Ignorance is Strength Essay

Richard Pho

Mr. George

World Literature Honors

21 October 2010

Ignorance is Strength

            In Orwell’s 1984 dystopia, he utilizes a series of paradoxes to explain the key concepts that governs Oceania’s citizens.  A paradox is a statement that self-contradicts itself to demonstrate a certain truth.  One of Oceania’s slogans, Ignorance is Strength, reveals the complexity of Oceania.  Although this slogan paradoxically articulates true insanity, the Party encapsulates the purpose of keeping a hierarchical society under certain regulations by eliminating all types of oppositions into maintaining a ruling upper class.

            Oceania’s hierarchical society preserves a division of power, keeping the lower class immobile to rise in supremacy and strength.  Divided by the classes’ wealth, a tension propagates between the middle and lower classes to rise and overthrow the ruling upper class: “Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims” (Orwell 202).  The lower class aspires to create a classless society in order to achieve absolute equality.  A cyclic struggle for power, where the middle and upper classes oscillate with power, leaves the lower class to never succeed.  The lower class’ inability to move up the social ladder demonstrates a lack of achievement and a stable power between the other two classes.  Preventing the lower class to advance in social status easily pinpoints this class as the prey of the upper class.  This occurs due to the Party’s unethical usage of Socialism. 

            Big Brother initiates an improper usage of Socialism on the citizens of Oceania, keeping the upper class in power.  Socialism is the concept of everyone distributing a sense of equality.  Big Brother twists this concept by making Oceania a collective socialistic society, where the sense of equality is only shared by a small few, namely the upper class: “Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything and disposes of the products as it thinks it fit” (206).  The Party intentionally controls society by controlling everyone.  They administer the lower class by keeping them ignorant.  The Party has complete control over the Proles’ minds because the Party has the power to justify any belief to be true.  Due to a lack of privilege, the Proles’ inability to get educated makes them ignorant.

            Eliminating the essentials to intelligence fundamentally preserves the Proles’ ignorance.  Since the majority of the population constitutes for Proles, if a majority of them were educated, they could clearly overthrow the Party: “They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly, but … the level of popular education is actually declining” (210).  Education is the key concept that will change the ideal that the Low will never succeed.  The Ministry of Truth controls the education system, therefore controlling the set of facts and their validity.  Thus, the Party annihilates this privilege in order to remain in power.  The concept of fear also creates the lower class’ ignorance, giving the Party their strength.

            Ignorance allows the Party to stay in control, manipulating the Proles from achieving a commendable social status.  In Oceania, Big Brother initiates key concepts such as Newspeak, mutability of the past, and doublethink in order to restrict the Proles’ sense of rebellion.  Newspeak, as the vernacular of Oceania, limits the Proles’ range of expressing their emotions, such as their abhorrence to the Party.  Mutability of the past allows the Party to completely alter people’s thoughts to correspond with the Party’s.  Looking at doublethink, “it means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary” (212).  The Party not only changes the meaning of these two concepts, but also mocks the Proles’ intelligence by making them believe the contradictory.  In this case, ignorance is used to achieve self power.  With the power of keeping everyone ignorant, the Party is able to prevent rebellion.

            Rebellion persists as a fear of the controlling Party, but the ideal of ignorance prevents rebellion.  The lower class cannot rebel due to their lack of intelligence: “The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed” (207).  Even though the Proles make up a majority of Oceania’s population, they will not speak up for themselves because of the consequences they will face.  Instead, the Proles remain quiet and obedient, allowing the Party to keep their citizens supervised.  The Party manages to keep the Proles mindless and naïve, therefore creating no confusion to what is said to them.  Within the Party, a lack of weakness is to be found.  The fact that Big Brother is always right prevents a rebellion because the Proles cannot rebel against the ideal figure when they are limited in vernacular.  The Party outlines their hypothetical world as reality through chaos and fear.  The Party simply suppresses the Proles with any truth created.

            This paradox purposely constrains Oceania into creating an insanity that is the truth.  In Oceania, truth is solely any idea that seems satisfactory at the moment.  The fact that Oceania is a dystopia allows “reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.  In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken” (216).  The Party’s intelligence for creating a society ignorant enough to believe such insanity is absolute genius.   The Party has created the ideal society where they do not need to worry about any idea because if the idea is fallacious, they have the power to reform an idea into a truth.  The citizens do not care what is considered right or wrong, solely what Big Brother believes is correct.  The fact that contradictions are considered correct demonstrates how ignorance is strength.

            Ignorance is strength contradictorily makes sense in Oceania because it allows the manipulation of facts to create a hierarchical society of different levels of power.  The division of power creates a tension that is cyclically never to be resolved.  The upper class imposes a false sense of Socialism in order to intentionally keep the power for themselves.  Ignorance manipulates the Proles’ minds into believing any belief to be true.  With that said, rebellion is not an option because the regulations and fear from the Party prevent a direct opposition.  Finally, the overall paradox is complete insanity, yet the Proles manage to obey.  With social status, wealth, and fear, the concept of ignorance is powerful enough to control a collective group of people.