Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The line comes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel *Nineteen Eighty-Four* (1949), where the totalitarian state of Oceania maintains power through pervasive surveillance, propaganda, and the manipulation of language and thought. Orwell introduces “doublethink” as a key mechanism of Party control: citizens are trained to internalize official contradictions—such as shifting wartime alliances or falsified historical records—without conscious resistance. The definition appears in the novel’s explanatory sections (including the pseudo-scholarly voice associated with the Party’s ideology and the “book” attributed to Emmanuel Goldstein), reflecting Orwell’s post–World War II anxieties about mass persuasion, ideological conformity, and the capacity of modern states to manufacture reality.

Orwell defines “doublethink” as more than hypocrisy or ordinary self-deception: it is a disciplined mental habit in which contradiction becomes psychologically normal and politically useful. By accepting mutually incompatible beliefs at once, the individual loses any stable standpoint from which to judge truth, memory, or morality. This collapse of logical consistency makes dissent difficult, because the mind can be trained to “know” and “not know” the same fact depending on what authority requires. The concept captures Orwell’s broader warning that authoritarian power is strongest when it colonizes inner life—turning reason itself into an instrument of obedience rather than a check on it.