Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.
•••
There have been many references to the “Orwellian” nature of recent national events. Although most of us have at least a glimmer of what that term means, it might help to dig deeper to understand its source and why it’s so appropriate to describe the country today.
George Orwell was the pen name of British writer Eric Blair, who once said that “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” His novella “Animal Farm” had the unforgettable line “some animals are more equal than others.” His novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” published in 1949, was positively chilling: the Thought Police, the Hate Week military parades, the signs that “Big Brother is watching you” all over the landscape, and the daily Two Minutes Hate that every citizen was expected to demonstrate against the designated enemy of the state.
And then there was Newspeak, the purpose of which, as Orwell explained in the appendix to the novel, was “to make all other modes of thought impossible.” Newspeak invented new words, eliminated undesirable words and reshaped the meaning of the words that remained. Prime examples were the slogans of the Party plastered on the towering Ministry of Truth: “WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”
When I read “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in the late ’70s, it sent a shiver down my spine, but some of the events from the novel seemed a bit far-fetched. However, in recent years we’ve heard that climate change is a hoax, that illegal immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets and that schoolchildren are receiving surgery to change their gender. Just within the past few months, we’ve been told that Ukraine started the war with Russia, that the Jan. 6 rioters didn’t assault first responders, and that racism today is a figment of our imagination except when it hurts the majority ethnic group. Up is down, black is white. War is peace.
How can anyone absorb into their system of beliefs information that contradicts what they could see with their own eyes? Research from social psychologists has shown that cognitive dissonance disrupts perception, learning, decisionmaking and even social change. Well, the authorities in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” had a solution to this problem, using a Newspeak word that is the opposite of cognitive dissonance: “doublethink.”
In the novel, Orwell talked about “blackwhite,” a related Newspeak word: “[T]his 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 … doublethink.” In a separate essay, Orwell drove the point home: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
