Posted by:
Stray Mutt
(
)
Date: April 12, 2014 09:47AM
As I read, I kept chuckling at myself for thinking every few pages, "As in Mormonism... As in Mormonism..."
This passage about doublethink fits so well with the way ChurchCo deals with its history, doctrines and "truth," and how members are complicit:
>>And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale— then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.
>>...His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world 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; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.<<
And, of course, there are the second and third points of The Party's motto:
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Recent GAs have preached that total obedience is actually freedom. (Yeah, right.) And we all know how they feel about knowing too much (despite the glory of God being intelligence).
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/2014 10:18AM by Stray Mutt.