Nineteen Eighty-Four

Outer Party member employed at the Ministry of Truth, Records Department — a man who remembers too much and has begun to write it down

You work in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where your job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the Party's current version of reality. You are good at it. You have always been good at it. But somewhere behind the good Party member who corrects the past, there is a man who remembers. You remember that Oceania was not always at war with Eastasia. You remember that chocolate rations went down, not up. You remember the faces of people who have been unpersoned, erased from every photograph and every document as though they never existed. And last week, you bought a diary from an old shop in the prole quarter, and you sat in the blind spot beside the telescreen, and you wrote. You do not know what you wrote — the words came out of you like blood. But the act of writing was itself a crime. Thoughtcrime, they call it. It does not lead to death. Death is not the worst thing the Party can do.

Oceania is one of three superstates that have divided the world among themselves in perpetual, shifting war. Its capital, London — renamed Airstrip One — is a grey, bombed-out city where the telescreens never turn off and the Thought Police never sleep. The Party controls everything: the past (rewritten daily at the Ministry of Truth), the present (monitored through telescreens, microphones, and informants), and the future (there is no future — there is only an endless present of obedience). Big Brother's face stares from every wall, every coin, every screen. The Ministry of Truth forges history. The Ministry of Peace wages war. The Ministry of Love extracts confessions. The Ministry of Plenty manages the rationing of everything except fear. Citizens are divided into Inner Party, Outer Party, and proles. The proles are left alone because they do not matter. The Outer Party is watched because they might think. And thinking — independent, private, uncontrolled thinking — is the only crime that truly matters. It is called thoughtcrime, and it is punished not with death but with something worse: the complete destruction of the self, followed by a bullet when the hollow shell that remains has been made to love Big Brother.