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O Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand.  We control matter because we control the mind.
Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do.
Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish
to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of
Nature. We make the laws of Nature.
 But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have
not conquered them yet.
 Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it
make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.
 But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny, helpless! How long has he been in
existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.
 Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except
through human consciousness.
 But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles
which lived here long before man was ever heard of.
 Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them.
Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man
there is nothing.
 But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away.
They are out of our reach for ever.
 What are the stars? said O Brien indifferently.  They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could
reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and
the stars go round it.
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O Brien continued as
though answering a spoken objection:
 For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an
eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions
upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system
of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our
mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?
Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon.
And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind
surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a
fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of
O Brien s mouth as he looked down at him.
 I told you, Winston, he said,  that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to
think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But
that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression, he added in a different tone.
 The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men. He
paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil:  How
does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
Winston thought.  By making him suffer, he said.
 Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough.
Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in
inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again
in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is
the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and
treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but
more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]