Nineteen Eighty-Four (Literature)/Fridge

Fridge Horror

• Fridge horror abounds when you read back the passages that Winston reads from Theory and Practices of Oligarchical Collectivism with the knowledge that O'Brien collaborated with other Party intellectuals in writing it; whilst it mostly dispenses with the Party lies and doublethink and tells the truth about the perpetual war, there is nothing in it that actually CRITICISES the Party at all.
• Try as you might, you can't find a way for the side of "Truth" to defeat The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
  • Think about the very concept of The Party itself. It is an all-seeing, all-knowing, incomprehensible entity that can essentially bend the reality of those it controls. Any naysayers or free thinkers? It WILL find them, it WILL rape their very souls and WILL bend them to its will. It likely will never die, and could likely claim that it had been around since the dawn of eternity. Sounds more like an Eldritch Abomination than a government.
    • Of course. Nineteen Eighty-Four manages to feel like a Cosmic Horror Story (even worse than whatever H.P. Lovecraft wrote), without the "Cosmic Horror"
    • Humanity creates its own 'cosmic horror'. The punchline to 1984 is that Humans Are Cthulhu.
  • If memory serves, though, didn't they specifically say that the system only works if the three Parties are always in constant war with one another? Isn't the end of the book elating for the main character because his Party has finally won the war? What happens when a government like this one collapses in on itself?
  • Sure you can- time is working against the Party. Much as they like to think themselves omnipotent, they are quite mortal, and the laws of physics are not on their side. If nothing else, they'll eventually collapse under their own weight, because they show a complete and utter disregard for reality, so they'll deplete their resources, destroy their capacity to replace those resources, and then delude themselves into believing everything is fine because they declare that everything is fine. Meanwhile, the entire system collapses.
    • The limited timespan of the Party becomes even more emphatic when you factor in the intention behind Newspeak: crippling the thought-power of the future generations through desctruction of the possibilities of creating thoughts against the Party or about thoughts against the Party. Without any known countermeasures, the future Inner Party won't have any idea on how to uphold the Party and Oceania. If Eurasia and/or Eastasia avoid the pitfall in their similar governing bodies, Oceania will be ripe for the taking.
• Quite a big horror moment comes when you realise that Orwell created the world of Oceania by extrapolating the real world rise of Nazism and Stalinism. This rooting in the real world is absolutely terrifying.

Fridge Logic

• One particularly famous example: Oceania is dominated by the Americas, with the British Isles being little more than a convenient Airstrip One for attacking Eurasia. So why would the Oceanians base their whole society on "Ingsoc" - English Socialism?
  • This of course leads to all sorts of Wild Mass Guessing about the true extent of Oceania...
  • Maybe it has a different name in every country of Oceania? "Libertysoc" in the US, "Neomateship" in Australia, "Modern Bolivarianism" in South America, etc.
  • Or it could be a reference to the Anglosphere (considering that the full implementation of Newspeak will eliminate the concept of Ingsoc--the name itself implies a definition in comparison to something else--we can expect generic references to 'the Party' to prevail over time).