Power, Absolute

Power is both a very simple and very complex idea. It is instinctual and intellectual at the same time. Human history is built around the use and abuse of power: in the case of the party, quite literally. The party claims socialism, but their government and ideology is built around absolute power. Power can be defined as the ability to exercise control over the external, whether this means objects or other people. The party attempts to control every aspect of life, from work to free time to the past to speech to ideas to thought itself. They seem to have achieved absolute power. But can absolute power really exist? Even when all ideas are streamlined and controlled, there are still small things that slip through the cracks, and other things that are completely beyond control. Even if complete control of peoples thoughts and emotions was achieved, their dreams would still remain beyond control. Even if the physical world could be manipulated in every detail, the laws of nature and physics still could not be bent. It would therefore seem impossible to achieve absolute power. But the Party, and only the Party, can come extremely close, if not all the way. This is for a very special reason.
The Party has achieved absolute power, not by a magical ability to change reality however they wish, but by the technique of doublethink. They can hold two contradictory ideas as true simultaneously. They know that they have no control over physics or the larger universe, but at the same time they know they have control over everything. As O'Brien says, "There is nothing we cannot do. Invisibility, levitation- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish too, because the Party does not wish it...We make the laws of nature,"'(277). Through doublethink, they create there own reality in which their power is absolute. If they live completely in this reality, and they have the power to bring other humans into this reality, than they do have absolute power. The real world doesn't matter, because it doesn't affect them. At the moment when it touches them, it ceases to be the real world and becomes part of their reality. Through doublethink, absolute power becomes a possibility. Their power is also everlasting as it is separate from reality. It cannot be broken as long as those under it's thrall do not realize the separation between the reality proposed by the Party and the reality laid down by the universe. Even if the Party is somehow overthrown, for a brief time it will have gone on forever, because that was the reality they created for themselves.