In Part III of 1984, fear is the number one tactic used by the Party to get Winston to comply with their “conversion therapy”, in a sense. Fear is also a number one tactic of totalitarian regimes and movements to coerce people into following with their ideals and teachings. Hannah Arendt gives several points about concentration camps and labor camps, in her book Origins of Totalitarianism, that were used to “cure” people of their inability to see the benefit of this system for the greater good. She makes the point that people were forever changed after going to and returning from the camps:
“…when the very thing that must be realized is that the psyche can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man”
Excerpt From: Hannah Arendt. “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” (page 577 in Apple Books)
The same word is used in 1984 when O’Brien was torturing Winston and after the fact Winston recollects on it:
” ‘What happens to you here is forever,’ O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover. Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out” (page 259).
He is beaten down and tortured to comply with their false teachings and admit to their false accusations against him. O’Brien even took it as far as to wipe Winston’s brain for him to relearn the doctored history they were teaching the rest of the world. Specifically, 2+2=5 and that Oceania was always at war with Eastasia and not Eurasia. Winston finally complied and adopted these notions of false information but he would not falter on his love and devotion toward Julia. For days and months this was continued and still Winston expressed his love for Julia; that they should torture and beat him and not her. It was not until Winston was forced to go to Room 101, when he was confronted with his worst fear, that he finally turned on Julia and said they should inflict the ravenous rats upon her and not him (page 253).
The whole idea of the totalitarian government was not truly convince people that this was the right way of government but to force them to follow their established understanding of the world and history through fear and betrayal. Winston feared the rats to such a degree that he was willing to turn them over onto the woman he loved to spare himself from the pain. This cowardice and betrayal grades on a human soul and turns them into nothing but flesh and blood that no one cares about and seeks alcohol as an outlet from the pain.