The object of power is power

The object of power is power is the political first principle that O'Brien places at the heart of Winston Smith's re-education in the Ministry of Love. It declares that the Party rules not for wealth, security, or the good of any class but for power alone, and that this naked self-knowledge makes the Party more honest and more terrible than any earlier tyranny. The maxim supplies the answer to the question Winston could never solve — why the whole apparatus of lies and terror exists — and its terrifying completeness is demonstrated by the book's ending, in which Winston, after forty years, has learned to love Big Brother.

Definition and context

The principle is spoken by O'Brien during the second stage of Winston's re-integration, the stage of understanding that lies between learning and acceptance. Winston has already been tortured, starved, drugged and forced through the ordeal of the five fingers; now O'Brien asks him directly why the Party clings to power, and sweeps away every comfortable answer. Winston's feeble suggestion that the Party rules for the good of the majority is punished on the spot, with a stab of pain, as stupidity. O'Brien then states the doctrine in its purest form: "Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

The formulation answers the diary entry in which Winston had written that he understood how the system worked but not why. The principle now fills that gap. "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake," O'Brien explains. "We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power." The pursuit of power is thus not a policy adopted for some further end but the final, irreducible purpose of the Party's existence.

A break with earlier tyrannies

O'Brien insists that this frankness is what separates the Party from every previous ruling class. Even the German Nazis and the Russian Communists, he says, "came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives"; they pretended that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, with a paradise waiting just round the corner. The Party makes no such claim. "We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it." The same logic runs through every clause of the doctrine: a dictatorship is not built to protect a revolution, the revolution is made to establish the dictatorship; persecution exists for the sake of persecution, torture for the sake of torture. This is why O'Brien can call the Inner Party "the priests of power" and declare, in a chilling inversion of theology, "God is power."

The self-consciousness of this power is, in O'Brien's account, its decisive advance over historical tyranny. Earlier persecutors killed heretics and made martyrs; the Party instead converts, reshapes, and only then destroys, because "the object of power is power" means that the inner mind is the final territory to be conquered. The setting in which the doctrine is taught — the windowless Ministry of Love, guarded by barbed wire, steel doors, hidden machine-gun nests and black-uniformed guards — makes the same point in architecture: a power that rules by pure will cannot allow any space, even a visible one, outside itself. The reversal of names that runs through Oceania — the Ministry of Love tortures, the Ministry of Truth lies — is the same principle applied to language.

The practice of power

For O'Brien, power is not exercised through obedience alone. When Winston asks how one man asserts power over another, O'Brien answers, "By making him suffer. 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. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." The future he projects is the exact opposite of the hedonistic utopias imagined by earlier reformers: a world of fear, treachery and torment, in which no emotions survive except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement, and progress means progress towards more pain. "If you want a picture of the future," he tells Winston, "imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever."

Winston's own body and mind are the laboratory in which the principle is proved. He is brought to the point of accepting that two and two make five, trained in crimestop until dangerous thoughts become invisible to him, and reduced to a ruined creature who has betrayed everyone he loves. The final demonstration is not death but conversion: in the Chestnut Tree Café, listening to news of a victory he no longer needs to question, Winston gazes up at the enormous face of Big Brother and understands, at last, what smile is hidden beneath the dark moustache. "He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." Power has achieved its purest object: it has not merely silenced a thought-criminal but remade his desires, so that the conquered man loves his conqueror.

Thematic significance

The principle gives Nineteen Eighty-Four its philosophical centre. It is the novel's way of saying that modern totalitarianism is not a failed revolution or a temporary seizure of power but power that has become its own justification. George Orwell's politics, as Thomas Pynchon's introduction stresses, were on the left of the Left — his work was written, in Orwell's own words, "against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I know it" — and the maxim can be read as the extreme case of what happens when the revolutionary promise of liberation is replaced by the worship of the apparatus itself. Orwell had watched English leftists accept the Russian regime as socialist while silently recognising that its practice had nothing to do with socialism; the "schizophrenic manner of thinking" that allowed concentration camps and democracy to be defended in the same breath is, in the novel, condensed into a single doctrine that no longer needs to pretend.

The maxim also explains why the Party's power seems inescapable within the world of the book and so portable beyond it. Because power is an end rather than a means, no reform, victory or material success can ever satisfy it; each triumph only generates the need for more power, just as each purge must be followed by another purge. Pynchon's introduction observes that Orwell understood in 1948 that "the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power" had not vanished with the defeat of the Axis, and that the technology of surveillance would only improve. Winston's final love for Big Brother is the novel's darkest proof of the doctrine: the boot stamping forever on a human face is not a punishment imposed from outside but a condition that the human being has been brought, at last, to embrace from within.