Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [922]

‘But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston, again momentarily forgetting the dial. ‘It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’ … O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial. … ‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to re-learn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 922

Note

The overt statement of totalitarian epistemology — reality owned by a collective, immortal Party-mind rather than by perishable individual perception — directly extends the panoptic idea to the contents of consciousness: there is no private sense-data left to trust.