if possible. What was more
important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable
because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way
she put it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel
happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like
that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this
marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.
If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big
Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest
of their bloody rot?'
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion
between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the
hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be
kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and
using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party,
and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick
with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be
abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their
children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the