Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [498]

It paid, she said; it was camouflage. If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones. She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition-work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party members. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 498

Note

Julia’s maxim ‘If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones’ is a precise counterpart to the panoptic logic — visible conformity as a strategy to buy invisible transgression, treating surveillance as a rule-system to be gamed rather than an omnipresence.