Orwell on power

[Johnno]

I'm reading 1984, this jumped out at me.

'As you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have often wondered you have even asked me -- why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, "I understand how: I do not understand why"? It was when you thought about "why" that you doubted your own sanity. You have read the book, Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?'

'You have read it?' said Winston.

'I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.'

'Is it true, what it says?'

'A description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation of knowledge -- a gradual spread of enlightenment -- ultimately a proletarian rebellion -- the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: you know it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.'

He came closer to the bed. 'For ever!' he repeated. 'And now let us get back to the question of "how" and "why". You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,' he added as Winston remained silent.

Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O'Brien's face. He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O'Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face. O'Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly. 'You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore --'

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than to say a thing like that.'

He pulled the lever back and continued:

'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'

Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O'Brien's face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O'Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.

'You are thinking,' he said, 'that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?'

He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket.

'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone -- free -- the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter -- external reality, as you would call it -- is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.'

 

[kenlee]

I'm reading 1984, this jumped out at me.

Quote:

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Quote:

We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone -- free -- the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter -- external reality, as you would call it -- is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.'

Interesting Johnno. I remember seeing a documentary about the Nazi death camps during W.W.II. Several people who lived through those times were being interviewed. One person said that the main thing that he noticed was the absolute loss of human compassion amongst his neighbors. According to him it simply did not exist, and like Diogenes looking for an honest man, human compassion could not be found anywhere among the people, which, no doubt, was the main contributing factor to allowing these events to happen.
Evidently there was simply no love to be found at all, almost as if the increasing power of the Nazis and the diminution of compassion within the people were one and the same thing.

Some say that if you stare at a bug it might suddenly stop, almost as if if feels your stare, as if there is a kind of radiation that is focused and radiated by the concentration of the mind on that bug and this radiation is the force that paralyzes it. "Power over matter' by radiation? It's as if pathocratic power radiates something that absorbs human compassion and paralyzes the human mind, much like the way that bug was paralyzed by that irradiated concentration. Interestingly it seems that racism is also 'radiated' in this way when the collective mind seeks to increase its power.

Barbara E. Hort in her book Unholy Hungers also has some interesting things to say on
power and how if we cannot find love, then we seek power from fear of our emotional annihilation.

From Unholy Hungers by Barbara E. Hort :

Jean Bolen made this observation: "I am convinced that we enter the world seeking love, and when we don't find love, we settle for power." Bolen's assertion works best when we define love as a relationship in which we honor and cherish the sacredness of any being {including ourselves} without any hidden agendas. When ever we relate in this way, we are savoring the true sustenance of our souls, which we experience in this plane of existence as love.

As we journey through life, we seek love passionately, but not invincibly. If we are met with lovelessness too often, we begin to fear that we will perish emotionally. The prospect of emotional annihilation is terrifying to all human beings, and in order to escape it, we grasp at any lifeline that presents itself, no matter how deceitful its redemptive promise may be. As Bolen suggests, when we sense our impending emotional death, the lifeline to which we most often cling is power, or more precisely, exploitation-the pursuit of self-enhancement at another's expense. Sometimes we exploit others by coercing them with our demonstrations of unassailable dominance, sometimes by manipulating them with our displays of submissive vulnerability. Either way, we are engaging in exploitation, a profane relationship to the life force in others and ourselves in which both parties are dehumanized and objectified. In contrast, love is a relationship wherein we cherish the sacred humanity of another person while simultaneously cherishing the sacred humanity in ourselves.

The difference between love and exploitation is often obscured, and it is easy to understand how we might be duped into seeking the power of exploitation when we can't find the potency of love. Exploitation is only an imitation of love, however, just as some nonnutritive chemicals are imitations of real food. They may look and taste like food, but they provide no sustaining nourishment. Likewise, the power of exploitation may initially feel like the potency of love, but it cannot provide love's nourishing, self renewing energy. What's more, although the life force stolen in the process of exploitation appears to empower the exploiter, it inevitably does so at a cost to both the exploiter and the victim. Because stolen goods decay quickly in matters of personal energy, exploiters must constantly embezzle more energy from others in order to sustain their illusion of empowerment-a crusade that is ever we relate in this way, we are savoring the true sustenance of our souls, which we experience in this plane of existence as love.

As we journey through life, we seek love passionately, but not invincibly. If we are met with lovelessness too often, we begin to fear that we will perish emotionally. The prospect of emotional annihilation is terrifying to all human beings, and in order to escape it, we grasp at any lifeline that presents itself, no matter how deceitful its redemptive promise may be. As Bolen suggests, when we sense our impending emotional death, the lifeline to which we most often cling is power, or more precisely, exploitation-the pursuit of self-enhancement at another's expense. Sometimes we exploit others by coercing them with our demonstrations of unassailable dominance, sometimes by manipulating them with our displays of submissive vulnerability. Either way, we are engaging in exploitation, a profane relationship to the life force in others and ourselves in which both parties are dehumanized and objectified. In contrast, love is a relationship wherein we cherish the sacred humanity of another person while simultaneously cherishing the sacred humanity in ourselves.

The difference between love and exploitation is often obscured, and it is easy to understand how we might be duped into seeking the power of exploitation when we can't find the potency of love. Exploitation is only an imitation of love, however, just as some nonnutritive chemicals are imitations of real food. They may look and taste like food, but they provide no sustaining nourishment. Likewise, the power of exploitation may initially feel like the potency of love, but it cannot provide love's nourishing, self renewing energy. What's more, although the life force stolen in the process of exploitation appears to empower the exploiter, it inevitably does so at a cost to both the exploiter and the victim. Because stolen goods decay quickly in matters of personal energy, exploiters must constantly embezzle more energy from others in order to sustain their illusion of empowerment-a crusade that is doomed to endless expansion, since stolen power can never satisfy the exploiter's hunger for love.

Most people resort to exploitation only in situations where they are met with lovelessness. A person who seeks love, only to be rebuffed again and again, eventually slides toward the terrifying pit of emotional starvation. Undergoing an emotional death is like being the swimmer in Jaws-all of existence is reduced to a scream, without echo or answer, into a black, inhuman void. Every unloved person slides to the brink of this awful pit and teeters there, writhing in terror on the precipice of emotional oblivion. The loneliness of this place seems absolute, but then a new entity slithers up alongside. The newcomer whispers to the despairing soul about a way of life in which love will no longer be needed. It swirls the dark cape of exploitation and weaves for the unloved person a tantalizing yarn of triumph over agony and annihilation. The person takes hold of the glittering bait and embarks on the pursuit of exploitive power, rather than elusive love.