What "doublethink" means in Nineteen Eighty-Four

A term you'll meet in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, doublethink is the Party's name for "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." It's the mental operation that makes the Party's three central slogans — War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength — not just sayable but believable.

Why it isn't simply lying

A propagandist who says something false while privately knowing the truth is lying — an ordinary, ancient skill. Doublethink is stranger: it requires actually believing the new version while also, somewhere, retaining the old one, and never letting the two come into contact long enough to notice the contradiction. Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth is instructive: he alters old newspaper articles to match the Party's current claims, and once the alteration is filed, the original truth is meant to be genuinely forgotten — not suppressed, but unknown.

The mechanism: "protective stupidity"

Orwell describes the discipline doublethink requires as needing "a sort of athleticism of mind" — the ability 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." This is deliberate, trained, and ongoing — closer to a skill than a delusion.

Doublethink vs. cognitive dissonance

Psychologists describe cognitive dissonance as the discomfort people feel when they notice they hold contradictory beliefs, which usually pushes them to resolve the contradiction one way or the other. Doublethink is almost the inverse: it is the trained capacity to never register the discomfort in the first place. The contradiction isn't resolved — it's prevented from ever surfacing as a contradiction at all.

Why Orwell thought this was the real danger

Outright lying can be caught and corrected once someone produces contrary evidence. Doublethink is more durable, because the citizen practicing it isn't being deceived by someone else — they are actively, willingly maintaining the contradiction themselves, as a condition of belonging and safety. That's what makes Orwell's vision bleaker than a simple story about propaganda: the population doesn't merely fail to notice the Party's lies. It has learned, generation by generation, not to notice its own.

Try Lexio

Look up "doublethink" like this — in any book, in any browser.

Lexio is a free Chrome extension and web app that reads a word's actual context and tells you what it means in this sentence, not from a generic dictionary.

Try Lexio — free →