"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."
- George Orwell, 1984
How is it possible to believe two mutually contradictory things? Actually it's quite easy - people do it all the time. Voluntarism and fatalism exist side by side as psychological tropes, as do sympathy for suffering and blaming the victim, knowing that winning streaks don't go on forever, and organising your life around the assumption that this one will.
The trick of course is to believe different things at different times, about different things, in different circumstances - while always maintaining that whatever belief you have at any given moment is the complete and unalterable truth.
You lost your job? There was nothing you could have done about it. You're applying for a new one? If you're confident, you'll get it. You didn't get it after all? There was nothing more you could have done. Or you weren't trying hard enough, take your pick.
The 'clever' part of doublethink is not the hypocrisy. Although there's a perverse admirability in the ability to flip nimbly between blatantly incompatible positions in an eyeblink - even between complex metaphysical and moral structures.
The clever part is in marshaling all the ancillary lies and evasions required to prevent the incompatible beliefs bumping into each other - and in the further lies and evasions involved in restoring cognitive consonance when they do collide.
As Orwell says, to be convinced by your own lies you need to lie to yourself about lying, and evade the fact that you're evading. If the generals fighting a losing war could plan operations with the skill and speed needed to justify the war inside their own heads, they'd probably win in a week.
Of course, sometimes the buzz of sophism in a person's head leads only to vacillation, paralysing indecision, or a steady state of being conflicted. People have been known to spend their lives working towards a goal, but to constantly invent delays in reaching it.
Marxists have elevated doublethink from a psychological coping strategy to a grand overarching narrative of the universe - with the astonishingly flexible and convenient notion of 'contradiction', in which it's not people who are hypocrites, it's the universe!
'Contradiction' means whatever you want it to mean, whenever you need it, and never when you don't.
The union has sold out strikers? Not to worry comrade, because every time the workers are betrayed, their consciousness increases, so their (eventual) political activity level increases, hastening the revolution. Every defeat is contradictory, because it creates success.
Employers want to reduce wages, but with low wages the workers can't buy commodities to make the market work? That's not irony, and it's not a flaw in the design of capitalism, it's a contradiction - in a completely different sense of the word.
Workers interests (revolution) aren't the same as those of employers (the status quo)? Yes, they're in contradiction - in a different completely different sense.
1+1=2? According to Engels, the two 1s are in contradiction. Something's moving? Engels says its position is contradictory.
Light is a particle and a wave? Magnets have two poles? Entropy increases but biological life gets more complex? That shows how physical reality itself is contradictory - which with great circular convenience (and scientific illiteracy) proves marxism as a whole.
The one place where we conspicuously don't find contradiction is our own movements, which is odd, because they're so full of ironies, conflicts and paradoxes.
Your party talks about democracy, but doesn't have any of its own. Your tendency believes in human freedom, but demands obedience. Your group hates all the other groups, because apparently they're all sectarians.
It seems the world is constantly contradicting itself, so in describing it, it makes sense for us to contradict ourselves. But we don't see contradictions in ourselves - instead, we see 'subtleties' and 'nuances' of theory and practice.
So it seems we don't see ourselves as part of the world we want to change.
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