Martin[_8_]
December 25th 07, 10:03 PM
All this
marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.
If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big
Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest
of their bloody rot?'
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion
between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the
hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be
kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and
using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party,
and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick
with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be
abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their
children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand,
were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them
and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension
of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be
surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would
unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not
happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But
what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the
afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began
telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to
happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married.
marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.
If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big
Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest
of their bloody rot?'
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion
between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the
hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be
kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and
using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party,
and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick
with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be
abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their
children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand,
were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them
and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension
of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be
surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would
unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not
happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But
what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the
afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began
telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to
happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married.