Room 101 and the end of Winston Smith, in 1984

Winston Smith does not die at the end of 1984. And that is exactly why the ending of George Orwell's book is more disturbing than any execution could be. He is captured, tortured, and then reprogrammed. What leaves the cell is no longer the same person who entered it.

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine the scenario: you believe, with complete certainty, that 2 plus 2 equals 4. Someone tells you that it is 5. You don't believe it. Then you will be tortured until you believe. Not until you pretend to believe. Until you truly believe.

What O'Brien Really Wants

Winston's torturer, O'Brien, isn't after a confession. Confession is easy to wrest from any body under enough pain. What he wants is more radical: for Winston to believe. In his own words, spoken to Winston during re-education:

We don't destroy the enemy just to kill him, we change him, we own him.

It is this phrase that separates 1984 from any ordinary history of oppression. The totalitarianism of the book is not content with controlling behavior. He needs to dominate the thought and the soul. Winston is only considered cured when, under torture and indoctrination, he begins to genuinely love Big Brother. It is the complete annulment of the self.

Julia's betrayal

In the moment of maximum despair, faced with his greatest personal fear, Winston surrenders Julia, the woman he loved, asking that the punishment fall on her instead of him. It is the moment in which the resistance he had been maintaining completely collapses. It's not an isolated character flaw. It's the exact point for which the entire system was designed: finding what each person most fears losing and using it as final leverage.

The question that remains is not whether Winston should have resisted more. It is whether anyone, placed there, would resist differently. What if we all have room 101 waiting to break us.

Today's Room 101

In Oceania, room 101 contained, in Winston's case, a cage with hungry rats. Today he doesn't need rats. There's the fear of being cancelled, the fear of being fired, the fear of being excluded from one's own group of friends. The 1984 Party made people fear each other, to the point where children denounced their own parents, not because they were forced, but because they genuinely believed it was the right thing to do.

The parallel requires no exaggeration. One word outside the consensus can cost you a job. An unpopular opinion can isolate someone from their own circle. And, like Winston, many people end up giving in, because sometimes loving what oppresses seems easier than resisting it.

The system wins when you love defeat

The scariest thing about the end of 1984 is not that Winston was defeated. It's just that he learned to love his own defeat. Death, for those who live under such a regime, would be a liberation. What the Party offers Winston is worse: a lifetime, shaped from within, in which his own mind no longer recognizes what it has lost.

The question that Orwell left has not aged. How far would you resist before loving what you hate? And if it came to that, would you notice?

Continue in the cluster: 1984, by Orwell: the warning that became routine · The Party's three slogans in 1984 · Reeducation camps, China and North Korea · Capitoline and Caravaggio Museums
Source class (YouTube): 1984, de George Orwell (NousCast)