what is “doublethink”?
Favorite Answer
For example:
You believe with all your heart that all men should be equal. At the same time, you believe with all your heart that your life is more important than others.
But yea, it’s like (s)he ^ said. A very convenient human tool. It helps us to view ourselves as being selfless and loving (thinking all men are equal) while we really aren’t (thinking our lives are more valuable than others’).
Origin
According to the novel, doublethink is:
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
Another quote from the novel, when Winston starts to think about doublethink as he exercises:
His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved using doublethink.
As Orwell explains in the book, the Party could not protect its iron grip on power without degrading its people and exposing them to constant propaganda. Yet, knowledge of this brutality and deception, even within the Party itself, could lead to disgusted collapse of the state from within. For this reason, Orwell’s idealized government used a complex system of “reality control”. Though the novel is most famous for its pervasive surveillance of daily life, reality control meant that the population (all of it, including the ruling elite) could be controlled and manipulated merely through the alteration of everyday language and thought. Newspeak was the method for controlling thought through language; doublethink was the method of controlling thought directly. This, rather than pervasive surveillance, is perhaps a more powerful and unsettling idea in the novel
Newspeak itself incorporated doublethink, as it contained many words that create assumed associations between contradictory meanings. That is especially true of words of fundamental importance, such as ‘good / evil’, ‘right / wrong’, ‘truth / falsehood’, and ‘justice / injustice’.
Doublethink was a form of trained, willful blindness to contradictions in a system of beliefs. Doublethink differed from ordinary hypocrisy in that the person who was “doublethinking” had to deliberately forget the contradiction between his two opposing beliefs — and then deliberately forget the fact that he had forgotten it. He then had to forget the forgetting of the forgetting, and so on; this process of intentional forgetting, once begun, continued indefinitely. Orwell describes this endless process as a kind of “controlled insanity.”
In the case of workers at the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth, it meant being able to falsify public records, and then believe in the new history which they themselves had written. (As revealed in Goldstein’s Book, the name of this Ministry is itself an example of doublethink: the Ministry is really concerned with lies.)
Additionally, doublethink’s self-deception allowed the Party to maintain both huge goals and realistic expectations: “If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.” Thus, each party member could be a credulous pawn, but would never lack relevant information. The party is both fanatical and well informed, and thus unlikely either to “ossify” or “grow soft” and collapse. Doublethink would avoid a “Killing the messenger” attitude that could disturb the Command structure. Doublethink thus functioned as a key tool of self-discipline for the Party, to complement the state-imposed discipline of propaganda and a police state. Together, these tools hid the government’s evil not only from the people, but also from the government itself, but without the confusion and misinformation associated with more primitive totalitarian regimes.
Doublethink was critical in allowing the Party to know what its true goals were without recoiling from them, avoiding the conflation of a regime’s egalitarian propaganda with its purpose.
Over the years since Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, the term doublethink has grown to be synonymous with relieving cognitive dissonance by simply ignoring the contradiction between two worldviews. Some schools of psychotherapy such as cognitive therapy encourage people to alter their own thoughts as a way of treating different psychological maladies. See cognitive distortions. In many ways, these recent developments represent the final triumph of the author, whose novel was not meant to predict either the future or a possible future, but to take the cognitive dissonance he saw in 1948 and show it in a futuristic setting.
Real-world doublethink
Some people think that doublethink is a concept unique to Nineteen Eighty-Four, and others think that it is a real psychological function. Among those who consider doublethink real, there are two conflicting definitions:
1. “believing contradictory beliefs for reasons of practicality, convenience, and/or emotional stability” or
2. “enjoying the malicious pleasure of the contrast between what one believes to be true and what one knows to be true.”
The second definition explains the affinity for opposites (e.g. war is peace, freedom is slavery, etc.), because opposites maximize the contrast with the truth. It also explains Newspeak words that consist of two contradictory definitions, especially among words of fundamental importance such as ‘truth / deception’, ‘good / evil’, etc, as such malicious doublethink creates an affinity for making such deceptions deeply ingrained in one’s thinking, and therefore very subtle. The main antagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘O’Brien’, made explicit note of such maliciously deceptive subtlety when he told Winston that (paraphrased) ‘in the future, the oppression will come in increasingly subtle forms’. That means that the second definition is closer to the doublethink of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the similarity with the first definition is also notable.
Some people also believe the dialectic to be an example of real-world doublethink.
