The Party creates human nature

The Party creates human nature is the central anthropological claim of Ingsoc, set out by O'Brien in the Ministry of Love after Winston has made his last protest that somehow life will defeat the Party. O'Brien answers that the Party controls life at all levels, that no fixed human nature will turn against it, and that "We create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable." The doctrine is the ideological hinge of the whole novel: it turns the Ministry of Love from a place of punishment into a laboratory for remaking persons, and it underwrites the final sentence, in which Winston, after forty years, learns what kind of smile is hidden beneath Big Brother's dark moustache and loves Big Brother. It is also the point where the book's political horror becomes metaphysical, since if human nature is manufactured there is no inner self left to resist the Party.

Statement of the Doctrine

O'Brien's assertion grows directly out of his account of why the Party rules. Power, he tells Winston, is sought "entirely for its own sake"; the Party is interested "solely in power", not wealth, luxury, long life or happiness, and it is different from all the oligarchies of the past, including the German Nazis and the Russian Communists, in knowing exactly what it is doing and never pretending that a paradise of free and equal human beings lies just round the corner. Because power is an end in itself, it must be exercised on something that can be shaped, and so "Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." The world this power is creating is the exact opposite of the "stupid hedonistic Utopias" imagined by old reformers—a world of "fear and treachery and torment", of trampling and being trampled upon, which grows not less but more merciless as it refines itself and which is founded on hatred rather than on love or justice.

The doctrine also dissolves the individual into the collective organism. When Winston observes that O'Brien's face is old and tired, O'Brien replies that "the individual is only a cell"—the weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism, and a man no more dies when his body decays than when he cuts his fingernails. "We are the priests of power," he announces, and "God is power." Human beings count only as material for this organism; everyone outside the Party is irrelevant, because, as O'Brien puts it, "Humanity is the Party. The others are outside – irrelevant." The same logic disposes of the hope that the proles or the slaves will one day rise, for they are "helpless, like the animals"—their nature, too, is something the Party can define and dismiss.

Philosophical Foundations and Doublethink

The claim is underwritten by a metaphysics of mind. O'Brien tells Winston that "reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else", and that it exists "only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal." From this flow the demonstrations that follow: the Party can make the earth flat or ice heavier than water, can produce "a dual system of astronomy" in which "The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them", and can even make O'Brien float off the floor like a soap bubble, because "We make the laws of Nature." O'Brien concedes that the position looks like solipsism but calls it "collective solipsism", "the opposite thing". This is the furthest development of doublethink—the discipline of holding two contradictory beliefs at once, forgetting whatever must be forgotten and then drawing it back at need, and applying the same process to the process itself. Orwell had diagnosed the real-world equivalent as "a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking" in which words like democracy could bear two irreconcilable meanings and concentration camps could be right and wrong simultaneously; in Oceania that split is raised to a metaphysical principle, the premise that the Party, not any external reality, supplies the content of human nature.

Institutional Machinery

The Party manufactures this raw material through institutions as well as arguments. The Ministry of Truth rewrites the past so continuously that memory itself becomes a dependent variable, and the Ministry of Love—windowless, ringed with barbed wire, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests—applies the same principle to persons. The Two Minutes Hate trains an automatic response in which, within thirty seconds, pretence is unnecessary and a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness passes through the crowd like an electric current. Emmanuel Goldstein is the permanent manufactured enemy, the primal traitor on whom hatred can always be focused, and the forbidden book and the Brotherhood are preserved as useful legends—rumours of a conspiracy that may not exist but that keep heresy aimed at a target. Such techniques are explicitly continuous with real-world brainwashing as Orwell's contemporaries understood it, a set of methods supposedly derived from Pavlov, in which human subjects are conditioned into political reflexes useful to the State; the goal is to get inside the person.

Proof by Re-education

Inside the Ministry of Love the doctrine ceases to be theory. O'Brien is explicit that the aim is "To cure you! To make you sane!", and that "We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them." In his account, the heretic is converted, his inner mind captured and reshaped, made one of themselves before being killed, precisely so that no martyr survives to inspire others. Winston himself is remade in body and mind: he is washed, given new teeth, fed and exercised until he grows fat; he writes out "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY", "TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE" and "GOD IS POWER" as exercises in self-remaking, and he trains himself in crimestop until dangerous thoughts no longer surface. The rat cage of Room 101 supplies the final proof of malleability: when the mask closes on his face, Winston screams "Do it to Julia!", offering the woman he loves as a substitute for himself. Julia had once insisted that "They can't get inside you"; the doctrine's whole point is that they can—that the inner heart, which seemed the last inviolable private space, is itself produced by the Party and can be hollowed out and refilled.

Triumph and Irony

The final chapters show the doctrine victorious. Released from the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia meet by chance in the Park; each says "I betrayed you", and Julia explains that when they threatened her with the thing she could not face she wanted it done to somebody else—"All you care about is yourself." They no longer feel the same towards one another. At the Chestnut Tree Café, Winston is a permanent fixture, drinking Victory Gin, working through chess problems in which "White always mates", and greeting the war bulletin with relief; at last he understands what smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache, and two gin-scented tears trickle down his nose. "He loved Big Brother." Yet the book places this defeat inside a structural irony: the appendix on the principles of Newspeak is written in the past tense, as though from a time after 1984 in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past and the old humanistic habits of thought have survived. The rule that the Party creates human nature is thus, at the very end, contested by the form of the novel—and by Orwell's own declared position, that every line of serious work he wrote after 1936 was written against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.