Doublethink

One of the more profound realizations on the part of Eric Blair, who wrote under the pen name George Orwell, is first illustrated in this passage of his landmark dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it: in Newspeak, "doublethink."
[…]
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 into memory again 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 the use of doublethink.

The profoundest relevance of doublethink likely eludes most readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four. After all, it is such a plentiful, dense and multifaceted book. A wealth of original concepts, perspicacious analysis, and chiefly, effortless prose immerse the unsuspecting reader in the senses and thoughts of Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith. Arrested by the almost painful clarity and harsh reality feel of the storytelling and imagery, the reader may very easily be led astray from applying adequate attention to some of Orwell's most brilliant and important insights. (My own favorite piece of writing in the book which momentarily distracted me from its own implications is the marvelous passage which concludes: "But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.") Orwell's artistic mastery distracts from his content unless his readers read well — carefully, thoughtfully, repeatedly. Ironically this problem might have been avoided in a mediocre novel, although we cannot seriously wish that Orwell had sacrificed his own goals simply to compensate for others' failures of attention, and not only because that would deprive us of the masterpiece.

Evidence that in particular doublethink has received lax and insufficient attention from millions of Orwell's readers comes in the form of the unwitting neologism, "doublespeak." Somehow, perhaps because of the expression "double talk," readers have conflated Orwell's Newspeak with Orwell's doublethink to make doublespeak, a word which Orwell never used in Nineteen Eighty-Four, so doublethink comes down into common colloquy and oratory as the supposedly Orwellian doublespeak. But doublespeak is a mere offshoot in meaning from Newspeak, a mere subset of the abuse of language — disingenuous, manipulative, often internally contradictory meanings in politicized words and phrases. (Doublethink produces instances of doublespeak.) An understanding of doublespeak is useful, but the idea is not nearly as profound as doublethink, missing most of Orwell's subtle point.

Doublethink refers to resolving contradictions which (otherwise) cannot be resolved, by keeping at least two alternate versions of something in mind at once, remembering only the approved one in any circumstance. One does not experience cognitive dissonance unless one fails at proper doublethink, in which case raw discomfort, almost physical pain, may be experienced. Other psychologically important Orwellian Newspeak neologisms, such as crimestop, blackwhite, and goodthink, are contained within doublethink. From crimestop to blackwhite to goodthink, Orwell describes the process as more and more instinctive.

Orwell explains doublethink most explicitly here:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

In his extreme circumstance of secret rebellion against doublethink, Winston finds that it helps him retain a sense of his own sanity — given the exigency of resisting nearly the whole of apparent human belief — to use a notion of accessing objectivity, or keep safe a recognition of an objective reality:

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.

Here we see that an objective "true" perspective can serve as a useful model within a context, proving very useful indeed to Winston in going against the Party's "collective solipsism" — though we do not see evidence supporting Ayn Rand's assertion that objectivity exists as a universal, perfectly accessible ideal entirely independent of context and perspective. Indeed, doublethink describes an internal conflict within the mind; it is even possible to follow doublethink with two things which do not really conflict practically, merely because one consciously and unconsciously believes it proper.

The most important thing we can now do with Orwell's concept of doublethink is to apply it to our own subtle daily discomfort which leads to forgetting. It is difficult to contemplate the full extent of what goes on that we know should be changed, so we ignore even what we know. It is difficult to think of the extent of misery which is experienced in this world if not in our own lives; of the injustice, and of the misinformation and lies. It is especially difficult to even learn about most of it, for its sheer breadth and depth. The worst is the depth; to know that unbounded monstrosities are committed in the name of the established order and are nonetheless not even common topics of conversation, much less grounds for immediate rebellion against that order — that is painfully unbelievable. If a shocking number of these and a great many lesser but similar acts are the work of those in power over us directly and indirectly, it is difficult to continue to see the situation as evidence shows it: that much of the worst is done by those who are supposed the best, and that in value "the high" is really often the low, and that the things on which people expend so much energy and attention are really unimportant.

Thousands of affirmations that one is wrong in this unpopular opinion are given every day, ranging from outright declarations that all is well, that "the best" among us are really deserving, that the powerful are as they should be, and that whatever gains mass attention must therefore be important, to more numerous slight hints which nonetheless nudge us toward the same conclusions. It is difficult to know and always remember. Therefore it is easier to ignore the contradictions between what one has learned by experience and what one is meant to think, rationalizing as necessary and improvising justification as it seems required. Instead of the effort of trying to remember and its consequence of discomfort, perhaps a painful somberness, even a feeling of being jarred to half-craziness by knowing terrible facts which should not ever have happened to become facts to be knowable — oh, it is so much easier to forget what one does know, at least enough of the time to render our responses occasional, symbolic, and ineffectual. Yes, it is easier to receive the comfort of more content company, those who have also reconciled, or those who have always remained ignorant of seeing our world as unacceptable. That is the reward for doublethink.

We — the rememberers of forbidden things — must remember with all the other forbidden things this secret piece of knowledge: we slink into doublethink far more unconsciously than consciously. We do not necessarily get a clear choice. There may not be a point when we even become aware of the "choice" which an outsider to ourselves might be able to see we have "made." It is more likely simply unconscious forgetting, our relatively more unaware nervous processes adjusting to seek pleasure or comfort instead of pain or discomfort. With practice, this forgetting becomes second nature, and if it cannot offer us the really aware peaks and valleys of happiness possible in this modern world of ours only for those who become dissidents and rebels of some sort, then at least we have secured a foggy contentment, making livable the seemingly unbearable. No one is immune to this. No one is above this. Everyone appears to have the basic capacity for doublethink; as Orwell pointed out, even the ability to really understand doublethink requires its use. Nor are the most dominant themselves simply above doublethink because they take substantial advantage of it in others; as Orwell relates here regarding war, they are the most possessed by doublethink:

It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.

Even the most carefully resistive probably succumb to doublethink, to some slight extent, and in some ways. What can we do about it? Our only weapons against our own weaker instincts are these: one, to harden ourselves to become stronger in the face of mental discomfort, two, to find compatriots and companions who support us instead of those crowds who encourage conformity, and three, to actively try to remain aware of things we might forget — to fight for conscious appraisal instead of quasi-consciousness, shocking ourselves into looking from a different perspective when necessary. These are our three weapons against doublethink.

previously published on January 24, 2002
page re-created on May 18, 2006
page updated May 18, 2006 3:57 EST

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