Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [292]

Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today forty per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been fifteen per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only a hundred and sixty per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been three hundred – and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 292

Note

‘A single equation with two unknowns’ crystallizes the epistemological condition—with no independent benchmark, all Party statistics are unfalsifiable. The collapsing certainty cascades from history books to the very existence of top hats.