After a couple pages of Hate Week (and Winston and the rest of his department having to swap Eurasia and East Asia again) this chapter is mostly Winston reading Goldstein's book. It's the longest chapter so far by quite a bit, and has a bit of a "I just wanted to write this essay, but no one would publish it so I hid it in a novel."
I'm going to ramble about fonts in web writing some next week. For today, I'm just going to make fun of Orwell:
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title page ran:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE
OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein
[Winston began reading.]
Chapter 1.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable....
The font isn't actually Courier, but he does switch font for the Goldstein excerpts. I really feel like:
1. Primary font
2. Secondary font
3. ALL CAPS
4. Italics
is a lot for one page.
Add in that awkward bracketentical and the period ellipse and I'm over it.
Long story short, Goldstein's book says that the war doesn't actually matter. It's just a way of diverting resources so that the class order is maintained. We finally get the boundaries of Oceania (it's America, British Isles, Australia, and a smidge of Africa). How the other two countries can't pick off Australia and the Isles is beyond me. He goes on about it for quite a while, but I want to pull one sentence.
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
I think this is probably the most wrong part of Orwell's thesis. Most people just don't want to think. It's too much work. You could argue that people are trained not to or whatever, and that might be true, but it's clear that you can have a majority literate population and they can still choose to remain ignorant. He kind of gives himself cover with the "leisure and security" line, but there's a lot of secure and leisurely unthinkers out there. (Huxley is probably right that providing leisure and security is an effective means of preventing thought for most people.)
