Put it out of your mind.
They are helpless, like the animals.
Humanity is the Party.
The others are outside--irrelevant.'
'I don't care.
In the end they will beat you.
Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.'
'Do you see any evidence that that is happening?
Or any reason why it should?'
'No.
I believe it.
I KNOW that you will fail.
There is something in the universe--I don't know, some spirit, some principle--that you will never overcome.'
'Do you believe in God, Winston?'
'No.'
'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?'
'I don't know.
The spirit of Man.'
'And do you consider yourself a man?'
'Yes.'
'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.
Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.
Do you understand that you are ALONE?
You are outside history, you are non-existent.' His manner changed and he said more harshly: 'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?'
'Yes, I consider myself superior.'
O'Brien did not speak.
Two other voices were speaking.
After a moment Winston recognized one of them as his own.
It was a sound-track of the conversation he had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled himself in the Brotherhood.
He heard himself promising to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face.
O'Brien made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the demonstration was hardly worth making.
Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.
'Get up from that bed,' he said.
The bonds had loosened themselves.
Winston lowered himself to the floor and stood up unsteadily.
'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guardian of the human spirit.
You shall see yourself as you are.
Take off your clothes.'
Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together.
The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them.
He could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time.
Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes.
As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room.
He approached it, then stopped short.
An involuntary cry had broken out of him.
'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the mirror.
You shall see the side view as well.'
He had stopped because he was frightened.
A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him.
Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself.