They’ve got the Power

Orthodoxy is defined in this book as unconsciousness, which is the goal of the Party. “He realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it…by lack of understanding they remained sane” (page 129). The Party gains power through the ignorance of the people. When people start to think about how they’re being treated and why it is wrong, they want to rebel. Ignorance may be bliss, but it also makes a person very weak. In the way the Party is run, it can never go extinct because “until they become conscious they will never rebel and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious” (page 61).The people are so brainwashed that they don’t even care what the Party is doing to them. O’Brien admits that the Party is similar to the German Nazis and the Russian Communists; except that the party knows that power is not a means…it’s an end. The power can never die.

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