the feeling that
they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no
capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows.
Except that English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official
language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held
together by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true
that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at
first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro
movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or
even in the pre-industrial age. Between the two branches of the Party there
is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that
weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of
the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians,
in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted
among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply
marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs
is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is
not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting
power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of
keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to
recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the
crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a
great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had
been trained to fight against something called 'class privilege' assumed
that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the
continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to
reflect that hereditary arist