Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism or the English Socialist Party) is the political ideology of the totalitariangovernment of Oceania in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It is clear that "English socialism" (Ingsoc) emerged within the Socialist Party.
However, the origins of Ingsoc have been obscured, as the Party continually rewrites history.
Oceania appears to have emerged as a formal political union of the United States and the countries of the British Commonwealth, which later annexed the remainder of the Americas and all of Southern Africa.
Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein led the Party to power in Oceania after a revolution of some kind. After the Party achieved control of Oceania, Ingsoc became the official governing ideology and other political beliefs were increasingly marginalized. Goldstein and Big Brother later became enemies, and differed in their interpretation of Ingsoc.
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, describes the Party’s ideology as anOligarchical Collectivism, which “rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it does so in the name of Socialism”. It is noteworthy that, in the terms of the book, this ideology would be a form of doublethink.
Big Brother personifies the Inner Party, as the ubiquitous face constantly depicted in posters and the telescreen. Thus, Big Brother is constantly watching. Ingsoc demands the complete submission – mental, moral and physical – of the people, and will torture to achieve it (seeRoom 101). Ingsoc is a masterfully complex system of psychological control that compels confession to imagined crimes and the forgetting of rebellious thought in order to love Big Brother and the Party over oneself. The purpose of Ingsoc is political control, power per se; glibly, O'Brien explains to Smith:
“ The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.