sheet of
paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that
mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time
robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the
grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained
from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished,
and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted
clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two
generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were
not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties
which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships,
and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a
dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to
him, had remained in this condition. They were notloyal to a party or a
country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in
his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an i
.
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