George Orwell, in 1984:
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 Minutes 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. Crimestop means 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 inimical to Ingsoc, 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 one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately 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 keyword 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 of 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 that 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 alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten…
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and 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 can ever have 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 the 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 all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, “reality control.” In Newspeak it is called doublethink, though 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 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.
Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, 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, with the lie 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.
Ultimately, doublethink has nothing to do with thinking. Thoughts only furnish raw collective value judgments with words to say, and these words bulk out the emotions with language. But the words are only a vehicle for emotions, a signal system for producing the collective emotional judgment.
What matters is having the correct attitude, judgment and emotional reactions, and thought is applied case by case to make these attitude, judgment and emotional reactions happen.
The thoughts, however, do not need to have any particular relation with any other thoughts. Each line of thought is an isolated means to a common end.
The possibility of interrelations between thoughts (reason), or thoughtful responses to one’s own observations and experiences (empiricism), or deep thoughtful connections among individual persons (dialogue) actually causing any change in one’s attitude, judgment and emotional reactions is unthinkable. That is simply not what believing, spectating and chattering is for.
Crimestop and doublethink ensure that the requirements of politically correct collective attitudes, judgments and emotional reactions drive thought, but that thought never exerts a reciprocal influence.
Incidentally, Orwell’s direct inspiration for 1984 was James Burnham’s 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, which presented both Nazism and Stalinism as two prototypical examples of a post-capitalist order, where a third class — a managerial class of managers and experts — interjects itself between the capitalists and the proletariat and take control of the increasingly complex technological means of production.
Burnham worried that the Allies, especially the United States, had not yet fully transitioned from capitalism (which, in his view, ended with the Great Depression) to the new managerial order, and that when it did, it would adopt some form of totalitarianism with some new managerial class ideology. He saw a future where rival managerial superstates dominated the world and reached a violent form of stasis. Orwell’s book tried to develop a speculative future fictional world where this had happened.
I’d like to see someone rewrite 1984 with an updated vision of technology. 1984 is so steampunk it is hard to extract the story and its projections from its own time. A 1984 with a global internet, mobile technologies, AI, robotic automation, active citizen co-creation of the totalitarian state, post-structuralist and post-colonial intellectual technologies, international governing bodies, international corporations with more power than most nations, and so on, would bring the story up to date and more relatable to a contemporary reader. What would an international Ingsoc look like? How would Big Brother present itself, and how would it engage individuals? How would it justify itself? How would it speak of the past? How would its citizens talk to one another? What would its ideology look like, and what doublethink themes might occupy the obedient minds of Party members?