1984 - Planet eBook

tories which in fact are largely unihabited and unexplored:but the balance of power always remains roughly even, andthe territory which forms the heartland of each super-statealways remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploitedpeoples round the Equator is not really necessary tothe world’s economy. They add nothing to the wealth of theworld, since whatever they produce is used for purposes ofwar, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a betterposition in which to wage another war. By their labourthe slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfareto be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structureof world society, and the process by which it maintains itself,would not be essentially different.The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordancewith the principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneouslyrecognized and not recognized by the directingbrains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of themachine without raising the general standard of living.Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem ofwhat to do with the surplus of consumption goods has beenlatent in industrial society. At present, when few human beingseven have enough to eat, this problem is obviously noturgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificialprocesses of destruction had been at work. The worldof today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared withthe world that existed before 1914, and still more so if comparedwith the imaginary future to which the people of thatperiod looked forward. In the early twentieth century, thevision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly,