progress only happens when its products can
in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful
arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are
cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in
matters of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage
-- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The
two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to
extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There
are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One
is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking,
and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few
seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research
still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is
either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real
ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones
of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy,
hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist
concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to
the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and
in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the