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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel,
what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference.
Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever
heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And
yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed
all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They
were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What
mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture,
an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in
itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this
condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they
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