Doublethink Lives

Orwell’s concept of doublethink in his work of genius 1984 exists today.

dou·ble·think
ˈdəbəlˌTHiNGk/
noun
noun: doublethink; noun: double-think

the acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination.

From Steven Astley comes this example:

“I was listening to a news broadcast on the radio on Friday when two news stories caught my attention.

The first concerned the US government’s response to ISIS. The article discussed the possibility of air strikes against ISIS in Syria. I believe it was a White House spokesman who stated that ‘we’ were going to conduct airstrikes against ISIS and we ‘aren’t going to let something like international borders get in the way.’

“The second concerned the Russian convoy that crossed into Ukraine. A Pentagon spokesman this time was castigating Russia for having the audacity to cross an international border using humanitarian aid as the reason.

“This was a single news broadcast and these were consecutive news stories. When I hear such examples of the government’s blatant hypocrisy going unquestioned by the majority, I realize that people truly are capable of doublethink.”

The web definition is quite good in linking doublethink to political indoctrination. The example suggests that many people in the media are themselves so indoctrinated that they accept the system without question and unthinkingly, presenting contradictions without any thought. It suggests that the greater the efforts of the authorities and media to justify their actions and disparage those of others who are doing the same kinds of things, the greater will be the incidence of doublethink in news reports. To those who are analyzing the reports and not merely accepting them, the political world will seem more crazy. This is because doublethink mimics some abnormalities of mental behavior by expressing and living with contradictions.

For the record, I believe that human beings cannot live without some contradictions. At a minimum, our ideas are not sharp enough and our knowledge not complete enough that we can avoid some contradictions. They might be illusory if we could get to the bottom of things better. But these kinds of contradictions are not doublethink. Doublethink is described by Orwell as follows. It is quite a different matter than deep philosophical contradictions that arise from human imperfection. He writes

“To know and to not 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 is 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.”

Share

9:54 am on September 15, 2014