JAKAL'S RHAPSODY

From the Afterword of George Orwell’s “1984” (p.324)

…”doublethink” is already with us, and not merely something which will happen in the future, and in dictatorships. 

…”Doublethink,” namely that in a successful manipulation of the mind the person is no longer saying the opposite of what he thinks, but he thinks the opposite of what is true. Thus, for instance, if he has surrendered his independence and his integrity completely, if he experiences himself as a thing which belongs either to the state, the party or the corporation, then two plus two are five, or “Slavery is Freedom,” and he feels free because there is no longer any awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood. Specifically this applies to ideologies. Just as the Inquisitors who tortured their prisoners believed that they acted in the name of Christian love, the Party “rejects and vilifies every principle for which the socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of socialism.” Its content is reversed into its opposite, and yet people believe that the ideology means what it says. In this respect Orwell quite obviously refers to the falsification of socialism by Russian communism, but it must be added that the West is also guilty of a similar falsification. We present our society as being one of free initiative, individualism and idealism, when in reality these are mostly words. We are a centralized managerial industrial society, of an essentially bureaucratic nature, and motivated by a materialism which is only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns.

…the new form of managerial industrialism, in which man builds machines which act like men and develops men who act like machines, is conducive to an era or dehumanization and complete alienation, in which men are transformed into things and become appendices to the process of production and consumption.

…”1984” teaches us, the danger of a society of automatons who will have lost every trace of individuality, of love, of critical thought, and yet who will not be aware of it because of “doublethink.”