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Doublethink is an integral concept in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, fervently believing both. Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903[1][2] – 21 January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. ...
A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia[1], kakotopia or anti-utopia) is a fictional society that is the antithesis of utopia. ...
This article is about the Orwell novel. ...
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.[1] | ” | 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.[2] | ” | 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. Soviet Propaganda Poster during the World War II. The text reads Red Army Fighter, SAVE US! Chinese propaganda poster from during the Cultural Revolution. ...
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwells novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. ...
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, wilful 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. In the book's notes, Orwell describes this endless process as a kind of "controlled insanity". Hypocrisy is the act of condemning another person, where the stated basis for the criticism is the breach of a rule which also applies to the critic. ...
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.) The Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue, in Newspeak) was one of the four ministries that govern Airstrip One, Oceania in George Orwells novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. ...
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism as featured in the 1984 film Goldsteins book, The Theory and Practice Of Oligarchical Collectivism, is a fictional book which is an important element in both the plot and the overall theme of George Orwells dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, first...
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. Shooting the messenger is a phrase describing the act of lashing out at the (blameless) bearer of bad news. ...
Discipline is any training intended to produce a specific character or pattern of behaviour, especially training that produces moral or mental development in a particular direction. ...
A police state is a political condition where the government maintains strict control over society, particularly through suspension of civil rights and often with the use of a force of secret police. ...
Forms of government Part of the Politics series Politics Portal This box: Totalitarianism is a term employed by political scientists, especially those in the field of comparative politics, to describe modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior. ...
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. Egalitarianism (derived from the French word égal, meaning equal or level) is the moral doctrine that people should be treated as equals, in some respect. ...
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,[citation needed] 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. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term which describes the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with ones beliefs. ...
Worldview is Chicago Public Radios daily international-affairs radio show, hosted by Jerome McDonnell. ...
Psychotherapy is an interpersonal, relational intervention used by trained psychotherapists to aid clients in problems of living. ...
Cognitive therapy or cognitive behaviour therapy is a kind of psychotherapy used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, phobias, and other forms of mental disorder. ...
Cognitive therapy and its variants traditionally identify ten cognitive distortions that maintain negative thinking and help to maintain negative emotions. ...
References - ^ Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, pp 35, 176-177
- ^ Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four.
See also Big Lie is a propaganda technique, defined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.[page # needed] // It is often erroneously claimed or implied Hitler had advocated...
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term which describes the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with ones beliefs. ...
Crimestop is a Newspeak term taken from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. ...
In classical philosophy, dialectic (Greek: διαλεκτική) is an exchange of propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) resulting in a synthesis of the opposing assertions, or at least a qualitative transformation in the direction of the dialogue. ...
Hypocrisy is the act of condemning another person, where the stated basis for the criticism is the breach of a rule which also applies to the critic. ...
In George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional language Newspeak attempts to influence thought by influencing the expressiveness of the English language. ...
One-Dimensional Man is a work by Herbert Marcuse, first published in 1964. ...
Syncretism consists of the attempt to reconcile disparate or contradictory beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. ...
In George Orwells dystopian novel 1984 the government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labeling disapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime or, in Newspeak, crimethink. In the book, Winston Smith, the main character, writes in his diary: He also...
Stephen Colbert announces that The WØRD of the night is truthiness, during the premiere episode of The Colbert Report. ...
The phrase two plus two make five (or 2 + 2 = 5) is sometimes used as a succinct and vivid representation of an illogical statement, especially one made and maintained to suit an ideological agenda. ...
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