Quote 2
Who
controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present
controls the past.
This Party slogan appears twice in the
novel, once in Book One, Chapter III, when Winston is thinking about
the Party’s control of history and memory, and once in Book Three,
Chapter II, when Winston, now a prisoner in the Ministry of Love,
talks to O’Brien about the nature of the past. The slogan is an
important example of the Party’s technique of using false history
to break down the psychological independence of its subjects. Control
of the past ensures control of the future, because the past can
be treated essentially as a set of conditions that justify or encourage
future goals: if the past was idyllic, then people will act to re-create
it; if the past was nightmarish, then people will act to prevent
such circumstances from recurring. The Party creates a past that
was a time of misery and slavery from which it claims to have liberated
the human race, thus compelling people to work toward the Party’s
goals.
The Party has complete political power in the present,
enabling it to control the way in which its subjects think about
and interpret the past: every history book reflects Party ideology,
and individuals are forbidden from keeping mementos of their own
pasts, such as photographs and documents. As a result, the citizens
of Oceania have a very short, fuzzy memory, and are willing to believe
anything that the Party tells them. In the second appearance of
this quote, O’Brien tells Winston that the past has no concrete
existence and that it is real only in the minds of human beings.
O’Brien is essentially arguing that because the Party’s version
of the past is what people believe, that past, though it has no
basis in real events, has become the truth.
