Re: Both you -- and Orwell -- should come to South Africa. I know you would argue that...
...Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes Free Trade. Free Trade is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from its leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Free Trade. It is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We may be reasonably sure that it will never die, and there is already considerable uncertainty as to when it was born. Free Trade is the guise in which the Technocracy chooses to exhibit itself to the world. Its function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards a principle than towards an organization.
Below Free Trade comes the Inner Technocracy. its numbers limited to ten millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of Oceania. Below the Inner Technocracy comes the Outer Technocracy, which, if the Inner Technocracy is described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands.
Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 40 per cent of the population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave population of the equatorial lands who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.
In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The child of Inner Technocracy parents is in theory not born into the Inner Technocracy. Admission to either branch of the Technocracy is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen.
Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Technocracy, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua franca and Doubletalk its official language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine.
It is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro movement between the different groups than happened under industrial capitalism or even in the pre-industrial age.
Between the two branches of the Technocracy there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Technocracy and that ambitious members of the Outer Technocracy are made harmless by allowing them to rise.
Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Technocracy. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the StraighThought Police and eliminated.
But this state of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Technocracy is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat.
In the crucial years, the fact that the Technocracy was not a hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called 'class privilege' assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years.
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Technocracy is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
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Subject 33609 |
