nineteen eighty-four part one chapter seven if there is hope wrote Winston its lies in the proles if there was hope it must lie in the proles because only there in those swarming disregarded masses 85% of the population of Oceania could the force to destroy the party ever be generated the party could not be overthrown from within its enemies if it had any enemies had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another even if the legendary Brotherhood existed as just possibly at nights it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in large enough masses in twos and threes rebellion meant to look in the eyes an inflection of the voice at most an occasional whispered word but the proles if they only could somehow become conscious of their own strength would have no need to conspire they only need to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies if they chose they could blow the Parsee to pieces tomorrow morning surely sooner or later it must have care to them to do it and yet he remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's voices had burst from a side street a little way ahead it was a great formidable cry of anger despair a deep loud oh that went humming gone like the last reverberation of a bell his heart slept it had started he'd thought a riot the pros are breaking loose at last when he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding around the stalls of a street market with faces as tragic is there they had been doomed passengers on a sinking ship but at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels it appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin sauce pans wretched flimsy things but cooking pots of any kind always difficult to get now the supply had unexpectedly given out the successful women bumped and jostled by the rest were trying to make off with their soul stones while dozens of others clamor drowned the stalls accusing the shopkeeper of favoritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve there was a fresh outburst of yells to belated women one of them with her hair coming down had got ahold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands for a moment they were both tugging then the handle came off Winston watched them disgustedly and yet just for a moment what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered he raped until they become conscious they will never Ravel and until after they have rebelled they can not become conscious that he reflected might almost have been a transcription from one of the party textbooks party claimed of course to have liberated the prose from bondage before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists they had been staffed and flogged women had been forced to work in the coal mines women still did work in the coal mines as a matter of fact build rune had been sold into the factories the age of six but simultaneously true to the principles of doublethink the party taught that the proles were natural inferiors he must be kept in subjugation like animals by the application of a few simple rules in reality very little was known about the proles it was not necessary to know much so long as they continued to work and breed their other activities were without importance left of themselves like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina they had reverses to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them a sort of ancestral possum they were born they grew up in the gutters they went to work at 12 they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire they married at 20 they were middle-aged at 30 they died for the most part at six heavy physical work the care of him and children petty quarrels with neighbors films football beer and all above gambling filled up the horizon of their minds to keep them in control was not difficult a few agents of the thought fleece moved always among them spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the party it was not desirable that the pros should have strong political feelings all that was required of them was primitive patriotism which could be appeals to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations and even when they became discontented as they sometimes did their discontent led nowhere because being without general ideas they could only focuses on petty specific grievances the larger evils invariably escaped their nearest the great majority of the proles did not even have telly screens in their homes even the civil police interfered with them very little there was a vast amount of criminality in London a whole worlds within a world of thieves bandits prostitutes drug peddlers and racketeers of every description but since it all happened among the pros themselves it was of no importance in all questions of morale they were allowed to follow their ancestral code the sexual purity ISM of the party was not imposed upon them from acuity he went unpunished divorce was permitted for that matter even religious worship would have been permitted if Rose had shown any sign of needing or wanting it they were beneath suspicion as the party slogan put it proles and animals are free Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his very case ulcer it had begun itching again the thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life was like before the revolution had really been like he took out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he had borrowed from mrs. Parsons and began copying a passage into the diary in the older days it ran before the Glorious Revolution London was not the beautiful city that we know today it was a dark dirty miserable place where hardly anyone had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under children never lived in you had to work 12 hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whip if they worked be slowly and fed them on nothing but stale bread crusts and water but in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as 37 to look after them these rich men were called capitalists they were fat ugly men with wicked faces like the one in the picture on the opposite page you can see that he's dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat and a queer shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe which is called a top hat this was the uniform of the capitalists and no one else was allowed to wear it the caps lists and everything in the world and everyone else was their slave they owned all the land all the houses all the factories and all the money if anyone disobeyed them they would throw them into prison or they could take his job away and starve him to death when any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him and take off his cap and address him as sir the chief of all the capitalists was called the king and but he knew the rest of the catalogue there would be mention of bishops in their long sleeves the judges in their mine revs the pillory the stocks the treadmill the cat-o'-nine-tails the Lord Mayor's banquet and the practice of kissing the pips tales there was also something called the jute premier noctus which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children it was the law by which any capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories how could you tell how much of it was lies it might be true that the average human being was better off now than it had been before the revolution any evidence the country was the mute protest in your own bones instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different it struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity but simply its bareness its ding genus it's listlessness life if he looked about you born a resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out at the telly screens but the ideals that the party was trying to achieve great areas of it even for a party member were the neutral and non-political a matter of sloshing through dreary jobs fighting for a place in the tube donning a worn-out sock caging a serene tablets saving a cigarette end the ideal set up by the posse was something huge terrible and glittering a world of steel and concrete of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons a nation of warriors and fanatics marching forward in perfect unity all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans petrol II working fighting tramping persecuting 300 million people or with the same face the reality was decaying dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes in patched up to nineteenth-century houses the smut always of cabbage and bad lavatories he seemed to see a vision of London vast and ruinous city of a million dust bins and mixed up with it was a picture of mrs. Parsons a woman with a lined face and wispy hair fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste pipe he reached down and scratched his ankle again Dame's night the telly screens bruised your airs with statistics proving that people today had more food more clothes better houses better recreations but they lived longer worked shorter hours were bigger healthier stronger happier more intelligent better educated than people of fifty years ago not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved the posse claimed for example that forty percent of adult pearls were literate before the Revolution it was said that the number had only been fifteen percent the basi claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand whereas before the Revolution it had been three hundred and so on it went it was like a single equation with two unknowns it might very well be that literally every word in the history books even things that one accepted without question were pure fantasy for all he knew they might never have been any such laws as the Jew primae Noctis or any such creature as a capitalist or any such garment as a top hat everything faded into mist the past was erased the erasure was forgotten the lie became truth just once in his life he had possessed after the event that was what counted concrete unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification he had held it between his fingers for as long as 30 seconds in 1973 it must have been at any rate it was about the time when he and Catherine had parted but really the relevant date was seven or eight years earlier the story really began in the middle sixties the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the revolution were wiped out once and for all by 1970 none of them was left except Big Brother himself all the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter revolutionaries Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where and of the others a few had simply disappeared while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they made confession of their crimes among the last survivors with three men named Jones Aaronson and Rutherford it must have been in 1965 that these three men had been arrested as often happened they'd vanished for a year or more but one did not know whether they were alive or dead and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way they had confessed to intelligence with the enemy at that date - the enemy was Eurasia embezzlement of public funds the murder of various trusted party members intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people after confessing to these things they had been pardoned reinstated in the party and given posts which were in fact sign occurs but which sounded important all three had written long abject articles in The Times analyzing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends there was no one at any of the tables nearest to them it was not wise even to be seen in the neighborhood of such people they were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with clothes which was the speciality of the cafe of the three it was rather hood whose appearance had most impressed Winston Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist used brutal cartoons that helped inflame popular opinion before and during the revolution even now at long intervals his cartoons were appearing in The Times it was simply an imitation of his earlier manner and curiously lifeless and unconvincing always they were rehashing the ancient themes slum tenements starving children street battles list in top hats even on the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless hopeless effort to get back into the past he was a monstrous man but the main of greasy gray hair his face pouched and seamed with thick negroid lips at one time he must have been immensely strong now his great body was sagging slopping bulging falling away in every direction he seemed to be breaking up before one's eyes like a mountain crumbling it was the lonely hour of 15 Winston could not now remember how he came to be in the cafe at such a time the place was almost empty a tinny music was trickling from the telly Green's the three men sat in the corner almost motionless never speaking uncommanded the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin there was a chessboard on the table beside them with the pieces set out but no game started and then perhaps for half a minute in all something happened to the telly screens the tunes that they were playing changed and the tone of the music changed too they came into it but it was something hard to describe it was a peculiar cracked braying jeering note in his mind Winston called it now a yellow note and then a voice from the telescreen was singing I told you you sold me there live a and here lie we under the spreading chestnut tree the three men never stirred but when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's runners face he saw that his eyes were full of tears and for the first time he noticed with a kind of inward shudder and yet not sneering at what he shuddered that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken gazes a little later all three men were re-arrested it appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release at their second trial they confessed to all their elder crimes over again with a whole new string of new ones they were executed and their fate was recorded in the parties histories a warning to prosperity about five years after this in 1973 where soon was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the humanik chip onto his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten the instant he had flattened it house he saw its significance it was a half page out of the times of about ten years earlier the top half of the page so that it to date and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some party function in New York prominent in the middle of the group were Jen's Aaronson and Rutherford there was no mistaking them in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom the point was that both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they'd been on Eurasian soil they'd flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff to whom they had betrayed important military secrets the date had stuck in Winston's memory because I had charts to be a Midsummer's day but the health story must be on record in countless other places as well there was only one possible conclusion the confessions were lies of course this was not in itself a discovery even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out of the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of but this was concrete evidence it was enough to blow the party to atoms if in some way it could have been published in the world and its significance made known he had gone straight on working as soon as he saw what the paragraph was and what it meant he had covered it up with another sheet of paper luckily when he unrolled it it had been upside down from the point of view of the telly screen he took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as far away from the telly screen as possible to keep your face expressionless was not difficult and even your breathing could be controlled with a bit of effort but you could not control the beating of your heart and the telly screen was quite delicate enough to pick it up he let what he judged to be ten minutes go by tormented all the while by the fear that some accident a sudden draweth blowing across his desk for instance would betray him then without uncovering it again he dropped the photograph into the memory hole along with some other waste papers within another minute perhaps it would have crumbled to ashes that was 10 11 years ago today probably he would have kept that photograph it was curious that the fact of having held it's in his fingers seemed to make a difference even now when the photograph itself well as the event it recorded was only a memory was the party's hold upon the past less strong he wondered because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed but today supposing that it could somehow be resurrected from its ashes the photograph might not even be evidence already at the time when he had made the discovery Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia and it must be to the agents East Asia that three men had betrayed their country since then there have been other changes to three he could not remember how many very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance the past not only changed but changed continuously what most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he never clearly understood why the huge imposter was undertaken the immediate advantages are falsify in the past were obvious but the ultimate move was mysterious he took up his pen again and raped I understand how I do not understand why he wondered as he had many times wondered before whether he himself was a lunatic perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one at one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the Sun today the belief that the past is an alterable might be alone in holding that belief and if Elaine and a lunatic but the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he also might be wrong he picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of big brother which formed its front piece the hypnotic eyes gazed into his own it was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you something that penetrated inside your skull battering against your brain frightening you out of your beliefs persuading you almost to deny the evidence of your senses in the end the party would announce the two and two made five and you'd have to believe it it was inevitable that they should make the claim sooner or later the logic of their position demanded it not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tact Lee denied by their philosophy the heresy of heresies was common sense and what was terrifying was not they will kill you for thinking otherwise but that they might be right for after all how do we know that two and two make for that the force of gravity works that the past is unchangeable if both the past and the external world exist only in the mind and if the mind itself is controllable what's then but no his courage seemed to suddenly stiffen of its own accord the face of her Brian not called up by any obvious Association had floated into his mind he knew with more certainty than before that O'Brien was on his side he was writing the diary for O'Brien to O'Brien it was like an interminable letter which no one would ever read but which was addressed to a particular person and took its color from that fact the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears it was their final most essential command his heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him the ease with which any party intellectual would ever throw him in debate the subtle arguments which she would not be able to understand much less answer and yet he was in the right they were wrong and he was right the obvious the silly and the true had got to be defended through isms are true hold on to that the solid world exists its laws do not change stones are hard water is wet objects unsupported fall towards the Earth's center with the feeling that he was speaking to her Brian and also that he was setting forth an important axiom he wrote freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four if that is granted all as follows thank you so much for listening I really hope you enjoyed and if you did do subscribe and hit the notification bell so that you know when the next video goes live like share and all that jazz and if you really want to support me go to my patreon the links in the bio see you next time bye bye