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Winston is still at his diary. After flagellating himself over his little dalliance with that elderly, toothless prostitute, he is feeling political and is dreaming a bit about revolution again, like a disgruntled undergraduate. He writes, “If there is hope it lies in the proles.”
After all, he reasons, they constitute 85% of the population and they are not creatures of the Party. If they could somehow rise up, they would easily tear the Party apart and crush it. He reflects on their position:
It seems that the proles cannot get truly worked up over anything that really matters. Besides, the Thought Police do keep an eye on the Proles, and when they see one who looks like he could be dangerous to the social order, they exterminate the pest. Winston realizes that there is not much hope there and he recalls the Party slogan: “Proles and animals are free.”
After all, he reasons, they constitute 85% of the population and they are not creatures of the Party. If they could somehow rise up, they would easily tear the Party apart and crush it. He reflects on their position:
In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds.Perhaps this is not such promising stuff for changing the world after all. His own personal experiences with these proles confirm the hopelessness of the situation. One time, when he was down in the prole quarters, he hears an uproar, and he even wonders if this could be the beginning of the revolution that he has been hungering for, but then he discovers that it is just a mob of housewives fighting over a limited supply of sauce pans on sale.
It seems that the proles cannot get truly worked up over anything that really matters. Besides, the Thought Police do keep an eye on the Proles, and when they see one who looks like he could be dangerous to the social order, they exterminate the pest. Winston realizes that there is not much hope there and he recalls the Party slogan: “Proles and animals are free.”
