It’s Not Cognitive Dissonance. It’s Doublethink.

Cognitive dissonance is when people feel discomfort due to discrepancies in their own thoughts or beliefs. As an example, someone who takes pride in being honest, feels such discomfort when he tells a lie.

Another example of cognitive dissonance is the discomfort felt by members of a cult when they seek to explain how the end of the world was postponed, as their apocalyptic prophecy did not come true. The term was in fact coined by psychologist Leon Festinger in his studies of such cults in the 1950s.

The opposite of cognitive dissonance is doublethink, a word that first appeared in George Orwell’s 1984. Doublethink is the ability to accept two contradictory beliefs at the same time, while being totally unaware of the contradiction. In Orwell’s own words:

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.

This morning I saw an excellent example of this on someone’s Facebook wall (translated by FB from the Icelandic, so not perfect):

Tertullian, one of the church fathers, born in the late second century, made the following observation regarding the birth, death and resurrection of Christ:

Natus est Dei Filius, non pudet, quia pudendum est;

et mortuus est Dei Filius, prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est;

et sepultus resurrexit, certum est, quia impossibile.

In English:

“The Son of God was born: there is no shame, because it is shameful.

And the Son of God died: it is wholly credible, because it is unsound.

And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible.”

Here, the contradiction is religious; only God can contradict himself, the absurd is allowed only to God; we mere mortals are bound by the rules of nature and the rules of logic. The only exemption is that through profound religious experience we can transcend the rules of logic and believe the absurd, hence “It is certain, because it is impossible.”

Does doublethink have a religious dimension then? Has the person who believes two contradictory statements at the same time in some way transcended reason, and entered into a religious dimension? Or has he simply lost his mind?

Reprinted from the author’s Substack.

Author

Thorsteinn Siglaugsson

BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

A New Collection of "Wisdom" from Leading Marxists

It makes clear that Leftist violence is thoroughly intentional and central to Leftism. It is not at all the work of a radical "fringe" or "incidental" in some way


5. “People have learned by bitter experience that the “European fraternal union of peoples” cannot be achieved by mere phrases and pious wishes, but only by profound revolutions and bloody struggles; they have learned that the question is not that of a fraternal union of all European peoples under a single republican flag, but of an alliance of the revolutionary peoples against the counter-revolutionary peoples, an alliance which comes into being not on paper, but only on the battlefield.”

– Frederick Engels, “Democratic Pan-Slavism,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No.222, February 1849 (as posted on Marxists.org).

“…the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789… gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf’s friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.”

– Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (Progress Publishers, 1975), chapter 6, section 3, italics in original. This volume can be found at Marxists.org, and it was first published in 1845. Note that the Foreign Language Publishing House version, released in 1956, translates the “new world order” as the “new world system” on page 161.  [convenient, no?]

“…the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things… They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

– Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Books, 1985, originally published in 1848), p.120.

“…the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.”

– Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Books, 1985, originally published in 1848), p.104.

“A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon – authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire…”

– Friedrich Engels, “On Authority,” The Marx-Engels Reader (W.W. Norton & Company, 1972, paperback edition), p.665 – first written in 1872.

“Let those who labor to live, understand, that this monster cannot be tamed, nor be made harmless or useful to man; let them learn to know, that there is but one means of safety: unrelenting, pitiless, thorough, war of extermination!”

– Jonathan Most (German-American Marxist), “The Beast of Property,” speech given in 1884 (as posted on Marxists.org).

“We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.”

– V.I. Lenin,” Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” Proletary, No.2, August 1906 (as posted on Marxists.org).

“But democracy is by no means a limit one may not overstep; it is only one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to Communism.”

– V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution (International Publishers, 1917/1969), p.82.

“We shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard-of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we will smash them with our clenched fist.”   

– Dimitri Manuilsky, Lenin School of Political Warfare, 1930, as quoted in Soviet Analyst, Volume 22, Numbers 7&8, p.7.

“All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist revolution…”

– Leon Trotsky, “Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism,” New International, August 1939 (as posted on Marxists.org).
[this is Trotsky showing off he read the Magyar struggle as he is paraphrasing Engels from the Magyar struggle!!]

“We are indebted to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin for giving us a weapon. The weapon is not a machine-gun, but Marxism-Leninism.”

– Mao Tse-tung, On People’s Democratic Dictatorship (Foreign Language Press, 1959, Orig. penned in 1949), p.2.

“…it is impossible for a genuine people’s revolution in any country to win victory without various forms of help from the international revolutionary forces.”

– Mao Tse-tung, On People’s Democratic Dictatorship (Foreign Language Press, 1959, Orig. penned in 1949), p.9.