what almost
frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats!
Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that
mattered?
He wrote:

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after
they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of
the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the
proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously
oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had
been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal
mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at
the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink,
the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in
subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In
reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to
know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other
activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned
loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life
that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were
bo