further with his thought-criminal actions, as he is taken into custody almost immediately after reading through two chapters of the book. 

What stands out to me about this list is that every single thought-criminal action of Winston's was chiefly enabled by members of the Thought Police. (Disclaimer: I do not know whether it is accurate to call O'Brien a member of the Thought Police, but I have done so anyway.) If we think back to Winston's first interactions with Mr. Charrington and O'Brien, each coincide with the beginnings of Winston's anti-Party activities. Mr. Charrington provided the avenue by which Winston could record and develop his anti-Party thoughts (the diary), and O'Brien planted a sensation of having been contacted by the Brotherhood with his "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness."(Of course, the irony of this referring to the Ministry of Love stings now, and raises questions: if O'Brien didn't somehow already know Winston would be a thought-criminal, why would he say this? I'll answer this later.)

So, the Thought Police didn't catch on to Winston's actions as he ramped up his anti-Party activity. They cast the original line with the original bait. 

And why should we not say that this is precisely how the Thought Police function?

Therefore, this is my theory of the structure of the Thought Police.

  1. All methods of thought-crime are not only monitored, but perpetrated and enabled by the Thought Police. A tangible example - Charrington, a Thought Policeman, sold Winston his diary.
  2. Most of this thought-crime-enabling activity takes the form of bait. That is, Thought Policemen allow people the opportunities to commit thought-crime, rather than engaging in any thought-crime themselves. (Of course, it has to be mostly Outer Party members who commit thought-crime, as thought-crime is defined by the illegality of thought, and illegality is defined by whether the action poses a threat to the ruling Party.)
  3. It does not matter if the Thought Police's bait is the only reason why someone becomes a thought-criminal, or, in other words, if the Thought Police's work spurs someone towards thought crime. As long as the Thought Police have the monopoly on routes of committing thought-crime, they can stop people in their tracks towards rebellion.

This third point gets into the nitty-gritty of "who started it?" Even in Winston's case, which is more true: that Winston always had a rebellious spirit in him, and it was brought out by the diary, the hints of the Brotherhood, and all the other thought-crime opportunities, or that those opportunities were what caused his thought-crime? If we rely on the book's assertion of the three classes with set objectives, Winston always had the rebellious nature of the Middle. (This might also explain O'Brien's mysterious message, although he could also have just perceived that Winston was going to be a bad boy.) 

But to me, one huge caveat remains: the book. ...So many questions. Why give Winston the book? Is the book really written by Goldstein? Is Goldstein really an enemy of the Party, and more specifically, was he always an enemy? (Is he supposed to be the Leon Trotsky of Oceania?) Why does having the book around support the interests of the ruling class?

If you have ideas about these questions, or any reactions to this blog post, the comments are open!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Civilization VI and The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

 Perhaps most defining to the later half of Part II is the long excerpt of Goldstein's book which the reader reads along with Winston. Within that, I'll zone in on the discussion of how the three superstates function and how Goldstein theorizes that this produces and is produced by the waste of surplus goods/labor and war.  Firstly, I'll try to explain the causation (mostly for myself) in simple terms: We have a small group of people in power who want to stay in power. We have the trend of mechanization occurring all across the world. This trend, which explodes the production power of the world, also raises the standard of living for many. Raising the standard of living too much is dangerous to the people at the top. (Personally I question this, because I expect there to be a disproportionate amount of production power going into further bettering the positions of the rich & powerful in this scenario. Through an economic lens, when the poor aren't so poor but the ri...
Read more

How to exert power, Orwell vs Huxley edition

O'Brien has a nice little monologue in Part III Chapter III where he explains some of his (read: the Party's) ideas on power and human suffering. He asserts that for a human to exert power over another human, the suffering of the latter is required. After all, "unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?" What a baffling idea that is. How the heck, I asked myself, could causing suffering do anything for power? Doesn't that just motivate hatred against the one exerting the power?  Here are some possible answers: If you ensure that the person you want to control is suffering, you can be sure that what you are doing to them and/or making them do is different from what they want to have happen to them or do. Thus, you know that the power you exert over them is causing the things they do and the things that happen to them. So, suffering is a roundabout and twisted way of affirming your power, more so than a means of establi...
Read more

Winston's axiom

Below is Winston's axiom, as he writes it at the end of chapter VII: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." I call it Winston's axiom even though it is really only a pair of sentences among many he has written in his diary. It's less about accurately describing the context for and role of the two sentences than it is about emulating and strengthening Winston's feeling "that he was setting forth an important axiom". As far as axioms go, it's got its problems. For one, if axioms are supposed to be as general as possible, why does Winston center the logic of his sentences around a very specific mathematical fact, that 2 + 2 = 4? But I'm going to veer away from semantics and call this part of the diary entry Winston's axiom, for funsies if nothing else. So anyways, what the heck is Winston saying? Unfortunately, I cannot provide answers, but I'll make some guesses. To start with ...
Read more