We induct on $n$ to prove that in a party with $n$ people, there must be at least $(n-3)$ people who know everyone else. (Clearly this is achievable by having everyone know everyone else except three people $A, B, C$ , who do not know each other.)
Base case: $n = 4$ is obvious.
Inductive step: Suppose in a party with $k$ people (with $k \ge 4$ ), at least $(k-3)$ people know everyone else. Consider a party with $(k+1)$ people. Take $k$ of the people (leaving another person, $A$ , out) and apply the inductive step to conclude that at least $(k-3)$ people know everyone else in the $k$ -person group, $G$ .
Now suppose that everyone in the group $G$ knows each other. Then take $3$ of these people and $A$ to deduce that $A$ knows a person $B \in G$ , which means $B$ knows everyone else. Then apply the inductive step on the remaining $k$ people (excluding $B$ ) to find $(k-3)$ people out of them that know everyone else (including $B$ , of course). Then these $(k-3)$ people and $B$ , which enumerate $(k-2)$ people, know everyone else.
Suppose that there exist two people $B, C \in G$ who do not know each other. Because $k-3 \ge 1$ , there exist at least one person in $G$ , person $D$ , who knows everyone else in $G$ . Now, take $A, B, C, D$ and observe that because $B, C$ do not know each other, either $A$ or $D$ knows everyone else of $A, B, C, D$ (by the problem condition), so in particular $A$ and $D$ know each other. Then apply the inductive step on the remaining $k$ people (excluding $D$ ) to find $(k-3)$ people out of them that know everyone else (including $D$ , of course). Then these $(k-3)$ people and $D$ , which enumerate $(k-2)$ people, know everyone else.
This completes the inductive step and thus the proof of this stronger result, which easily implies that at least $1982 - 3 = \boxed{1979}$ people know everyone else.