The Party is infallible

In Oceania, the doctrine of the Party's infallibility is the foundation of all belief. At the apex of the pyramid stands Big Brother, "infallible and all-powerful"; every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration. Yet nobody has ever seen Big Brother: he is a face on the hoardings and a voice on the telescreen, probably deathless, with no certain date of birth. He is, as Goldstein's forbidden book explains, the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world, a focusing point for love, fear and reverence — emotions more easily directed at an individual than at an organisation.

The doctrine is also the engine of historical falsification. Goldstein's book argues that the alteration of the past has two purposes. The subsidiary one is that Party members, like the proles, must be cut off from the past and from foreign countries so that they can believe they are better off than their ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. The more important purpose is to "safeguard the infallibility of the Party": speeches, statistics and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date to show that the Party's predictions were in all cases right, and no change in doctrine or political alignment can ever be admitted. If the enemy is Eurasia today, then the enemy must always have been Eurasia; "if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered." This day-to-day falsification, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression carried out by the Ministry of Love.

The machine of denial

The machinery that sustains the doctrine extends through the whole Ministry of Truth. Its primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels — with every conceivable kind of information, instruction or entertainment — and then to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proles. Thomas Pynchon, introducing the novel, observes that from the totalitarian point of view memory is relatively easy to deal with: there is always some agency like the Ministry of Truth to deny the memories of others and to rewrite the past.

The secular god

The ideology nevertheless wears a religious face. During the Two Minutes Hate a small sandy-haired woman flings herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her and, with a tremulous murmur that sounds like "My Saviour!", extends her arms towards the screen, then buries her face in her hands in what is plainly a prayer. O'Brien later gives the cult its most explicit formulation, calling the Party's rulers "the priests of power" and declaring "God is power." Power, he explains, is collective: the individual has power only in so far as he ceases to be an individual, and by merging himself in the Party becomes all-powerful and immortal.

O'Brien then turns infallibility into metaphysics. "We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull." There is nothing the Party could not do — invisibility, levitation, anything; he says he could float off this floor like a soap bubble if he wished to, but he does not wish to because the Party does not wish it. "We make the laws of Nature." The claim is no longer merely political: it is a claim to own reality itself.

Terror and pure power

The claim is guarded by an architecture of terror. The entire apparatus of government is divided among four Ministries — the Ministry of Truth for news, entertainment, education and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace for war; the Ministry of Love for law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty for economic affairs — buildings so vast that from the roof of Victory Mansions all four can be seen at once. The Ministry of Love is the really frightening one: windowless, impossible to enter except on official business, penetrable only through barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests, its approaches roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms armed with jointed truncheons. Party infallibility is backed by a place designed to ensure that no one who questions it survives intact.

In the Ministry of Love, O'Brien finally states the motive beneath the doctrine. "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake." It is not interested in the good of others, nor in wealth, luxury, long life or happiness — only in power, pure power. Past oligarchies, including the German Nazis and the Russian Communists, were cowards and hypocrites who never had the courage to recognize their own motives; the Party knows that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. The object of persecution is persecution, the object of torture is torture, the object of power is power.

Power, for O'Brien, is exercised through suffering and the remaking of minds. "Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?" Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation, in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of the Party's choosing. The world being created is "the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined" — a world of fear and treachery and torment whose progress will be progress towards more pain, founded on hatred, in which no emotions will survive except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement.

The final conversion

The doctrine's ultimate proof is Winston's conversion. Looking up at the enormous face, he reflects that it has taken him forty years to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. "O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!" Two gin-scented tears trickle down the sides of his nose. "But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." Infallibility has become not merely accepted but loved.

Doctrine as prophecy

The doctrine grew out of Orwell's political preoccupations rather than out of simple anti-communism. Pynchon's introduction stresses that Orwell was to the left of the Left, that he went to Spain in 1937 to fight against Franco and his Nazi-supported fascists, and that he later declared that every line of serious work he had written since 1936 had been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.

Orwell was particularly angered by the Left's allegiance to Stalinism in the face of overwhelming evidence. In March 1948, while revising the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he wrote that nearly the whole of the English Left had been driven to accept the Russian regime as "Socialist" while silently recognizing that its spirit and practice were quite alien to anything meant by "Socialism" in England; hence a schizophrenic manner of thinking in which words like "democracy" can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously. The doctrine of Party infallibility is the perfected form of that schizophrenia — a belief system that cannot admit error because it has abolished the standard by which error could be measured.