Some kinds of failure are better than the other ones.
In
a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on
people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the
most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped
the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently
interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of
understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and
what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind,
just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a
bird.
They
were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What
mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless
gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have
value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained
in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an
idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he
did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force
which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles
had stayed human.
All
rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon
their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion
that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the
loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be
undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical
facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or
politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun
or an aeroplane they had to make four.
Even
the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern
standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no
government had the power to keep its citizens under constant
surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to
manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the
process further. With the development of television, and the technical
advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on
the same instrument, private life came to an end.
Sanity is not statistical.
"Yes, sometimes two plus two is four. But sometimes it's five or even three. Sometimes it's all of those at the same time."
George Orwell 1984
