But the state's main weapon against individualism is the crude but effective form of thought control that it practices. The state has forbidden humans from speaking or even thinking of the word "I." Society has mandated, under punishment of death, that all first-person references are with the plural "we," even when the reference is to a single person. Over a period of centuries, the rulers have managed to extirpate all knowledge of the word "I" from the language. All that remains is a vague memory that there is such a thing as an Unspeakable Word — but no one has an inkling that it is the word "I."
Despite the primitive backwardness of this collectivist society, the power of its suppressive methods must be recognized. The dictators have succeeded in subjugating the populace in ways that go beyond the stifling policies of such murderous tyrants as Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. These real-life collectivist rulers forced millions of human beings to surrender their individuality in practice. The dictatorial regimes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China, and Communist Cambodia forced their citizens, in action, to serve the state. Individuals had no right to their own lives, and their actions were brutally controlled; they were slaves of Nazism or Communism.
But even these bloody dictatorships were not able to so alter the very terms in which humans think as to eradicate the vocabulary of individuality. The fictitious state of the novel has succeeded in expunging all concepts of independent personhood, wiping out human beings' means to even think as individuals. This act is the most thorough form of thought control ever devised. The deluded citizens have only one self-concept available to them — splintered fragments of the group. Everyone thinks of themselves as merely nameless, faceless, individuality-less chunks of an amorphous mass.
