According to the novel, 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, 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..
”
“
The
power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting
both of them....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.
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