Newspeak and Doublethink in 2020

1984 is a dystopian novel set in Oceania. Oceania is run by “The Party” with “Big Brother” at the head, and we are following a man named Winston Smith, and he works as someone who rewrites history to match with what Big Brother says. If Big Brother says the sky is orange, then Winston rewrites and burns any account that the sky is blue and makes it say that the sky is orange. This often comes into contact with Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, and according to the end of the book, it’s rarely ever used on it’s own. It was created to express the needs of Ingsoc, short for English Socialism, and it was created to make any other way of thinking impossible. For example, instead of words like cut, they used the noun, knife. So instead of saying “She cut the vegetables.” you would say “She knifed the vegetables.” There was also no word for thought, it was replaced by think. Essentially, its self-replicating propaganda. This goes hand in hand with Doublethink, where you believe in two competing ideas at the same time; for example, phrases like “War is peace” and “Freedom is slavery” appear in the novel. This is another way the Party rectifies inconsistencies in Big Brother’s speech.

So, what principles of these concepts can we see today? Well, we’ve gone from “Shell shock”, to “Soldier Heart”, to “war neurosis,” before finally settling on “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.” We’ve gone from combining the terms “Sex” and “Gender” to thinking of them as separate concepts. Sure, this can be considered speech evolution, but if you put a new lens on it it’s newspeak. Changing language to change thoughts. “Shell Shock” is exclusive, sounds scary. so when we changed it to “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” It seems more approachable, easier to handle. We call this political correctness, but it’s really all the same. All the same, Doublethink is more prevalent today than you’d think. Conservatives believe businesses should be allowed to deny business to gay couples, but not to Christians, people not wearing masks, or straight couples. Liberal politicians believe we need to cut down on emissions, yet many of them charter private flights. Politicians expect the middle and lower class to save up several paychecks worth of cash for emergencies, but when big businesses suffered through the first month of the pandemic the government practically threw money at them.

Doublethink and Newspeak are prevalent in politics today, more prevalent than one would expect and it’s not going away. It’s like a chronic illness, it can’t be cured by any means we know today, and without getting a diagnosis, recognizing the problem nothing can change. We need to recognize when newspeak and doublethink are at work, and we need to actively combat it in our own thoughts.