IndexIntroductionPower through the destruction of emotions in 1984ConclusionReferencesIntroduction“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” O'Brien asks. Winston's response: “Making him suffer.” These two characters embody George Orwell's vision of a future totalitarian government that has evolved to its most frightening efficiency. In 1984, an organization, the Party, rules everything and everyone in Oceania, creating and destroying the past at will, inducing servile submission in its subjects. There is no escape from the Party or its divine leader, Big Brother, who spouts his rhetoric from every television screen. No one is ever alone; someone is always watching from television screens with a predatory eye. In the final section of the book, powerful Party official O'Brien utters this definition of power to Winston, a man completely at his physical mercy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In a novel where the ruling party is as much a character as any individual person, the complexities of power certainly give each scene deeper implications. While asserting power by causing pain can be a captivating theme, the driving force of the novel comes from the linked notions of annihilation and reconstruction. Power is the ability to annihilate someone by destroying their personal emotions and then recreate them until the world is populated with copies of the one model of your choice. In 1984, the Party cuts away at the very heart of the human being, until, without the personal, the only emotions that exist are decreed and owned by the Party. Each episode of the novel is a battle within Winston to resist the Party's inexorable emotional grip. Power through the destruction of emotion in 1984 We never see Winston as a complete human being, fully capable of emotion. Mostly Winston is like the wasp that Orwell cut in half, which he describes in a book review. Only when Winston the wasp attempted to “fly away did he understand the terrible thing that had happened to him… What has been cut away from him is his soul…”. For Winston, “The thing that was cut away” is his personal emotions; what he does or thinks he feels is mainly political. The novel opens with the beginning of Winston's diary, perhaps the most obvious symbol of personality. We get to the date, and then “A sense of total helplessness had descended on him…”. He has no idea what to write; he has nothing personal to write down in a diary. Keep thinking about who the diary is written for. He thinks about his audience perhaps in the future; evidently he cannot conceive of a diary written exclusively for himself for personal reasons; it must be for some political purpose. Finally, his first words tell of a film he saw: a political film. He then proceeds to write “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” several times; in fact, everything he writes in his diary is political, from reflections on his future execution to reflections on thought crime and doublethink. The diary becomes an abject symbol of the emotion of which Winston is incapable. Winston cannot even experience love, the pinnacle of human emotion. In his unconscious, he harbors pre-revolutionary memories of his now deceased mother and sister. It is not surprising, therefore, that he dreams of his lost mother and perhaps even grieves for her unconsciously. However, even in a hazy dream, he realizes that at the time “he was too young and selfish to love her back” and that now that she is gone there is no longer any possibility for him to love her. Today, without "privacy, love and friendship" there can be no "emotional dignity, no deep or complex pain" of its ownmother. Winston can perceive all these emotional nuances, but his acute perception does not help him feel those “deep or complex pains” resulting from love. His confused dream memories are personal, but the emotion is present, they belong to a dead world. In continuation of his dream, he sees Julia as a work colleague and future lover, and is filled with “admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown aside his clothes. With his grace and nonchalance he seemed to annihilate an entire culture, an entire system of thought, as if Big Brother, the Party and the Thought Police could be swept into thin air by a single splendid movement of his arm. That too was a gesture belonging to ancient times." Such an intimate sexual fantasy is still reduced to an instinctive political rebellion. Winston may discern and even admire such a triumphantly human response to totalitarianism, but he himself cannot feel the same way. Such gestures and feelings belong "to the ancient time". In fact, when Winston goes to bed with the much dreamed of Julia, we only receive confirmation that even his most intimate act is tainted with something political. Sex is political. When Winston wakes up next to Julia and reflects on the sex they had, he understands that there are no pure personal emotions, untainted by politics. In the old days, he thought, a man would look at a girl's body and see that she was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But nowadays it is not possible to have pure love or pure lust. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow to the Party. It was a political act. What would have been the most intimate and personal bond between two human beings turned into a sort of political battle against the Party. Winston is incapable of acting outside of politics, he must "fight" to assert his power and obtain his small "victory" over the Party even through sex. This crucial sex scene portrays the means by which the Party controls its subjects and points towards the remaining components of power and the real conflict in the novel. The fact that Winston cannot have a life outside of politics means that the Party has already partially won. Although Winston may believe that he has achieved some sort of victory over the Party by having illicit sexual relations with a Party woman for non-reproductive purposes, this victory is also an empty self-deception. The real victory would be to have meaningful, personal sex. Instead, the very fact that the Party has infiltrated the deepest parts of the human psyche means that the Party has triumphed in co-opting all personal human passions and therefore all threats to itself. Winston's idea of ​​sex as a battle represents a defeat on the Party's part, even if the battle itself could have been a "victory." Although Winston tries to rebel against the Party's annihilation, he cannot truly succeed; what the novel is left with is that he recognizes his defeat and accepts the Party's replacement for his soul. That struggle within Winston to recognize and accept his inevitable defeat is what 1984 is about. Since Winston may well be completely annihilated, complete domination of the Party requires him only to think as the Party rules. Therefore, the initial conflict between Winston and the Party boils down to Winston's internal struggle between self-control and those lapses of emotion and memory. We see a sort of inconsistency here; instead of a chess game between two opponents, we only have one person playing against himself: Winston, struggling with the memory demons within himself. This contradiction is illuminated by philosopher Hannah Arendt's theories ontotalitarianism. In “The Politics of Totalitarianism,” he describes the kind of fully evolved totalitarian society that Orwell presages. According to her, the course of history “may decide that those who eliminate races and individuals today or members of dying classes and decadent peoples are those who must be sacrificed tomorrow. What the totalitarian government needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is preparation so that each of them adapts equally well to the role of executioner and the role of victim." Applying this theory to 1984, we see that Winston himself has some aspects of both the victim and the perpetrator. The emotionally crushed Winston would surely be a victim. However, Arendt states that every subject must also have within himself an executioner, a party that participates in the eradication of the Party. Although Winston is a victim, he is ultimately just a doublethink crime-stopping version of himself who has gained enough control to suppress his personal emotions; he too is his own executioner. Although he initially shouts at O'Brien in anguish: “How can you stop people from remembering things?… It's involuntary… How can you control memory? You haven't controlled mine!”, in the end, the Party doesn't even need to actively control Winston's mind; he does it for himself, constantly continuing the execution or annihilation. Ultimately, Winston is even able to ignore happy childhood memories. He simply “pushed the image out of his mind. It was a false memory... They didn't matter as long as you knew them for what they were." Thus, not only does the Party annihilate and have power over Winston, Winston himself finally becomes an "executioner" of his own soul. In the end, Winston does not only he manages to control his own memories and emotions, but he also swallows the Party line: bait, hook and all the rest. The image that Orwell leaves us is that of a drained and gin-soaked Winston, staring into the sky. image on the TV screen of Big Brother: "He had won over himself. He loved Big Brother". Suffering is over. If power is established over a man by “making him suffer,” then surely Winston fled from the Party the power and suffering he caused. Indeed, merging into the Party collective is the Winston's dubious reward for his new ability to conform to the Party's standards of thought, believe that two plus two equals five, and love Big Brother from whom Winston simply cannot escape Despite the Party's power and personal suffering, he is happily immersed in the monolithic Party. This collective is what Arendt calls “the One”. According to Arendt, in totalitarian society many individual men become “He who will act infallibly as if he himself were part of the course of history or nature, has been found an expedient not only to liberate historical and natural forces, but to accelerate them to a speed they would never have reached if left to themselves." Individuals thus gain the privilege of becoming "more powerful than the most powerful forces generated by the actions and will of men." In 1984, then, it is just as Arendt outlines. The One Party will always be more powerful than any individual action or will of one man. At least according to the Party line that O'Brien explains to Winston, “power is collective. The individual has power only to the extent that he ceases to be an individual. Only free human beings are always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is destined to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can submit completely, totally, if he can escape his identity, if he can merge into the Party so as to be the Party, then he is omnipotent and immortal.” In a sortof cruel irony of doublethink, it is only by giving up any pretense of feeling emotions or acting personally that Winston ultimately steps into that intoxicating power. Only through submission and self-execution does Winston win his battle, end his suffering, and become omnipotent by joining the Party collective. So, in the end, the consequence for Oceania is that all victories belong to the Party, just as all emotions belong to the Party. Winston wins the battle to control his own mind, but only to join and strengthen the Party. The power of the Party does not consist only in making men suffer; it's about destroying them and recreating them in your own image, to absorb them better, become even more powerful and repeat the process. It is an endless cycle that has no other purpose to perpetuate so that the Party can exercise even more power. Winston enters the scene already with most of his soul cut away, already unable to fully express emotion. It was eventually rebuilt according to the Party's standard model. The consequence for society is that the only emotions left are those dictated by the Party's edict. I love Big Brother, not Julia, and in the end Winston does that too. The other feelings – hatred and fear – also belong to the Party. The Two Minutes of Hate is the only tolerable expression of passion, and can only be directed against those the Party considers enemies at this time: Eastasia, Eurasia, Goldstein, etc. Fear is fear of the Party. Even the most personal fears (in Winston's case, the fear of mice) translate into fear of the Party. O'Brien makes this ominous statement to Winston: “You will never again be capable of ordinary human feelings. Everything will be dead inside you. You will never again be capable of love, or friendship, or joy in life, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be empty. We will squeeze you and then fill you with ourselves." The breadth of the statement seems to address all of humanity: if ever there was a fully healthy human being, there certainly won't be any more. Preaching as the Party, O'Brien intones: “We control life… we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable” (216). Men become the clay with which the Party shapes exactly what it wants. The Party not only completes its mission by annihilating and restructuring Winston, but all of humanity to an infinite extent; the concept of a powerful and unalterable "human nature" is also corrected, with the Party lord of all power. Ultimately, non-believers would say, 1984 is just a story, nothing more. This infernal nonsense cannot exist in our world. However, these mechanisms of power and control are very real to our experience. In Arendt's real totalitarian world, as in Orwell's fictional one, there are no clear laws that “are designed to erect boundaries and establish channels of communication between men” (Arendt 411). In our possible future, no one can tell you which thought crosses some nebulous boundary or other. In Winston's world it's the same; although he may enjoy the Party's collective power and become one of its executioners, as we have already seen, any glimmer of an individual self must be prepared to be a sacrificed victim should the doctrine change or one's thoughts cross an undefined boundary. . His diary “is not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no more laws)”. This does not mean that there is anarchy; Although there is no rule of law, there is government based on power in Oceania. Oceania is governed by the only law in Arendt's analysis: the “law” of the unstoppable tide of “forces of nature or history” (Arendt 412). The same results that Arendt found in her independent analysis of modern totalitarianism apply,)