Question

Excerpts from We
Yevgeny Zamyatin
1924

Why does D-503 consider life in the previous society to have been "actually wholesale murder" (Paragraph 20)? Cite evidence in your answer.

Answer 1

D‑503 means that the old, pre‑One‑State world killed people on a mass scale not only by open war but by the everyday social conditions created by private life and “freedom.” In paragraph 20 he links wholesale murder to the chaos of private interests: jealousy, theft, selfishness, hatred, poverty, disease and violence that arise when people act for their own appetites instead of under rational law. He contrasts that world’s spite, quarrels and “private” cruelties with the One State’s order, arguing that the cumulative effect of those private, unregulated actions was equivalent to mass killing.

Evidence from paragraph 20 supporting this:
- D‑503 explicitly calls the previous existence “actually wholesale murder,” tying the phrase to his list of social evils (people starving, hating, quarrelling, deceiving and injuring one another).
- He blames the old system’s allowance of private life and individual impulses for producing continual violence and suffering, which the One State’s planned, “mathematical” life is meant to eliminate.

(If you’d like, paste paragraph 20 and I’ll quote the exact lines that show these points.)