Orwell listed dozens of examples of people believing emotionally satisfying lies, dismissing inexpedient truths, applying outrageous double standards, and rewriting events. These are the psychological ingredients for doublethink, or “reality control,” defined in Nineteen Eighty-Four as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them . . . 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
...more
