Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [328]

But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 328

Note

Orwell’s key ethical sentence about the proles: the identical proposition held as logic versus held as faith. The shift from ‘put in words’ to ‘looked at human beings passing’ makes the gap between abstraction and encounter the real subject — the idea fails exactly at the point of contact with embodied reality.