The reality of doublethink
About ten miles south of Oxford lies the unremarkable English village of Sutton Courtenay. There in the parish yard of All Saints’ Church can be found an ordinary grave marker with the ordinary name Eric Arthur Blair. The marker informs us that the grave’s occupant lived from June of 1903 to January of 1950. It is perhaps part of the famous English propensity for understatement that this humble place should commemorate the English grave of the planet’s greatest prophet so unpretentiously. But that is the circumstance today of the man who was known to the world as George Orwell.
The word “Orwellian” has practically become a cliche to describe the times we are in. But what other synonym is there for a chillingly dystopian name like the “Department of Government Efficiency”? And in what other examples of human literature can there be found more apropos descriptions of the dark celebration of human cruelty than in the novels “1984” and “Animal Farm”? Orwell saw us coming better than anyone else. Far better than any of us could have. And he managed to do it from the first half of the twentieth century.
I first read “1984” when I was 16, the year after I read the far less prophetic dystopian book “A Clockwork Orange.” My problem with the former was I couldn’t manage to suspend my disbelief. I couldn’t get my head around the idea that any person could simultaneously believe two contradictory ideas. The notion of “doublethink” was preposterous to me.
Today, of course, doublethink has become part of the common national landscape. Doublethink is what millions of Americans use to convince themselves that a philandering, thrice married, adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal is a “moral leader.” Doublethink is called upon to accept that a rogue’s gallery of incompetent substance abusers, lawbreakers, rapists, traitors, thieves and hypocrites can form a moral and “Christian” government. Doublethink is more than just a word. It’s a process. It takes years of practice. One cannot become so thoroughly fucked up without decades of indoctrination.
The glassy-eyed cultists at Fox News couldn’t do it by themselves, oh no. They required the tacit complicity of the so-called “left-leaning” mainstream media. Without their combined efforts and literal decades of indoctrination it would never have been possible for an entire nation to embrace an obvious monster like Donald Trump. That took years of “sanewashing” normalisation. We had to be convinced that a man who is unfit to lead, who is actually Constitutionally disqualified from leading, is nevertheless about to be “legitimately” installed — a second time! — as president of the United States.
First, they had to advance the idea that a bloviating, convicted criminal moron could be a viable and legitimate Republican candidate. That by itself required a tour de force of world class hoodwinking. Then they had to reinterpret his incoherent, word salad ramblings into sanitised headlines that included such antiseptic words as “policy” and “strategy.” Then they had to avoid comparing him with Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin because that would be unfair and in violation of some rule or other.
Along the way, every outrageous criminal hypocrisy committed by Trump and his parade of assclowns was humorlessly sanitised into outrageous false equivalencies. Trump’s pardoning of his criminal cronies was given a pass as part of his presidential prerogative. Biden’s pardoning of his persecuted son was the blackest sin imaginable. Trump elevating unqualified idiots into cabinet-level positions was part of the tradition of the spoils system. Biden’s elevation of a highly qualified woman, a Senator, with decades of experience as a prosecutor and state attorney general to the Vice Presidency, was nothing more than virtue-signalling and “out of control DEI.”
And the fools bought it. Now we are about to have the very thing that the mainstream media so desperately wanted. We are about to have, once again, a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week news cycle behemoth as president of the United States. A man who will do six impossibly stupid things every day before breakfast. None of this would have been possible were it not for the literal existence and viability of the Orwellian idea of doublethink.
Like I said, since that day back in high school when I first picked up Orwell’s book, I have become a believer in the idea of doublethink. What I still can’t get my head around is the idea that people would use doublethink to manipulate an entire nation into promoting a man like Trump back into the presidency. To risk all forms of organised human existence for more money, added to an already inconceivable mountain of money, seems beyond belief to me. I don’t know of a word that really does it justice. The word “evil” simply isn’t enough.
Nevertheless, we will fight this evil, because we must. And we will continue to believe that we will ultimately triumph over this evil, because we must. We have no choice. Along the way, brothers and sisters, take care of yourselves, and if you can, take care of someone else too.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.