The Mind Killer - The role of fear in George Orwell's 1984

The Mind Killer “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” — Frank Herbert, Dune. It is true; fear is a single force that can either strengthen or weaken a man. Fear has the potential to ruin oneself, leaving nothing left but the need to obey the fear itself. In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the government uses fear as a mechanism to control its citizens. The government uses fear to ensure obedience among all citizens, and in addition, prevents relationships from forming to guarantee that no one will have a greater “love” than that of the Party and of Big Brother. Furthermore, the government uses fear to break Winston’s and Julia’s love for each other, and determine their conformity to the Party and its value system. It is evident, that the role of fear helps emphasize the government's desire for uniformism, as it will help them fulfill their utopian vision. To begin with, the Party maintains a network of faceless and emotionless constructs, in order to establish contact and relationships with the citizenry. The terror inspired by these buildings and the nature of their construction, is to block any citizen from considering another way of living. Winston, while considering the various Ministries, notes that the government makes absolutely no attempt to encourage independent thinking; in fact, they are designed to crush individuality, The Ministry of Love was the really frightening [building]. There were no windows in it at all… it was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers where roomed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with joined trucheons (Orwell 6).

The world that the Party has created is one where citizens will only dare to think or act differently if they seek active revolution, to become martyrs, or both. Anyone who values self-preservations will stay quiet. The Ministry of Love, and its armoured barricade surrounding it, is used as a symbol to frighten individuals into what could happen to them if they do not stay quiet. The use of terror for conformity extends not only into actions, but to the human thought process as well. Fear is built in to the Party’s strategy by virtue of the fact that it is unpredictable and always accomplished without modern due process. This leaves the population not only certain of eventual punishment, but sure that this enforcement will realized, It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word (24).

Oceania’s social structure is based on the terror of an inevitable judgement being levelled, when ever one dares to contravene established guidelines in codes of conduct. The hope is not a reward for obedience but merely to avoid an unnamed punishment. In addition to the insurance of obedience, the Party’s use of fear deliberately extends to interfere with human relationships as a means of enforcing conformity. The Party understands that humans can only have one ultimate loyalty, or love. In order to guarantee that this is directed toward the Party, fear of non-Party relationships is cultivated. Any establishment of love between humans is dealt with by parading fear of the consequences. This is done to ensure that no relationship is held at higher value than between Party and Party members. This ends up poisoning what should have been the most joyous moments between Winston and his now-vanished wife, Katherine,
As soon as [Winston] touched [Katherine] she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength… She would lie there shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating, but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after awhile, horrible (70).

In a world such as this, sexual relations are pursued merely for prorogation of the species and furthering the Party’s own goals. Party members may not escape the fear of retribution, even in moments that should be detected to a loving couple. When in one of their private moments, Julia ruminates on the need for the Party to control human sexual instincts, and, by extension, relationships, ‘All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’ That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? (139-40).

The Party understands very well that, if left undirected, humans will form attachments to one another, and the Party, and its victory, will become a distant second subject. By using fear to intervene between two people, the Party is one step closer to making sure that its welfare is the only thing that matters. Lastly, fear is used to break what Winston and Julia have established. After they are caught, Winston is subjected at the Ministry of Love to tortures that play primarily on his fears. Specifically, he is threatened with rats, which form the basis for his greatest personal fears. The Party hopes that fear will be enough to break the love that Winston and Julia have forged,
He was shouting frantically, over and over. ‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’ (300).

The Party knew that Winston would never fully accept his position to the Party, and to Big Brother, if he still had a desire to be with Julia. Winston’s worst fear is used against him in order to make him feel that Julia is the cause of his punishment and that Big Brother is his saviour. Once Winston no longer loves Julia there is nothing more for him to fight for, only the ease of acceptance to fit the mould of the Party and its value system. The Party alters both Winston’s and Julia’s mind to make them feel like they betrayed each other out of their own will. This is done to ensure that they only hold a love for Big Brother and have the interests of the Party in mind, ‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly. ‘I betrayed you,’ he said… ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something, something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’… ‘And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer’ (305-06).

Winston’s and Julia’s relationship has been demolished though the impact of fear on their thoughts. The Party forced this upon them as they do not want their citizens acting and thinking for themselves. If Winston truly believes that he made his own choice to betray Julia, he would be more likely not to love her, rather then if the Party had just told him to do so. In short, as proven by the above evidence, the government uses fear in a verity of ways to force it’s citizens into a mould of uniformism. This is evident when the government uses fear to ensure obedience, control relationships, and to break Winston and Julia’s love for each other. In Frank Herbert’s quote about fear, he points out that overcoming fear is an important part of adulthood and building character. Overcoming this is also a vital part of individuality and self thought within our daily lives. However, in Orwell’s world, fear is used to control and diminish humans until they are nothing more then cogs in the Party’s endless war machine. Fear is no longer something for them to overcome but something to obey, something to be used against them and force them into the uniformity of the Party