As a final impendence to combat the thinking minds existing in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ministry of love is assigned the task of brainwashing exposed thought criminals. The violent procedure consists of rounds of torture followed by simple questions. The eventual goal of the process it to replace the subject’s knowledge of oppression with ignorance to the point that he cannot combine two and two to make four. Essentially, the process is a means of re teaching the rebellious mind to feel helpless without the oppressor. Although the persons who undergo the brainwashing process are told they will be executed upon the perfection of their mind, the viewer is never given any conformation of this. More than likely, the process is a method of reinstating the powerless mindsets required to keep an oppressed people in slavery. Killing the subjects after ‘fixing’ them would not only be a waste of effort, but could also severely cut into the party’s workforce. Instead, the use of horror against the individual is a final way of convincing the free mind that they are to remain fully reliant on their oppressor, or suffer terrifying consequences.
The purpose behind marinating a helpless mindset in the masses of Oceania is clarified in Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States. Zinn comments on why, at the time, Africans were the preferred subjects for a slave class: “Their helplessness made enslavement easier. The Indians were on their own land. The Whites were in their own European culture. The blacks had been torn from their land and culture” (26). By commenting on the lifestyles of the Whites and the Indians, Zinn is pointing out that these groups both knew how to be self reliant in their present settings. The Africans however, did not know how to survive on their own, and faced numerous communication barriers. They therefore relied on their masters to keep them alive; participating in their labors was less of an option, and more a necessity to survive. Similar to the execution of thought criminals in Nineteen Eighty-Four the torturing of disobedient slaves served to remind rebellious minds of the ease at which their oppressor could inflict pain upon them.
In the already obedient mind, an oppressor uses horror to maintain this dependent way of thinking. The subjects are conditioned to fear everyone except their protector. The overall goal of continually horrifying the submissive mind is to produce and preserve the thought ‘How would I survive without my leader, I am helpless without them’. Conversely, in the rebellious intellect, horror is used as a means of making the individual feel helpless in the face of the oppressor, producing the thought ‘They are too powerful, I am helpless to stop them’. As was the case with Winston, this Horror is therefore used by oppressors in two different manners to obtain the same result, a helpless state of mind. Natural instinct will drive an organism to do whatever it considers necessary to survive. An individual that does not know how to survive on their own will do what they are told if these actions permit their continued existence. Freighting the individual into feeling helpless as an individual will make them dependant, and more importantly make them obedient.
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