jaylar
Continuing his denouement of the ‘Brotherhood’ of what they could expect in joining it, O’Brien states:
“You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. “
Clearly O’Brien is not trying to recruit them with images of success or hope; what he says is done to discourage them, yet they do not grasp it.
And making his point stronger:
“There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years.”
Obviously, the pointlessness of this endeavour can not be emphasised any greater than O’Brien is doing. And if they do not comprehend what he has said, he makes it clearer:
” At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.’
