Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 7

If there is hope, wrote Bradley, it lies in the losers.

If there was hope, it must lie in the losers, because only there in those swarming masses, 85 percent of the population of Amerussia, could the force to destroy the Corporate ever be generated. The Corporate could not be overthrown from within. It held too much power over its employees. Internal enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Deep State existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, a change of tone, at most an occasional whispered word. But the losers, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, of how the cause of all their misery came from the very figurehead they revered, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose to, they could blow the Corporate to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it?

Bradley remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It was a formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went reverberating on like the echo of a bell. His heart leapt. It's started! he thought. A riot! The trumpenproletariat are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred people crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. One of the stalls had been selling toilet paper. They were thin flimsy rolls, but toilet paper of any kind was always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful ones, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their gains while dozens of others clamored around the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favoritism and of having more rolls somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, got hold of the same batch and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the plastic tore and the paper spilled onto the ground. Bradley watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it 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 Corporate textbooks. The Corporate claimed, of course, to have liberated the losers from bondage. Thousands of clips showed The Ronald goadingly calling them losers, as he rose to power on their anger. Before the Takeover they had been hideously oppressed by the elites, they had been unemployed and tricked into drug addiction, they had been forced to work with illegal immigrants, their children had no hope of any life other than unemployed drudgery. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of #altfactthink, the Corporate taught that losers were natural inferiors to be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. The Ronald's speeches always held an undercurrent of mocking contempt—he called them "losers" and they loved him for it.

In reality very little was known about the losers. 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 Alberta, they reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them: a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at sixteen, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at eighteen, they were middle-aged at forty, they died, for the most part, at seventy. Dull servile work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, movies, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them under control was not difficult. A few agents of the TRUTH Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Corporate. It was not desirable that the losers should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or appalling healthcare and other basic services. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of losers did not even have faceboogle in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in Harbor One, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, dealers in hard drugs, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the losers themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The intricate sexual scoring of the Corporate was not imposed upon them. Sexual unorthodoxy often went unpunished. Religious worship was encouraged, so long as it was heavily focused on The Ronald. They were beneath suspicion. As the Corporate slogan put it: 'Losers and animals are free.'