Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [107]

Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms – one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 107

Note

The compressed paradox — stability depends more on devoted drudges than on the Thought Police — quietly extends the panoptic thesis: enforcement has become internalized in ordinary believers who need no watcher. The ‘drudges on whom… the stability of the Party depended’ is a formulation that does the argument’s work in one clause.