Goals
What are the goals of each social class?
Low wants equality
Middle wants to overthrow the High
The High wants to keep their money and status
If the lower classes are able to overthrow the highest class, The middle class rises to the high class and the lower class stays the lower class and a mix of the both become the new middle class
What is totalitarianism?
Totalitarianism is a largely dictatorial system of government that demands submission of the people to the government.
Why did machines threaten the ruling class?
If machines provided abundance, hierarchies would dissolve. The ruling class would lose their power since people would no longer depend on them.
What did the Party do to prevent equality?
They redirected machine production into war to waste resources, ensuring scarcity remained and the masses stayed poor and dependent.
How do telescreens tie into totalitarianism?
Telescreens tie into totalitarianism by having people be constantly surveilled, forcing their subservience to the government, the Inner Party.
How did machines relate to socialism’s original goal?
Machines could have made socialism real by producing enough wealth to keep everyone on the same level, destroying class divisions. They represented the foundation for equality.
How did equality become technically possible?
Machines took the place of the lower classes work
Because Machines could do the lower class work there was no need to give people jobs varying in skill because the machines could already do it
So, everyone would be given different jobs, but they would all be valued the same
How did Ingsoc twist the role of machines?
Instead of liberating people, machines became tools of surveillance, control, and war, ensuring inequality was permanent and that the Party could rule forever.
Who are the new aristocracy of totalitarianism?
The Inner Party, those that control pretty much everything, from the government to people’s lives as a whole (<2% of population).