Ingsoc
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In George Orwell's dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ingsoc is the ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania. Ingsoc is Newspeak for "English Socialism".
Ingsoc apparently came to dominance during a communist or more likely socialist revolution, but as The Party is constantly rewriting history it is difficult to tell precisely how it came about. Emmanuel Goldstein's book-within-the-book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism describes the actual ideology of the Party as "oligarchical collectivism", stating that Ingsoc "rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism", a practice Orwell dealt with in Animal Farm.
Ingsoc is personified by Big Brother, an omnipresent Stalin-like figure constantly depicted on posters and the telescreen. Like Ingsoc itself, Big Brother is constantly watching. Ingsoc demands complete submission to it, and uses torture to achieve that end (see Room 101). In fact, Ingsoc has mastered a complex system of psychological tools and methods to make people not only confess imagined crimes and forget any thoughts of rebellion, but to actually love Ingsoc itself.
Under Ingsoc, society is composed of three levels:
- The Inner Party that makes policy decisions and runs the government, which is referred to as simply The Party.
- The Outer Party that works in the state jobs and is the middle class of the society. "Members are allowed no vices other than cigarettes and Victory Gin." The Outer Party is also under the most scrutiny, being constantly monitored by two-way telescreens and other implements of surveillance.
- The Proles that are the lower class, the rabble the Inner Party keeps happy and sedate with beer, gambling, sports, casual sex and prolefeed ("rubbishy texts"). The proles are named for the proletariat, the term Marx used for the working class. The Proles make up 85% of the population of Airstrip One (the new name for the country of England).
Eastasia and Eurasia, the two other superstates that came to be formed and ruled by ideology in a similar manner as Oceania, each have their own equivalents to Ingsoc. Eurasia, formed from Russia's conquest of Europe, names its philosophy Neo-Bolshevism, and the Chinese name for the ideology that rules Eastasia is commonly translated as Death-Worship, or more precisely Obliteration of the Self. A fact known to all three ruling Inner Parties, yet constantly denied by means of doublethink, is that all three ideologies are virtually indistinguishable in their tenets. This denial of similarity between them and vilification by each of the other two is what allows the eternal war between the three superstates to continue, without which the lower classes would lack a focus for the hatred and triumph that are part of the Party's psychological means of domination.
What is left unexplained in the novel is how Ingsoc and its ruling cabal, the Inner Party, were able to establish and maintain control over Britain and its Commonwealth, Ireland, and the whole of the Americas in a historically short period (roughly 30 years based on the internal chronology of the novel). In light of the wide differences in language, culture, religion and history existing among the various peoples in these regions, this premise might be considered the most significant weakness in the novel's plot. On the other hand, given the rapid spread of communism through the date of the novel's composition, it might well have seemed entirely plausible at the time.
See also
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | |
|---|---|
| By George Orwell | |
| Characters | Winston Smith | Julia | O'Brien | Big Brother | Emmanuel Goldstein |
| Places | Oceania | Eastasia | Eurasia | Airstrip One | Room 101 |
| Classes | Inner Party | Outer Party | Proles |
| Ministries | Love | Peace | Plenty | Truth |
| Concepts | Ingsoc | Newspeak | Doublethink | Goodthink | Crimestop Two plus two | Thoughtcrime | Ownlife | Prolefeed |
| Miscellaneous | Thought Police | Telescreen | Memory hole | The Book | Newspeak words |
| Other media | Film | TV programme | Opera | 1985 | Me and the Big Guy |
External links
- [Flag-Burning: a Detriment to the Oceanian Way], a satire by Alexander S. Peak
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