Regarding the Power of Ritual & Emotional Manipulation
excerpts from Orwell's 1984 (1948)
Part One, Chapter I
(Context: Winston describes his participation in the “Two Minutes Hate” ritual.)
“It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the center of the hall, opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate….”
“The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience….”
“Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions….”
“Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room….the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically….He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be....”
“In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen….The dark haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out “Swine! Swine! Swine” and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen….In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.”