Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [699]

‘You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages on walls, recognising one another by code-words or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognising one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a very few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organisation in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. … We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police, there is no other way.’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 699

Note

Orwell dismantles the romantic conspiratorial romance (cellars, codewords, hand-signals) in favor of a purely ideational underground—‘nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.’ The formulation ‘We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.’ converts the members into pure carriers of a future idea, an elegant doctrinal statement of deferred meaning.