Winston Smith Human Nature

Winston Smith, an average and very human man in George Orwell’s 1984, struggles with the rules and opinions of Big Brother and those who work for him. Winston possesses many characteristics of human nature such as violence and rebellion, traits found to some degree in all the citizens of Oceania. The rebelliousness in Winston is brought out when he believes his rights and freedoms are being stripped from him. In the novel, Big Brother is an overarching figure who sees everything. He enforces an abundance of rules that create conformity and repression, but also obedience and harmony, in the citizens of Oceania. Big Brother’s encouragement of peace and unity is challenged by the human tendency to lean towards violence and because of that, Big

Brother and the Party adapt their manipulative tactics.
Winston is average in every way, including his significantly ordinary name.

He posses all the qualities of human nature which tend to challenge the ideas of Big Brother. When first introduced, Winston is described as having “a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party” (2). He appears to be an average worker of the Party. It is later revealed, however, that he is having doubts about the authenticity of the Party. He feels as though his freedoms are not available to him and this stirs a sense of rebellion and violence inside him. Because of this, multiple times in the novel Winston is shown to have a violent attitude towards other people. When Winston wants to sit by Julia, but another man waves him over to sit at a different table, “Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pickaxe right into the middle of [his face]” (99). Along with violence, Winston possesses another trait undesired by the Party, rebellion. Writing in a journal is Winston’s first steps towards rebellion. Although it is small, this is the spring towards his rebellious streak. He O’Brien preys on Winston’s rebelliousness and convinces him to join the fictitious “Brotherhood”, a supposed rebellion group. Winston possesses many of the negative humanity traits which the Party hopes to rid their population of, violent thoughts, rebellious ideas, and slightly naïve ideas. These traits make it significantly more

challenging for the Party and Big Brother to manipulate a person and the way they go about this brainwashing process is successful, but inhumane. In order to beat the unfavorable human nature traits out of Winston, they torture his humanity out of him. O’Brien beats and tortures Winston until he is only a shell of a man. O’Brien says to Winston, “you are rotting away; you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn round and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity” (243). O’Brien continues to torture him until he begs them to “do it to Julia! Not me! Julia!” and believes that “2+2=5” (256). This is done to completely suppress any amount of rebellion inside of Winston. O’Brien also asks him if he considers himself a man, to which Winston responds yes. O’Brien then tells him, “If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are nonexistent” (241). The Party takes out, or at least suppresses the humanity in each of its’ citizens. And eventually, at the end of the novel, Winston is also completely stripped of his humanity and can finally proclaim that, “He loved Big Brother” (266).
While for Winston, the Party needs to use extreme force to shape him the way they want, for many of the citizens it is much simpler to subdue their tendencies to lean towards war and conflict.

For some, like Parsons, they only need to put them before a tribunal for them to confess their sin and guilt. When Parsons and Winston meet in the Ministry of Love, Parsons admits that he said “down with Big Brother” and that when he goes in front of the tribunal he will say, “Thank you. Thank you for saving me before it was too late” (208). Parsons already believes that he has done something wrong and accepts that his little daughter was right to denounce him. For others, it is as simple as continuing to announce events of war that may or may not be real. In the beginning, “Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia” but “as Winston knew it well, it was only four years sing Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia” (30). Later in the story, on the sixth day of Hate Week, a speaker reverses his speech to claim that, “Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war will Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally” (160). While Winston knows that the constantly changing wars are not, in fact, all accurate and can change within minutes, the manipulated members of Oceania society do not. This tactic of keeping the brainwashed people entertained with updates from a perpetual war subdues their inclination towards war and violence. Another way

in which the Party quells their citizens’ impulse towards rebellion, is through what they call, “Hate Week”. The Party uses this as a psychological process to pursue the hate towards their enemy for a week before going back to normal. It consists of “the speeches, the shouthing, the singing, [and] the banners” of the citizens announcing their hate for whichever other superpower they are at war with (159). Winston states that the hate becomes so intense that, “if the crowd could have got their hands on the two thousand Eurasian war criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces” (159-60). This is a well thought out way of keeping the hate and violence the citizens feel at bay. The Party also conducts a Two Minutes Hate every day. While it varied from day to day, Winston says that Goldstein, a supposed traitor of the Party and of Big Brother, is always the subject of hate. These psychological events that take place allow the people of Oceania to release their hate, anger, and violence on the people that the Party wants them to. It stops them from beginning a rebellion against the Party itself and quells their desire to act out.
The Party knows that there are certain natural human traits that make it difficult to brainwash a person into believing Big Brother’s truths. For some people it takes minimum effort and all they need is the once in a while Hate Week or the daily Two Minutes Hate. For others like Winston, they need to break them down until all they have left is a shell of who they used to be. Once that has been achieved, the Party builds them back up as dutiful and loyal workers who support Big Brother. Support and loyalty, however, is not enough for the Party. To be complete, O’Brien states, “you must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him; you must love him” (252). So while humanity does tend to lean more towards war and conflict than they do peace and harmony, the Party finds ways to moderate and overcome these setbacks in their totalitarianism society and manipulate their citizens to follow and adore Big Brother.