Over the weekend, I finished reading the novel “1984” by George Orwell. I read it the first time probably a few years before 1984, because I had to for a class and I was young and thought it was crazy to read a book with that title when I was staring down that particular year.
I don’t remember much from that first reading, except how terrifying it was. And yet thinking that none of that could ever happen. That was way before the Hunger Games series and other recent dystopian books and movies. We were still living in the Cold War, and maybe we had been desensitized by it after the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’ve lived through a lot, but that doesn’t mean I knew what was going on. I was a dumb kid, not a jaded near-senior citizen with an over-active imagination and internet access.
Anyway, I’m sure you’ve heard of the book I’m talking about, but if you still don’t know anything about it, check it out on Google. I wish I could recommend you read it for yourself, but I don’t want that liability.
Whether you know the premise of the book or nor, here are some quotes. They may chill you to the bone.
“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
“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, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from 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 around 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 you begin to understand me.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
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| Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia |
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