Orwell
"A party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minute Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak,
crimestop. Crimestopmeans the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are mimical to Insoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over ones mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests untimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The key word here is
blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction to the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to
believe that black is white, and more, to
know that black is white, and to forget one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as
doublethink."
"The mutability of the past is the central tenent of Igsoc. Past events, it is argues, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and the in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version
is the past, and no different past has ever existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to
remember that events happened in a desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to
forget that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It
is learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by those who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, "reality control". In Newspeak it is called
doublethink, although
doublethink comprises much else as well.
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 conscious, or it would not be carried out with significant precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence guilt.
Doublethink lies at the very heart of Insoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. 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, until the lie is always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately, it is by means of
doublethink that the Party has been able - and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years - to arrest the course of history."
"It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of
doublethink are those who invented
doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration is of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude toward the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters that will treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightly more favored workers whom we call "the proles" are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World conquest is believed most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking together of opposites - knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism - is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society."
Created on 07/03/2012 08:14 PM by admin
Updated on 08/12/2012 08:03 PM by admin
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