down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs
is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is
not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting
power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of
keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to
recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat. In the
crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body did a
great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist, who had
been trained to fight against something called 'class privilege' assumed
that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the
continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to
reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas
adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted
for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not
father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and
a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group
is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is
not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who
wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure
remains always the same.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that
characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the
Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being
pe