George Orwell’s contribution to understanding autocrats everywhere is necessary here. The word is doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously while accepting both. It was, Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the power “to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them.” It was to use facts only when convenient, to disavow their existence when contradictory, and “to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.”
