Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [697]

‘You understand,’ he said, ‘that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which you will learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that we are fighting for, and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 697

Note

O’Brien’s double negative epistemology—knowledge withheld, uncertainty for the subject, the terror of fighting while kept in the dark—is a mirror inversion of the panopticon’s mechanics: the same asymmetry of knowledge that the Party wields over Winston is reproduced inside the Brotherhood.