Preliminary Materials

Midsemester Essay:

Chapters:

1984:

1. “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed– if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”(34-35).
2. “They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified – when that happened, the claim of the party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist and never again could exist any standard against which it could be tested”(93).
3. 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 would make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy”(80).  

The Origins of Totalitarianism

“…the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition”(437). 

Thesis:

Totalitarian regimes use manipulation of truth to strengthen their regime because controlling people’s beliefs is more powerful and oppressing than controlling what they do.

Abstract: 

When the line between objectivity and subjectivity is blurred, who knows what’s right? As those in control of manipulating the truth continue to exercise their power in that way, those unaware become more oppressed and less aware of accurate reality. Thus, when lies are perpetuated and facts are rewritten, truth ceases to be an objective reality and becomes only what power declares it to be.