Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [1133]

Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something – something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.” And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 1133

Note

Julia’s testimony about what betrayal actually is — the insistence that ‘at the time you do mean it’ — is the moral hinge of the chapter, naming the precise mechanism of the regime’s corruption of the self before we see Winston enact it on her.