The Rise 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....
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.” — George Orwell, 1984
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, citizens of Oceania were required to exercise doublethink on a regular basis in order to believe and go along with the lies that “Big Brother” told them. One particularly notable feature of doublethink in Orwell’s novel was that most, if not all, of the people were unaware that they were even engaging in such a display of mental gymnastics, or if they were aware of it, they would deny they were doing it. Readers of 1984 might be shocked or even cynically amused that such a mental exercise could even take place among anyone, much less a large segment of the population. We regret to announce that doublethink is alive and well in modern society, and it has a name: belief in catastrophic man-made global warming. To put it more precisely, believing that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old and has gone through various geological ages and periods (which the majority of scientists today claim to be the case) and simultaneously believing that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will have catastrophic effects upon the Earth’s climate is a perfect example of doublethink.
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