George Orwell's 1984 a Modern Reality?

1984, startlingly portrays a completely controlled society with unequalled depth and understanding. Key to understanding the way this dystopia works is in the concept of doublethink. Doublethink allows the Party to maintain absolute control over an individual's understanding of her environments and the realities she may face. Doublethink allows the Party to eliminate the idea of an external, objective reality in favor of a reality based solely on what one thinks, based on what the Party says is truth. With these two ideas working in unison-there is no reality except the reality in one's mind-the Party is able to maintain its only purpose for existing: power. Doublethink is the means by which the Party achieves its end power.

Orwell defines doublethink as "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them"(220). For example, that the past is alterable, yet that it has never been altered, or the three main slogans we see in the beginning of the novel, "war is peace.

Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength"(4). Obviously, these contradicting ideas are not rational and therefore believing them poses an initial problem to the Party's quest for indefinite power. Orwell explains how to implement doublethink, by using doublethink when he writes, "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"(220).

It follows that reality is not violated because reality was never altered. The changes that the Party intellectual just made are not changes-they are corrections that emphasize facts that always have been. Cognition of contradiction only exists long enough to remedy an error. After the error is fixed, no contradiction exists.

I intend to follow this article up with more in depth look at the phenomenon we are all being forced to endure, a delayed doublethink known as project America.