"Thou Art" Victor Luo

The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not’.
The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt’.
Our command is ‘Thou art’.
(Orwell 255)

Recent clarifications from the Ministry of Love have once again affirmed the Party’s most profound achievement: the complete unification of the citizen’s inner being with the will of Oceania. Earlier civilizations, limited by primitive understanding, sought only to restrict or compel behavior. Their commands touched the surface of life. The Party, by contrast, reaches deeper. It shapes not merely what a citizen does, but what a citizen is.

Where the failed civilizations of earlier centuries issued orders to be obeyed, the Party orders simply that truth be embodied. Through the steady work of the Ministries and the unwavering leadership of Big Brother, the people of Oceania have been liberated from the burden of constructing their own identities. The Party provides not instruction but definition. It does not ask the citizen to act; it constitutes the citizen.

To be Oceanian is not a matter of choice or belief. It is a state of being. The Party is your thoughts, your memories, your reality. In this, the Party has surpassed all earlier forms of governance; it has conquered the final frontier of dissent; it has eliminated the final illusion of separateness—the notion of a private self distinct from the collective mind.

The individual is unstable and incomplete. Private thought breeds contradiction; private identity breeds error. A self that attempts to exist outside the Party is ontologically incorrect, a flaw that the Party gently re-educates and corrects. They will not exist. They do not exist.

Remember:You are the Party and the Party is You.