Doublethink and the Liberal Mind
Recent polls are showing that by a good 60% margin, Barack Obama is seen as a candidate who can “unify” the nation. This may be the most brilliant example of what George Orwell called “doublethink” in the recent history of the Democratic Party. Think about it: for over thirty, maybe forty years the American public has been variously sermonized and threatened by crusaders in Obama’s same party into embracing not unity, but “diversity.” Call it what you will - brilliant or duplicitous - it is still a masterful political achievement.
George Orwell claimed that there was something more calculated at work when politicians begin to claim for example that “Slavery is Freedom” or that “Hate is Love,” or in Mao Tse Tung’s words, that “Compulsion is Voluntary.” The new and improved Democratic Party version seems to be that “Diversity is Unity.” Orwell called this “doublethink” and he claimed that it was a condition endemic to the totalitarian mind. It meant the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory” and “to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.” For example, a liberal socialist political platform usually involves “liberating” us from our attachments to property, families and nation in the name of “freedom.” When the State chooses for us, however, the result is slavery. Doublethink in Mr. Obama’s case (“Diversity is Unity!”) gives him the luxury of defending not only the divisive and intolerant Reverend Wright and his party’s divisive policies over the years, but it also allows him to be seen as the savior who will finally make America whole.
In all seriousness however we need to be aware that doublethink is at bottom a form of intellectual laziness, irresponsibility, or a form of “having your cake and eating it too” with a disdain for objective limits and consistency.