1984: Conditioned Thought and Thought Crime
1. [April Altieri and Leah Fitzgerald ]In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs,
hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving
flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did
not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered. Behind Winston’s back
the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the
overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and
transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper,
would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether
you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police
plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody
all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did
live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard,
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
2. [Katherine Lesperance and Geoffrey Keegan] Thought crime is death; it does not entail death; it is
death. He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless.
Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from
writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether
he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him
just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had
never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they
called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully
for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. It was always at night — the
arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your
shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed . . . He went back to the
table, dipped his pen, and wrote: To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men
are different from one another and do not live alone -- to a time when truth exists and what is done
cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother,
from the age of doublethink -- greetings! He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it
was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive
step. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote: Thoughtcrime does not
entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
1984: Newspeak
3. [Pier Suarez and Caitlin Rennell] Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been
devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as
yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. . . . It
was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we
should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending
to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The
version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a
provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be
suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the
Dictionary, that we are concerned here. The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of
expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other
modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all
and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc
— should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on
words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle
expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express,
while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by
indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly
by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of
unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings
whatever . . . Newspeak was designed not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of
thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words
down to a minimum. 4. In addition, any word — this again applied in principle to every word in the
language — could be negatived by adding the affix UN-, or could be strengthened by the affix PLUS-, or,
for still greater emphasis, DOUBLEPLUS-. Thus, for example, UNCOLD meant ‘warm’, while PLUSCOLD
and DOUBLEPLUSCOLD meant, respectively, ‘very cold’ and ‘superlatively cold’. It was also possible, as in
present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ANTE-,
POST-, UP-, DOWN-, etc. By such methods it was found possible to bring about an enormous diminution
of vocabulary.
4. [Eric Loiselle and Vanessa Marsocci] 'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice
to overcome the noise. 'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.' He had brightened up
immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in
one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak
without shouting. 'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language
into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've
finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job
is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them,
every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single
word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.' . . . 'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of
words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there
are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the
synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there
for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word
contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word
like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just
as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or
again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague
useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning,
or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in
the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and
badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that,
Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought.
5. [Melissa Day and Wylie Carlisle] Syme said, 'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,'
he said almost sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those
pieces that you write in The Times occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your
heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You
don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in
the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?' Winston did know that, of course. He smiled,
sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another
fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on: 'Don't you
see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the
end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no
words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be
expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its
subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition,
we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after
you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of
consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or
excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline,
reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete
when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of
mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not
a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'
1984: Doublethink
6. [Andrew Dooley and Ahuva Barros] At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania
was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever
admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston
well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with
Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his
memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war
with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and
it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. The
frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his
shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their
bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back
muscles)—the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could
thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, IT NEVER
HAPPENED—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He,
Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago.
But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be
annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same
tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan,
‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature
alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It
was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.
‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.
7. [Ashley Baxter and Sarah Gwee] DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which
direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by
the exercise of DOUBLETHINK he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be
conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it
would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. DOUBLETHINK lies at the very heart of Ingsoc,
since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose
that goes with complete honesty. 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. Ultimately it is by
means of DOUBLETHINK that the Party has been able — and may, for all we know, continue to be able
for thousands of years — to arrest the course of history.
8. [Danyelle Mulin and Monica Rodriguez] The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the
principles of DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing
brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard
of living . . . CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the
contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete
as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is
omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the
party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment
of facts. The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this 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 the system of thought
which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in
Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK. Even the names of the four
Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts.
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with
torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they
result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in DOUBLETHINK. For it is only by
reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient
cycle be broken. If human equality is to be forever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to
keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
9. [Timothy Todaro and Jonathan ReCasino] Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his
lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. 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.
Developing a Concept (Part 2)
1. [Domenique Latessa and Elizabeth Mathewson] Althusser takes great pains to indicate that
ideology contorts itself further into “a relation of a relation”; this additional abstraction
resituates the concept one step further removed from the “relation” to the subject it
constructs. Althusser introduces this doubled abstraction, which befuddles people who
privilege concrete observations and clear distinctions as a way of defining their reality in clear
and present terms. He does this by moving ideology one step away from itself, so its actions
are even more difficult to track. Most people want life experience to be concrete. They want
to know their world and their place in it. The want conceptual closure. They want to populate
their universe with a series of material objects that can be studied in their static
pronouncement of themselves. To do this, they people their world with fixed objects and
narratable events – not with signs and abstract structural processes that mediate their
conceptions of the world and their relation to it. The problem is that those with the power to
manipulate ideological systems of representation count on our desire for simplicity and
concrete experience. They count on our being blithely unaware of their insinuating their
ideological aspirations between our relation to our world and their relation to ideology,
ideological claims, and the lack of “trackability” of ideology’s capacity to disappear from the
traceable path of its intervention.
2. [Evan Cloutier and Cristina Domenech] If ideology is to do its work, we must remain dense and
distracted. If it is to function effectively, we must accept its prompts to think concretely as it
weaves its abstractions in such a way that we relate through its gaze when examining
“reality.” If successful, ideology induces us to relate to ideology (relation one) and only then
to the world (relation two). This is how the abstract maneuvering occurs, and the relation of
alienation fostered. This is how we develop a relation to a relation. In other words, ideology
circumvents our relation to the world by intervening in the perceptual process of organizing
consciousness itself through a system of signs that furthers its purpose. Through its actions,
any direct relation to world experience is displaced, although most people never know it nor
do they care to know it because their world would become less decipherable and more
complex. Ideology depends upon this will not to know – this will to know not abstract,
disorienting conceptions. In the intervening space allowed to it, ideology creates a
transposition of experience, based on this premise: as we lose our material relation to the
world, we gain a relation to an abstract field of perceptions that organizes the perceptual field
with our/its ideas of the world. Our worldviews provide us with the stuff of ideology – with
ideas, ideals, values, beliefs and an entire belief system that frames are perceptions and
mediates our experience. The question is, “do we care to conceptualize it.”
3. [Domenique Latessa and Elizabeth Mathewson] First and second section of paragraph 2: A
relation to a relation is an abstract concept, so it is difficult to understand. If we see ideology in
concrete terms, it will be easier to conceptualize. If we say that ideology is a relational concept,
then it becomes a bit more difficult to conceptualize. It becomes somewhat abstract. But if you
say ideology creates a relation to a relation, it becomes difficult to comprehend what in the
world has just been posited. Why? Because it is an abstraction of an abstraction.
4. Most people want life experience to be concrete. They want to know their world and their place
in it. The want conceptual closure. They want to populate their universe with a series of
material objects that can be studied in their static pronouncement of themselves.
5. The third section of paragraph 2: But there is a problem with concrete thinking when you are
trying to conceptualize “ideology.’ The problem is that those with the power count on our
desire for simplicity and concrete experience. They want us to be blithely unaware of their
ideological aspirations and its “trackability.”
6. [Evan Cloutier and Cristina Domenech] First section of paragraph 3: If ideology is to do its
work, we must think concretely as it weaves its abstractions in such a way that we relate to the
world through its filters. It is through ideology that we see “reality.” It is our matrix, but we are
not hardwired into it.
7. Second section of paragraph 3: Ideology induces us to relate to ideology (relation one). Then
and only then do we relate to the world (relation two). This is how we develop a relation to a
relation. In other words, ideology circumvents our direct relation to the world by intervening in
the perceptual process. It constantly organizes consciousness through the system of signs it
introduces. Through its actions, any direct relation to world is displaced. Most people never
know their world is mediated by ideology. They think they have a direct relation to the world
when the best they can have is a relation to a relation.
8. Third section of paragraph 3: Ideology depends upon this knowledge not being apparent. It
depends upon people keeping things concrete and avoiding abstract thinking. Most people never
know that their direct material relation to the world is a fiction; they never know that it has been
displaced by an abstract field of perceptions that organizes the conceptual field of consciousness.
Our ideological worldview – with its ideas, ideals, values, beliefs – frames our perceptions and
mediates our experience. The question is, “do we care to conceptualize it.” This is the matrix, one
that isn’t hardwired. The question becomes “do you want to know about it?” The question
becomes
do you want
the red pill
or the blue
pill?