With a single stroke of pen to paper, George Orwell committed the revolutionary act. Of the numerous terms to enter the cultural zeitgeist as a result of Orwell’s masterpiece 1984, “newspeak”, “thoughtcrime” and the like, perhaps none captures the imagination and wonder of readers quite like “doublethink”. The dangers of the thought process or rather unthought process become clear because Orwell’s lucid prose cements doublethink in minds, a permanent imprint on our psyche, the stray footprint in a freshly-poured mental sidewalk.
In a sense, doublethink offers a mental state similar to that of the revolutionary drug soma in another dystopian heavyweight, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley posits that soma allows for an escape from the facts, a distorted view of reality that replaces pain with pleasure, even if the adverse effects result in a societal haze, the masses willing participants in the spoon-fed rhetoric of their government. Orwell explains doublethink similarly as a form of reality-control, “all that is needed is a series of victories over yourself.” (Orwell, 16) For those willing participants, doublethink is less a conscious act and more a trained Pavlovian response to years of terrifying telescreen claptrap giving way to a succumbed public. Winston Smith experiences the diabolical dilemma that doublethink forces on its, I suppose, adherents by committing what Orwell deems to be the revolutionary act of opening a diary. Embroiled in the ever-present thoughtcrime of the decision, Winston is faced with a skirmish inside his own mind, the allure of placing pen to paper in a beautiful if altogether crude and illegible practice or forgetting his thoughts and emerging victorious over himself. But rather than the joyous militant victories playing in an endless loop on telescreens across Oceania, Winston is left simply with the horror of his act. Such is the danger of doublethink. Attempting to not only hold two opposing views in your mind simultaneously but partaking in the mental gymnastics necessary to believe either or both at any given time only serves to increase the risk of the wayward glances and aloof demeanors to which Orwell warns, for Oceania and other dystopian states.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn posits that Orwell drew from the Soviet intelligentsia of the 1930s and 1940s to gain the requisite historical knowledge to put a term to the concept. “And since that time this doublethink has been worked up to perfection and become a permanent part of our lives.” (Solzhenitsyn, 352) Solzhenitsyn deems the practice a failure by the esteemed minds of his fellow thinkers in academia, lamenting the idea of allowing oneself to hold and believe contradictory views simultaneously. At its most basic, it is simply a survival technique, the possibility of gaining one more day of relative freedom before being “vaporized” – in Orwellian parlance – overruling the desertion of one’s convictions. Solzhenitsyn explains that the Soviet intelligentsia would praise Stalin in public only to eschew his rhetoric privately which is doublethink in its purest – a switch turned on or off as the societal milieu dictates. And given the relative shoulder-shrug from Stalin and his henchmen to the Great Purge, to creating in the Newspeak vein “unpersons”, doublethink may have been the only feasible option for a society simply looking to survive.
Through his descriptions of the destroying of language through the “progress” of subsequent editions of Newspeak – clearly not doubleplusgood but I digress -, Orwell implies that the concept of doublethink is finite in scope. The official narrative from Orwell is that thoughtcrime will become impossible from a lack of requisite words to explain an opposing thought. But by extension, doublethink would also cease to exist all dissidents would vanish if a totalitarian movement ever reached completion. Whittaker Chambers referenced the idea in Witness, Ji Xianlin referenced the idea in The Cowshed and Orwell explores the idea in 1984 – once fear has pervaded conscious thought to the point of creating unthinking zombies compliant to the State at every move, free thought has ceased to exist.