We: Record 5 Summary & Analysis

The next day, D-503 again expresses discontentment with his records. He’s been addressing his readers too familiarly, as though they were his friend R-13, not alien creatures with no inside knowledge of the One State’s intricacies. Because everything about the One State is a given to D-503, it’s hard for him to regard it from an outsider’s unfamiliar perspective; still, he resolves to try to do so.

D-503 begins his history of the One State by transcribing an ancient adage: “Love and hunger are the masters of the world.” He explains that his ancestors conquered Hunger—and gained control of the entire world—through the Two-Hundred-Year War, a battle waged between the city and the country. Thirty-five years before the One State’s founding, D-503’s ancestors invented petroleum-based food, which allowed for 0.2 percent of earth’s population to survive. While the survival rate was small, it allowed for the One State’s population to live in complete bliss, so D-503 sees it as ethically defendable.

D-503 reasons that bliss and envy are “the numerator and the denominator of the fraction known as happiness.” Thus, the One State had to wipe out envy so that the sacrifices incurred during the war would be worth it. After, the One State set out to destroy love. In the One State, thus, there is no monogamy: all ciphers have a right to other ciphers for sexual relations. The State studies its citizens’ hormone levels at the Bureau of Sex, determining how often and when ciphers may be granted Sex Days. On one’s assigned Sex Day, they make a request to “make use of” a particular cipher, and the government gives them a pink ticket. Such as system disallows for jealousy or love to develop and peace reigns. The One State’s system makes the Ancients’ “innumerable silly tragedies” an impossibility, so ciphers are better able to live lives of maximized productivity and efficiency.

D-503 reveals that as he was recording the progress of civilization he felt “some kind of four-pawed X, inside” him. This could’ve been the result of unconsciously spotting his “shaggy” hands perched on the desk before him. He hates his hands because they remind him of his ancestors, the pre-One State barbaric Ancients. He wants to cross out this observation, but leaves it in his records, as he wants them to be as exact and precise as possible. Defensively, D-503 passes off his “X” feeling as a fluke.