Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [1010]

‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation – anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 1010

Note

O’Brien carries the internalized-panopticon logic to its epistemological endpoint: reality is inside the skull, and even the Party’s own desires defer to the Party. The soap-bubble image — self-restraint internalized by the priest of power — is chilling because it shows even O’Brien as governed.