Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [610]

If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he realised how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 610

Note

The central paradox of the chapter: understanding is vulnerability, and incomprehension is a kind of sanity. ‘By lack of understanding they remained sane’ — the swallowed doctrine ‘left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.’ The metabolic image makes orthodoxy harmless to the truly ignorant.