Doublethink

This blog post was co-written with Devon Horner Bourassa.

(http://www.blogger.com/profile/01934303794302410388) 

Doublethink is the goal of the Party. To fully believe in everything Big Brother says one must use doublethink.  Doublethink is a form of reality control, a series of victories over your own memory.  If the Party says that something does not exist or has not happened, then that is the truth. Doublethink is “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.”  (p. 37) To understand the word "doublethink", one must use doublethink.

The purpose of doublethink is control.   Doublethink could be expressed as an act of escapism in its compliance, as it is giving in to the ideas of the Party without losing your own.  It would be safer to accept the Party's lies, but easier to easier to simply overwrite the truth. One goal of doublethink is in the Ministry of Truth: when workers falsify documents they are using doublethink to convince themselves that the documents had been wrong and must be corrected. All Party members train themselves at doublethink in case they come across potentially incriminating things like the photo Winston found, where they would convince themselves that it was false.

          Doublethink creates reality. The Party is never wrong; the facts are simply misreported. It is Winston's job to fix the "misreported" facts as the views of the Party change.  To do this job, it would be best to be very skilled at doublethink, so as to block out the past as soon as one was done altering it.  It allows the general population to believe in the Party’s success even while they experience deprivation.  If the Party goes back on its word, such as with the chocolate rations, the general population will quickly accept the “new truth” even though they are being manipulated.

The ministry's names themselves involve doublethink. The Ministry of Truth is concerned with the falsifying and modifying of the past, the Ministry of Peace with war, the Ministry of Love with torture and hatred, and the Ministry of Plenty with rations and scarcity. The Party slogans also contain doublethink, as they are expressing complete opposites to be the same (War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength). Any one of these slogans would be regarded as insanity in todays society, because of the blatant contradiction.

We believe that in the future (of 1984), doublethink will have become completely natural to everyone as they had been raised thinking that way (ex. Parsons’ children growing up in the Spies). They would not have known a time with any other form of government. When Newspeak is the only language of Oceania, doublethink will become less necessary as expressing an unorthodox opinion would be very difficult given the limited vocabulary available.

Doublethink as a way of life is a very scary prospect. One of the most treasured human traits is the ability to tell what is truth. To have someone else tell us to forsake our memories would drive many to insanity. It is duckthink.