Doublethink

There is a special concept in the novel 1984 by George Orwell, called doublethink. It’s the idea that you can simultaneously accept two contradictory statements as truth. Below is an excerpt:

“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.”

In my opinion, to doublethink is also to have a working spirit. Doublethink means you think you’re worthless, but you think you’re worth fighting for. You might be down in the dumps about yourself, but there’s the simple fact that you don’t want to feel that way anymore. You might be depressed, but part of you (the part that feels small but is in fact, a significantly large and powerful fighter) finds reasons to keep going. You hang onto that belief, even if believing seems futile.

You might be mistreated, and think that you deserve the mistreatment. But probably you also believe that no one should be mistreated in the same way. You might believe that everybody deserves kindness, yet reward yourself none.

A famous example of doublethink is 2 + 2 = 5. The philosopher René Descartes once said that truth is self-evident and exists only in our minds. According to his worldview, our society’s shared belief of “2 + 2 = 4” is immaterial in concrete reality, no matter how much we believe it to be real.

The danger in this, George Orwell argued, is that the ruling parties of the world could make you believe their reality over competing realities. Worst of all, who was to say otherwise? Who could deny that 2 + 2 = 5, if reality existed only in our minds, and our minds could be controlled by those who ruled?

The way I see it, we can live with our multiple realities, where truth is whatever is convenient for us to believe. Or we can ground our truths in evidence. Why do we deserve better? Because we have made, and can continue to make, the people around us happy. Because despite what we sometimes choose to ignore, there are people that like and accept us.

Despite our competing realities, we know and believe that we deserve love, respect, and leniency in the right moments. So the next time you’re full of self-doubt, take a step back and look at things more objectively.

It’s like that old saying, if someone put your actions on the front page of a newspaper, would you be ashamed or proud? Similarly, if you listened to your worst self-criticism coming out of your friend’s or loved one’s mouth, would you still believe in what you’re saying?