Freedom is Slavery
Freedom is Slavery is one of the three slogans of the Party in Oceania, alongside War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength, and the clearest expression of doublethink on which Ingsoc is built. The slogan is inscribed on the face of the Ministry of Truth, closes the Two Minutes Hate, follows Winston Smith onto coins and posters, and is finally written out by Winston himself as a lesson in re-education. It is not merely propaganda but an operating rule of the society: a command to believe two contradictory truths at once, and to accept that the freedom abolished by the Party is the same thing as the slavery it imposes. By the end of the novel the slogan has completed its work, and the man who once set down that freedom was the freedom to say that two plus two make four has learned to love Big Brother.
The Slogan and the Machinery of Ingsoc
The slogan is built into the physical architecture of the state. It appears in elegant lettering on the white face of the Ministry of Truth, the enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete that towers three hundred metres above the grimy landscape of London, chief city of Airstrip One. The Ministry of Truth, known in Newspeak as Minitrue, was responsible for news, entertainment, education and the fine arts; its three thousand rooms above ground level made it one of four buildings that dwarfed all surrounding architecture. The same three slogans are flashed in bold capitals at the climax of the Two Minutes Hate, after the face of Emmanuel Goldstein has melted first into that of a Eurasian soldier and then into the features of Big Brother. They are reproduced on the twenty-five cent piece in Winston's pocket and, as he reflects while the wind flaps a torn poster in the street below, on coins, stamps, book covers, banners, posters and the wrapping of a cigarette packet. The same slogans confront him again from the white face of the Ministry of Truth as he wonders whether the Party's dominion will endure for ever. The Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Love tortures, the Ministry of Plenty presides over starvation, and Freedom is Slavery is the verbal equivalent of a system in which every institution is named by its opposite.
Propaganda and the Manufacture of Consent
The slogan operates as the closing chord of the Party's most important ritual. At the Two Minutes Hate, Emmanuel Goldstein appears on the two-way television as the Enemy of the People, the renegade who was once almost on a level with Big Brother, and the crowd is worked into a frenzy of fear and vindictiveness. The ritual cannot be avoided: within thirty seconds any pretence is unnecessary, and even Winston, who secretly loathes the Party, finds himself shouting with the others. Around the slogan the Party runs a propaganda machine of continuous, self-contradicting announcements. In the canteen, a voice from the two-way television proclaims that the standard of living has risen by twenty per cent, while the chocolate ration is simultaneously reduced from thirty grammes to twenty and then celebrated as a rise. Winston watches Parsons swallow the lie with the stupidity of an animal and Syme swallow it in some more complex way, involving doublethink. The slogan is the distilled form of this mental process. Syme, the Newspeak specialist, predicts that by 2050 no one will be able to understand a slogan of this kind, because the concept of freedom will have been abolished along with the words for it. The propaganda of the present depends on the old word; the perfected language of the future will not even need to deny it.
Doublethink and O'Brien's Philosophy of Power
The real meaning of the slogan is articulated by O'Brien in the Ministry of Love, the windowless building that Winston has never entered before and that can be approached only through barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests. O'Brien tells Winston that the Party seeks power entirely for its own sake, not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness, and that the object of power is power. Power, he says, is power over human beings: "Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation." He invites Winston to read the Party slogan backwards: "Slavery is freedom." An individual who remains free is always defeated, doomed to die; only by complete submission, by merging himself in the Party, can he become all-powerful and immortal. The forbidden book by Emmanuel Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, circulates clandestinely and is known simply as the book; it explains the mental discipline of doublethink, by which a Party member holds two contradictory beliefs and accepts both. O'Brien's interrogation drives the lesson home: reality exists only in the mind of the Party, the past is whatever the Party says it was, and the man who insists that two and two make four is treated as a lunatic. Winston's own diary axiom - that freedom was the freedom to say that two plus two make four - is the precise heresy the slogan is designed to extinguish.
Re-education and the Slogan's Inner Triumph
The final victory of the slogan takes place inside Winston's mind. In the cell where O'Brien re-educates him, he is given a white slate with a stump of pencil, and writes the Party's truths in large clumsy capitals: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE, GOD IS POWER. He learns crimestop, the faculty of stopping short at the threshold of any dangerous thought, and trains himself not to see the arguments against propositions such as the Party's claim that the earth is flat. After his release he becomes a fixture of the Chestnut Tree Café, a shabby, gin-soaked remnant with a sinecure on a sub-committee engaged in an interim report about commas; at the café he traces 2 + 2 = 5 in the dust on the table. When a trumpet-call announces a vast strategic victory in Africa, he is swept into a blissful dream of running with the crowds outside and cheering himself deaf. The final sentence of the novel records the last stage of the lesson: "He loved Big Brother." O'Brien has explained that the Party does not destroy the heretic who resists; it converts him, captures his inner mind, reshapes him, and makes him one of themselves before killing him. Freedom is Slavery ceases to be a slogan on a wall and becomes the structure of Winston's own desire.
Historical Context: Orwell and the Slogan's Birth
The slogan was Orwell's reduction to a single phrase of a political condition he diagnosed in the 1940s. He wrote that every line of serious work he had produced since 1936 had been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism; Thomas Pynchon's introduction to this edition stresses that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not intended as a simple anti-communist tract and that Orwell's politics were to the left of the official Left. Orwell was particularly angered by the readiness of the English Left to accept the Russian regime as socialist while silently recognising that its spirit and practice were alien to socialism, producing what he called a "sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking" in which words like "democracy" could bear two irreconcilable meanings. Freedom is Slavery is the novel's compressed emblem of that schizophrenia, the point at which political language becomes the instrument of power rather than of truth. Pynchon also observes that memory is relatively easy for a totalitarian state to deal with, since an agency like the Ministry of Truth can deny and rewrite the past, while controlling desire is more problematic; the slogan marks the place where both projects meet, because it renames the abolition of freedom as the achievement of it.
