THE U N F U T U,REO F U TOP' A
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soon teaches
him
that even these few cubic centimeters can never belong
to him, only to the Party. What is so implacable about the despotisms
of the twentieth century is that they have abolished martyrdom.
If
all
through history the capacity and willingness to suffer for one's convic–
tions served at once as the test and demonstration of sincerity, valor, and
heroic resistance to evil, now even that capacity and willingness have
been rendered meaningless. In the prisons of the M.V.D. or the Ministry
of Love suffering has been converted into its opposite-into the ineluct–
able means of surrender. The victim crawls before his torturer, he
identifies himself with him and grows to love him. That is the ultimate
horror.
The dialectic of power is embodied in the figure of O'Brien, who
simultaneously recalls and refutes the ideas of Dostoevsky's Grand In- '
quisitor. For a long time we thought that the legend of the Grand
Inquisitor contained the innermost secrets of the power-mongering hu–
man mind. But no, modern experience has taught us that the last word
is by no means to be found in Dostoevsky. For even the author of
The
Brothers Karamazov,
who wrote that "man is a despot by nature and
. loves to be a torturer," was for all his crucial insights into evil never–
theless incapable of seeing the Grand Inquisitor as he really is. There
are elements of the idealistic rationalization of power in the ideology of
the Grand Inquisitor that we must overcome if we are to become fully
aware of what the politics of totalitarianism come to in the end.
Clearly, that is what Orwell has in mind in the scene when Smith,
while yielding more and more to O'Brien, voices the thoughts of the
Grand Inquisitor only to suffer further pangs of pain for his persistence
in error. Smith thinks that he will please O'Brien by explaining the
Party's limitless desire for power along Dostoevskyean lines: "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 stronger than
themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and hap–
piness, 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." This is a fair summary of the Grand Inquisitor's ideology.
O'Brien, however, has gone beyond even this last and most insidious ra–
tionalization of power. He forcibly instructs Smith in the plain truth
that "the Party seeks power for its own sake. We are not interested in
the good of others; we are interested solely in power.... Power is not
