PARTISAN REVIEW
a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
safeguard a revolution; one makes a 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 do you begin to
understand me?" And how does one human being assert his power over
another human being? By making him suffer, of course. For "obedience
is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is
obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and
humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them
together again in new shapes of your own choosing." That, precisely, is
the lesson the West must learn if it is to comprehend the meaning
of Communism. Otherwise we shall go on playing Winston Smith, fall–
ing sooner or later into the hands of the O'Briens of the East, who will
break our bones until we scream with love for Big Brother.
But there is one aspect of the psychology of power in which Dosto–
evsky's insight strikes me as being more viable than Orwell's strict real–
ism. It seems to me that Orwell fails to distinguish, in the behavior
of
O'Brien, between psychological and objective truth. Undoubtedly it is
O'Brien, rather than Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, who reveals the real
nature of total power; yet that does not settle the question of O'Brien's
personal psychology, the question, that is, of his ability to live with
this naked truth as his sole support; nor is it conceivable that the party–
elite to which he belongs could live with this truth for very long. Evil,
far more than good, is in need of the pseudo-religious justifications so
readily provided by the ideologies of world-salvation and compulsory
happiness, ideologies generated both by the Left and the Right. Power
is its own end, to be sure, but even the Grand Inquisitors are compelled,
now as, always, to believe in the fiction that their power is a means to
some other end, gratifyingly noble and supernal. Though O'Brien's
realism is wholly convincing in social and political terms, its motivation
in the psychological economy of the novel remains unclear.
Another aspect of Orwell's dreadful Utopia that might be called
into question is the role he attributes to the proletariat, a role that
puts it ouside politics. In Oceania the workers, known as the Proles, are
assigned to the task of production, deprived of all political rights, but un–
like the Party members, are otherwise left alone and even permitted to
lead private lives in accordance with their own choice. That is an idea
that appears to me to run contrary to the basic tendencies of totalitarian–
ism. All societies of our epoch, whether authoritarian or democratic
in
structure, are mass-societies; and an authoritarian state built on the
foundations of a mass-society could scarcely afford the luxury of allowing
