Doublethink

Doublethink is an integral concept in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and fervently believing both.

According to the novel, doublethink is:

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 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.

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. In the case of Winston Smith, Orwell's protagonist, it meant being able to work at the Ministry of Truth deleting uncomfortable facts from public records, and then believing in the new history which he himself had written.

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" (page 177). 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. "Killing the messenger" disturbed the command-and-control of the Nazi (and later the Iraqi) militaries, but would not present itself in such a system. 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. Previous dictatorships made the mistake of conflating their egalitarian propaganda with their purpose; 1984 demonstrated that the next generation of dictatorship would not be so naïve.

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.

Real-world doublethink

There is debate whether doublethink is a concept unique to Nineteen Eighty-Four, or 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."

Both of the above can be observed to exist.

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 enemy character 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.

Doublethink in other literature

A form of doublethink could be said to occur in Frank Herbert's novel Dune and in Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea novel, The Farthest Shore. In Dune, the prophet Paul-Muad'Dib comments that "kindness and cruelty are the same thing," a statement often interpreted to mean that what is kind to one person is cruel to another. Similarly, Ged the Archmage Sparrowhawk says to Prince Lebannen in The Farthest Shore, "Life and Death are the same thing... neither separated nor mixed." Readers of both books have thought of these statements as intending to suggest that death, kindness, cruelty, and life are essentially the movement of energy from an area of higher concentration to one of lower concentration. Some such thinkers have added that what is an area of high concentration for one form of energy is an area of low concentration for another, illustrating the subjective nature of reality.

References

Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London.

External links

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Real-world doublethink

Doublethink in other literature

References

See also

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