The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith writes a diary in which he confesses thought crimes, such as his secret hatred of Big Brother and the Party.

[2] In the course of his work life at the Ministry of Truth, Winston approaches O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, believing him part of the Brotherhood, Goldstein's conspiracy against Oceania.

However, O'Brien later explains the meaning of the slogan: the free man is always condemned to defeat and death; only when he submits to the collective and eternal Party can he become omnipotent and immortal.

"Ignorance is Strength" details the perpetual class struggle characteristic of human societies;[8] beginning with the historical observation that societies always have hierarchically divided themselves into social classes and castes: the High (who rule); the Middle (who work for, and yearn to supplant the High), and the Low (whose goal is daily survival).

Ian Slater writes that Goldstein goes beyond George Orwell's beliefs in earlier work, such as A Clergyman's Daughter, in which the Middle makes a pretence of believing in equality.

By focusing on collectivism, The Party can consolidate their power and present Ingsoc as an inevitable followup to capitalism in which the Low are no longer exploited.

Robbed of the ability to learn from history and the worries of the future, the Proles exist in a state of constant present and are incapable of revolution.

[11] In order to prevent any unorthodoxy, the Ministry of Truth uses Newspeak, an impoverished language that makes heresy impossible by omitting words that could express it.

Newspeak also reduces thought to simple opposites, such as good and "ungood", an intentional dichotomy that hides nuance and ambiguity while promoting black and white thinking.

Inner party's members are further subject to self-deceptive habits of mind, such as crimestop ("preventive stupidity"), which halts thinking at the threshold of politically dangerous thought, and doublethink, which allows simultaneously holding and believing contradictory thoughts without noticing the contradiction,[12] to wit: ... but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink.Before reading the first chapter, Winston reads the third chapter "War is Peace", which explains that slogan-title's meaning, by reviewing how the global super-states were established: The United States merged with the British Empire (and later Latin America) to form Oceania; the Soviet Union absorbed mainland Europe to form Eurasia; and Eastasia emerged "after a decade of confused fighting", with China proper's annexation of Japan, Korea and parts of Mongolia and Tibet.

Yet the perpetual war is militarily nonsensical, because "it is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference", since each is a totalitarian state.

[13] Scientific advance is held carefully in check, as The Party does not want to allow for any unaccounted abundance of goods, which could conceivably raise the quality of life beyond bare subsistence for the Proles.

Once mind control is perfected, the superstates are free to destroy their counterparts in a theoretical single, decisive strike that precludes retaliation.

Thus, war becomes a psychological tool to establish a kind of ironic "peace", a stasis where progress is impossible and nothing ever changes, except for the possibility of eventual global conquest.

[14] However, even though inner party's members have devoted their lives to establishing Oceania as the universal world power, they use doublethink also in connection with the war, knowing that it is necessary for the conflict to go on indefinitely to keep the structure of Oceanic society intact.

"Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible--and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord.