The second of our short videos marking the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984 & – we hope – a timely reminder it is much more than the famous memes of Room 101, Big Brother, Doublethink or Newspeak.
Part 2 – We Are Not Human
Winston’s reflection on how The Party has rendered its members inhuman, wiped the self from existence by eroding the value of your internal world and erased interpersonal loyalties in favour of serving the collective.
Transcript:
“The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world.
When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference.
Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. 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. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort.
And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
‘The proles are human beings,’ he said aloud. ‘We are not human.’
