The past is alterable

The past is alterable stands as the foundational doctrine of Ingsoc, the totalitarian ideology that governs Oceania. It asserts that past events possess no objective reality independent of human consciousness; they exist only insofar as they are recorded in documents or remembered by individuals. Since the Party exercises absolute control over all written records and, through the Thought Police and relentless propaganda, over the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. This principle is not merely a philosophical abstraction but the operational basis of the regime, enabling it to maintain its infallibility and perpetuate its power indefinitely. The slogan 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' encapsulates this logic, and the technique of doublethink — holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously — is the mental tool required to sustain it.

Definition and Core Principle

The mutability of the past is explicitly described in Emmanuel Goldstein's forbidden book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which Winston Smith reads in the room above Mr Charrington's shop. The book states: 'Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.' This reasoning leads to the paradoxical conclusion that although the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance, because each new version instantly becomes the only version that ever existed. The Party's control over the past is thus both absolute and self-validating: whatever it declares to be true at any moment is true from everlasting to everlasting.

Mechanisms of Alteration: The Ministry of Truth and Doublethink

The practical implementation of altering the past falls to the Ministry of Truth, where Winston Smith works in the Records Department. The process is continuous and all-encompassing: every newspaper, book, periodical, pamphlet, poster, film, sound-track, cartoon, and photograph that might hold political or ideological significance is subject to revision. Corrected copies replace originals, which are destroyed in the furnaces hidden within the building. 'Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date,' the narrative explains. 'All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.' This systematic falsification ensures that every Party prediction appears correct and that no conflicting record survives. The mental discipline of doublethink is essential to this process, as Winston reflects: 'To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them — that was the ultimate subtlety.' Without doublethink, the cognitive dissonance of believing in a fabricated past while knowing it to be false would be unbearable.

Concrete Evidence: The Photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford

The most dramatic illustration of the past's alterability occurs through Winston's discovery of a photograph. Eleven years before the novel's main action, while working in the Records Department, Winston unrolled a wad of documents and found a half-page torn from the Times showing three former Party leaders — Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford — at a function in New York. The photograph was dated midsummer day, yet at their public trials all three men had confessed that on that exact date they had been in Siberia, betraying military secrets to the Eurasian General Staff. The photograph was undeniable proof that the confessions were lies. Winston held it in his fingers for perhaps thirty seconds before dropping it into the memory hole to be destroyed. The incident haunts him for years; he later tells Julia that it was 'a little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter.' The photograph itself, once destroyed, ceases to exist as evidence, and the Party's version of the past — that the three men were traitors — becomes the only truth. This episode demonstrates not only the Party's power to obliterate inconvenient facts but also the fragility of individual memory when it contradicts the official record.

Consequences for the Individual

Living under a regime that constantly rewrites history produces profound psychological effects. Party members are trained from childhood in crimestop — the ability to stop short at the threshold of any dangerous thought — and in doublethink, which allows them to believe contradictory truths simultaneously. The Party's control over memory extends even to the most intimate experiences: Winston cannot be certain of his own age, the date of his birth, or whether his mother and sister died or were simply vaporized. The past is not merely altered but destroyed; as O'Brien tells Winston during his interrogation, 'You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.' The individual's only refuge is the few cubic centimetres inside the skull, but even that sanctuary is under constant surveillance. The ability to remember a different past — to hold onto the truth that two plus two makes four — becomes the ultimate act of rebellion, but it is a rebellion that the Party is determined to extinguish by breaking the mind itself.

The Ultimate Goal: Newspeak and the Erasure of Thought

The final stage of making the past alterable is the development of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, designed to make heretical thought literally impossible. The appendix to the novel explains that Newspeak's purpose is 'not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.' By shrinking the vocabulary and eliminating words that carry unorthodox meanings — such as 'freedom' in its political sense — the Party aims to ensure that future generations, who know only Newspeak, will have no conceptual tools with which to conceive of a different past or a different society. The past is alterable not only in the short term, through falsified records, but in the long term, through the destruction of language itself. Once the last link with Oldspeak is severed, history will be not merely rewritten but permanently unreachable.