Ingsoc
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In George Orwell's dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ingsoc is the ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania. Ingsoc is Newspeak for "English Socialism".
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[edit] Origins
English Socialism apparently came to dominance during a communist or more likely socialist revolution, but as The Party is constantly rewriting history it is difficult to tell precisely how it came about. In addition to rewriting history, The Party is also constantly rewriting the language, so as to make the true meanings of words, and the ideas behind them, ambiguous. Hence, The Party changed the term "English Socialism" to the shorter and more esoteric "Ingsoc."
[edit] Ingsoc as a political philosophy
Emmanuel Goldstein's book-within-the-book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, describes the actual ideology of the Party as "oligarchical collectivism", stating that Ingsoc "rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism", a practice Orwell dealt with in Animal Farm.
The Party is personified by Big Brother, an omnipresent Stalin-like figure constantly depicted on posters and the telescreen. Like the Party itself, Big Brother is constantly watching. Ingsoc demands complete submission to it, and uses torture to achieve that end (see Room 101). In fact, Ingsoc has mastered a complex system of psychological tools and methods to make people not only confess imagined crimes and forget any thoughts of rebellion, but to actually love Ingsoc itself.
In actuality, Ingsoc has little to no true end or ultimate political goal other than to be in undying control. O'Brien puts it quite glibly:
The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. 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.
[edit] Ingsoc as a metaphysical philosophy
In addition to being a political philosophy, Ingsoc is also a metaphysical philosophy. It puts forward the belief that all knowledge rests in the collective mind of the Party, that reality is what the Party wants it to be. This is the Party's justification for altering historical texts. It uses doublethink to believe what it would otherwise know to be false, and in believing the new past, the new past truly was. This is why it is said that "he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past."
Numerous references to themes akin to solipsism in regards to pure Ingsoc are made throughout the third part of the book. It is implied that according to Ingsoc, the universe exists entirely in the mind of the individual. It is the job of the Ministry of Love and to a lesser extent the Ministry of Truth to make sure each individual's mind is shaped by undying loyalty to the Party and its ideological beliefs. By integrating in these beliefs that the individual exists only to be part of a whole, and convincing the whole that there is nothing but the goodness of the Party and the badness of other nations, this becomes the form of the individual's and the whole's conscious universe, and thus the Party remains in total power.
[edit] Class structure under Ingsoc
Under Ingsoc, society is composed of three levels:
- The Inner Party that makes policy decisions and runs the government, which is referred to as simply The Party.
- The Outer Party that works in the state jobs and is the middle class of the society. "Members are allowed no vices other than cigarettes and Victory Gin." The Outer Party is also under the most scrutiny, being constantly monitored by two-way telescreens and other implements of surveillance.
- The Proles that are the lower class, the rabble the Inner Party keeps happy and sedate with beer, gambling, sports, casual sex and prolefeed ("rubbishy texts"). The proles are named for the proletariat, the term Marx used for the working class. The Proles make up 85% of the population of Oceania.
The classes do not mix much, although the narrator describes an evening at the movie theater where proles and Party members are both in attendance. The main character is also able to patronise a prole pub without attracting much attention -- or so he thinks -- and to visit the flat of O'Brien, an Inner Party member, on a pretext of borrowing a special edition of a Newspeak dictionary.
[edit] Other political ideologies in 1984
Eastasia and Eurasia, the two other superstates that came to be formed and ruled by ideology in a similar manner as Oceania, each have their own equivalents to Ingsoc. Eurasia, formed from Russia's conquest of Europe, names its philosophy Neo-Bolshevism, and the Chinese name for the ideology that rules Eastasia is commonly translated as Death-Worship, or more precisely Obliteration of the Self. A fact known to all three ruling Inner Parties, yet constantly denied by means of doublethink, is that all three ideologies are virtually indistinguishable in their tenets. This denial of similarity between them and vilification by each of the other two is what allows the eternal war between the three superstates to continue. Without this war, the lower classes would lack a focus for the hatred and triumph that are part of the Party's psychological means of domination.
What is left unexplained in the novel is how Ingsoc and its ruling cabal, the Inner Party, were able to establish and maintain control over Britain and its Commonwealth, Ireland, and the whole of the Americas in a historically short period (roughly 30 years based on the internal chronology of the novel). In light of the wide differences in language, culture, religion and history existing among the various peoples in these regions, this premise might be considered the most significant weakness in the novel's plot. On the other hand, given the rapid spread of communism through the date of the novel's composition, it might well have seemed entirely plausible at the time.
[edit] See also
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | |
|---|---|
| By George Orwell | |
| Characters | Winston Smith | Julia | O'Brien | Big Brother | Emmanuel Goldstein |
| Places | Oceania | Eastasia | Eurasia | Airstrip One | Room 101 |
| Classes | Inner Party | Outer Party | Proles |
| Ministries | Ministry of Love | Ministry of Peace | Ministry of Plenty | Ministry of Truth |
| Concepts | Ingsoc | Newspeak | Doublethink | Goodthink | Crimestop Two plus two | Thoughtcrime | Prolefeed | Prolesec |
| Miscellaneous | Thought Police | Telescreen | Memory hole | The Book Newspeak words | Two Minutes Hate | Hate week |
| Other media | 1956 film | 1984 film | 1953 TV programme | 1954 TV programme Opera | 1985 | Me and the Big Guy |
[edit] External links
- Flag-Burning: a Detriment to the Oceanian Way, a satire by Alexander S. Peak
