Ignorance is Strength

"Ignorance is Strength" is one of the three slogans of the Party in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the most paradoxical of them. It is inscribed on the white facade of the Ministry of Truth beside "War is Peace" and "Freedom is Slavery", it returns through the climax of the Two Minutes Hate, and it surfaces in Winston Smith's mind at moments of despair. The same words stand as the title of the first chapter of Emmanuel Goldstein's forbidden book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. The slogan proclaims that a Party which controls all knowledge and all records is sustained by the ignorance of its subjects, and it turns doublethink — the capacity to believe two contradictory truths at once — into the foundation of loyalty.

The Slogan and Its Place in Oceania

At the Ministry of Truth the three slogans are picked out in elegant lettering on the glittering white pyramid; when the Two Minutes Hate ends, the face of Big Brother fades and the slogans reappear in bold capitals. They come back to Winston again as he stands at the window of Victory Mansions, and he finds them on the twenty-five cent piece in his pocket, in tiny clear lettering on one face, while the head of Big Brother stares from the other. The repetition makes "Ignorance is Strength" one of the most inescapable texts in Oceania, always present with the watching face and the voice of the telescreen.

Doublethink and the Control of the Past

The slogan is the doctrinal expression of doublethink. In Goldstein's book, whose first chapter bears the slogan as its title, the three classes of society are described as permanently fixed, and the past as something the Party can reshape. The Party controls all records and all memories, so that a false version of history passes into truth; as Orwell himself wrote of the doublethink he saw around him, words like "democracy" could bear two irreconcilable meanings, and concentration camps could be right and wrong simultaneously. "Ignorance is Strength" thus describes an engineered condition, not a natural one: the citizen is cut off from the past, from foreign contact and from standards of comparison, so that the Party's claims cannot be tested.

Propaganda in Action

The machinery of the Two Minutes Hate keeps the slogan alive by manufacturing an endless enemy. Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, is the principal figure of every Hate session, and all subsequent treacheries supposedly spring from his teaching. The same propaganda system produces contradictory announcements designed to be swallowed without thought: the Ministry of Plenty announces that the standard of living has risen by twenty per cent, and a day after it is announced that the chocolate ration is to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty, demonstrations are reported thanking Big Brother for raising the ration to twenty grammes. Winston reflects that Parsons swallows it easily, the eyeless creature at the next table swallows it fanatically, and even Syme swallows it through doublethink: only Winston seems left in possession of a memory.

The Slogan's Final Meaning in the Ministry of Love

The real enforcement of "Ignorance is Strength" takes place in the Ministry of Love, the windowless building that Winston has never entered and never approached, guarded by barbed wire, steel doors and machine-gun nests. There O'Brien explains the Party's doctrine: it seeks power entirely for its own sake, the object of persecution is persecution, the object of torture is torture, the object of power is power. Power, he says, is in inflicting pain and humiliation, in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes; his picture of the future is a boot stamping on a human face, for ever. The slogan reaches its completion when Winston, released and hollowed out, sits in the Chestnut Tree Café and gazes at the enormous face: "He loved Big Brother."

Orwell's Historical Target

Orwell came to this vision from politics to the left of the official Left. He had fought in Spain against Franco and the Nazi-supported fascists, and from 1936 onward he wrote every line of serious work against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as he understood it. He was particularly angered by the English Left's acceptance of the Stalinist regime as socialist while silently recognizing that its spirit and practice had nothing in common with socialism. The slogan also condenses the scientific stagnation of Oceania, where innovation has largely stopped and the world is more primitive than it was fifty years before, because empirical habits of thought cannot survive in a strictly regimented society. "Ignorance is Strength" is therefore not merely a fantasy but Orwell's diagnosis of what happens when power is pursued for its own sake.