1984 Group
Question:
What is doublethink in 1984?
Answers:
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Posted by darkheaven1016 on Saturday April 11, 2009 at 10:46 PM
double think is when you think twice about something that you know for a fact isnt true. for example big brother does not want his people to question anything that "he" put out for his them to see meaning if you have something green and he tells you that it is yellow you better not " doublethink" what he said or else you would be vaporized. in otherwords what he says goes and no one could say, or tell him otherwise
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eNotes Editor
Posted by sagesource on Saturday April 11, 2009 at 11:45 PMDoublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time about the same question, remaining untroubled by the contradiction and expressing one opinion or the other as the convenience of the Party requires it. It is defined in Part II, Chapter IX of 1984, in the extract from "the Book" written supposedly by the Party heretic Goldstein. It enables Party members to constantly deceive themselves and others while at the same time remaining convinced that everything they say -- even when it is contradictory -- is the exact truth. For instance, the Party defies every principle that originally defined socialism, but still maintains that it upholds the only true socialism. Doublethink allows Party members to be fighting one enemy on Monday and another on Tuesday, but to believe and proclaim that their enemy of Tuesday has been their enemy not only on Monday but for all time -- and to switch back again on Wednesday without any qualms. It is an enormously flexible system of rearranging reality to avoid contradictions, whose main weakness is the tendency it has to detach its practitioners from concrete reality, "the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion."
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Posted by desoray08 on Sunday April 12, 2009 at 8:45 PM
doublethink - Reality Control. The power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them.
Here is how Winston Smith described doublethink in the novel:
"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, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was 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. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.'


