Podcast: lecture by Bruno Waterfield recorded at the Battle of ideas 2016

Across Europe in the 1930s a battle opened as totalitarians of

the right and left sought power over man’s soul. This was not merely an

exercise in traditional tyranny or authoritarianism but an attempt to

break down informal relationships, to assault sovereignty and

independence at the level of the nation and the individual. To destroy

those boundaries of freedom that make us human, even to attack the mind

itself. In Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual sets

out the totalitarian project. “The real power, the power we have to

fight for night and day, is not power over things but over men,” he

tells Winston Smith. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and

putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing.”