This is from the end of “1984” where O’Brien is torturing Winston and brainwashing him, which gives him an opportunity to explain how things really work.
The primary aim of modern warfare… is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods…when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations… …But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction–indeed, in some sense was the destruction–of a hierarchical society…wealth would confer no distinction… the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
