“It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.”

— George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”

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, pure power.

What pure power means you will understand presently.  We are different from 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 around 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 you begin to understand me.

― from George Orwell’s “1984”

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it … And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable…what then?

— from George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

— George Orwell, 1984