Doing Doublethink: A Manual for Self-Deception
To do doublethink, you must learn truths about three profoundly influential lies. These truths are sophisticated and difficult to understand.
It is simple to inherit doublethink but challenging to do it.
Only the self-aware can intentionally self-deceive.
The Lie About Lies
The lie about lies is that they are “statements intended to conceal or misrepresent known truths.” This popular definition is so impoverished that a new category had to be created to deal with its many exceptions: “white lies.”
If lying is morally bad, then “white lies” can’t logically exist because they are statements intended to conceal or misrepresent known truths that are morally neutral or good. What makes certain lies fake and okay (“white”) and other lies real and bad?
A lie is classified as “white” when it is intended to exert positive impacts instead of negative ones. Indeed, if the liar were to tell you that what you thought was a white lie was motivated by a seriously bad intention, you would mentally re-classify it as a real lie.
The popular definition of “lie” does not comport with how language is actually used in interpersonal contexts. You often say things that are technically false to impact people in particular ways, not because you know them to be true or false when you say them. You may not have any information whatsoever about what it is you are saying because your words are not the message.
When you lash out of rejection, you tend not to be remotely aware of the relationship your statements have with your existing knowledge. In such moments, you do not intend to conceal or misrepresent known truths because you only intend to hurt. Even if you say something technically false like “I never want to see you again” to someone you love deeply, you are not lying according to the standard definition for you do not intend anything but pain.
Similarly, you often improvise hypotheticals, whose technical truth value is unknown and unknowable, to discourage someone from doing something you don’t want them to do (e.g., “Place A will probably be closed, so we should go to Place B like I suggested”). Even if you believe your hypotheticals are improbable, your inability to know whether they will come true or not means they can’t qualify as lies if lies are intentionally false statements.
The illogical existence of “white lies,” as well as the possibility of intentionally saying something technically false without lying, shows that the “intended to conceal a known truth” part of the popular understanding of “lie” is flawed. However, the “statements” part also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Yet again, the failures of the standard definition are glossed over with a new category: “lies of omission.”
This category is clearly absurd when considered with respect to the typical definition. If lies are intentionally false statements, and “lies of omission” are intentionally secretive silences, “lies of omission” can’t logically qualify as lies at all.
Furthermore, you can lie by intentionally saying something technically true in a sarcastic tone. In this case, an element outside of the language of the statement modifies the meaning of the statement. The typical conceptualization of “lie” comes nowhere close to dealing with this.
As the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” He meant that the meaning of a communication cannot possibly be decoded without knowing the way in which it was communicated. In other words, to decontextualize something interpersonally meaningful is to fundamentally misunderstand what it is.
There is no such thing as “a lie that says something technically true” (sarcasm example) or “an intentional statement that is technically false but not a lie” (lashing out example). Such notions disconnect the medium from the message, thereby fragmenting the object of analysis and rendering it incoherent.
If “message” is rationalistically defined as a universal proposition capable of being articulated by anyone anywhere at any point in time, then a message becomes a meaningless series of letters in a timeless, bloodless void. In actuality, a message is an emergent meaning produced through the interaction between a communication’s medium and its communicated content. Messages are not general abstract propositions that exist mind-independently, but specific concrete indications to another mind or group of minds.
This brings me to a conclusion that logically follows from all this but is hard for people to accept because the cognitive habit to conceptualize “lie” in the traditional way is so reinforced. Before I state it, let’s review the flaws of the popular definition of “lies” as “statements intended to conceal or misrepresent known truths.”
This conceptualization is flawed because it allows for morally good lies, doesn’t recognize that language is often used to impact rather than convey, fails to explain how strategic silences can qualify as lies, and fundamentally misrepresents the nature of interpersonal messages by indicating that de-contextualized language (a statement or proposition) can constitute a real message.
The conclusion to draw from all this is that only actions (intentional behaviors) can qualify as lies because only actions exist at the level of analysis capable of integrating communicational medium with communicational content. Specific actions are mediumized-contents, or contextualized-communications. Interpersonal messages are actions. To say something that would help someone if they took it literally in a sarcastic tone is to perform a deceptive speech-act. You can lie through gestures, facial movements, tones, movements, and all other behaviors because all these things can qualify as actions.
So, what is a lie, really?
A lie is an action that indicates something to yourself or others that conflicts with your overarching goals for your life. Lies are not statements, but actions. Lies are performed.
This re-conceptualization eliminates “white lies,” logically accommodates “lies of omission,” and allows for speech-acts to be evaluated in their context (in the way/medium that they are meant). It also discards the rigid dichotomy of true and false that rarely maps onto interpersonal interactions with all their vagaries. Slight exaggerations, misdirections, jargon filled obfuscations, etc. can qualify as more or less true (goal-progressive) under this definition, and therefore more or less honest, depending on the context.
Importantly, if you think you are worried by the fact that people can change what’s true by changing their minds about their overarching life goals, then you are actually worried about your ability to trust other people. You can only trust those who share some of your overarching goals. Social truth is cultural consensus and cultural consensus emerges from individuals agreeing about what is worth pursuing in life.
The Lie About Intentions
The lie about intentions is that behaviors performed without self-consciousness in the moment cannot be intentional. This is the lie behind so-called “crimes of passion” and other nonsensical categories of action involving the supposed “overwhelming of reason by emotion.” It is supported by the flawed intuition that you can only intend things in the present moment as well as a logically indefensible yet pervasive misunderstanding of emotion/reason.
You need only consider intentionally cultivated habits to see through this deception. A practice you successfully self-habituate through intentional behavioral repetition becomes automatic such that you don’t have to attend to it self-consciously to perform it. What motivates a specific automatic, un-self-conscious performance of an intentionally cultivated habit?
If your reason motivates it, then your reason can operate outside of your conscious control. If your emotion motivates it, then you can have emotions without feeling anything. Neither of these possibilities comports with colloquial understandings of these concepts. The average person would object that unconscious reason is not reasonable (or rational) and unfelt emotion is not emotional.
This conflict is resolved when emotion and reason are integrated into one process: thinking. Thinking is not rational or emotional because the labels “rational” and “emotional” are moral judgements and not substantively different types of thought.
Thinking is either self-conscious or un-self-conscious. Self-conscious thought (metacognition) is thought that examines other thoughts while un-self-conscious thought is thought focused on anything other than thoughts.
Intentions are self-conscious thoughts about what to do in the future that become actualized (acted out). To act intentionally is to enact an intention. The second you transition from the deliberation phase to the enactment phase, you lose self-consciousness because your attention necessarily shifts from thoughts to the objects in the environment that must be manipulated to fulfill past-you’s intention. The environment is every notable thing in attention, which can include the body.
For example, you self-consciously plan to go to the store when you interrogate your thoughts about which store to go to and why. Once you intend by committing to an action plan, once you decide/believe that an action plan should be actualized, your attention moves from thoughts to the feet that need shoes, the car keys, the door, the road, the produce aisle, and so on.
Like the intentionally cultivated habit illustration, this example demonstrates that un-self-conscious behaviors whose performances originate from intentions, or are traceable to intentions, qualify as actions. Intentional behaviors are not behaviors intended in the moment because it is impossible to simultaneously intend something and enact it. Instead, intentional behaviors are behaviors that derive from past intentions.
The Lie About Inactions
The lie about inactions is that they exist. You cannot perform an inaction for the same reasons that you cannot do nothing. You are always doing something; you are always acting out some intention, however old. The failure to do something is not the absence of Action A, but the presence of Action B.
The category “inaction” is like “hole” in that its instances are abstract hypotheticals drawn from observations of contrasts. When you observe, “This donut has a hole,” you mean, “There is a donut-less space that could hypothetically be filled with more donut.”
Holes are abstracted from observations of contrasts in object-space (donutlessness vs. potential donutness), while inactions are abstracted from observations of contrasts in behavior-time (past performances vs. potential past performances). When you say, “Pam failed to eat the donut,” you mean, “There was a past time at which Pam could hypothetically have eaten the donut, but she did something else instead.”
You actualize what becomes actuality by acting out actionable actions. Inactions can’t exist because they have already not happened and are therefore not actionable now or ever.
All claims about inactions are really claims about past action prioritizations. Every “you failed to do X” is implicitly a “you prioritized doing something else over doing X.”
Inaction is to praxeology as ignorance is to epistemology. Once inaction is seen as unreal, ignorance, the absence of knowledge or information, becomes suspect. To be in a state of ignorance is to be in the presence of an absence. This is logically impossible.
Or is it?
Doublethink: Inherited Ignorance
You can only know that you are in the presence of an absence if you can specify the absent presence. If you do not know about any absent presence, then you cannot possibly know that you are in ignorance of anything.
Ignorance of ignorance is knowing everything that you know that you need to know. You are always ignorant of what you are ignorant about. Since you cannot specify that which you are ignorant of being ignorant about, it cannot and does not exist for you.
Consequently, that which you are ignorant of being ignorant about bothers you as much as everything else you don’t know that you don’t know about, which is to say it doesn’t bother you at all. It has no existence.
It is indeed logically possible for you to be ignorant, to be in the presence of an absence, but only if “you” is conceptualized trans-temporally (existing across time) and not temporally (existing now).
You are in the presence of an absence after you shift your attention away from something that had just appeared in attention. An absence in this context is a presence that you make absent by ignoring it (diverting attention away from it). Ignorance is not existing within a temporal state characterized by the presence of an absence, which is logically impossible, but instantiating a trans-temporal process in which an attentional pivot makes what had just been present absent.
All claims about ignorances are really claims about past attention prioritizations. Every “you failed to be aware of X” is implicitly a “you prioritized attending to something else over attending to X.”
Doublethink is a habit comprised of behaviors that ignore contradictions in dogma whose continued existence entails the continued sacrifice of individuality, and whose logical reconciliation entails a dramatic loss of comfort and security.
Doublethink is a habit. Habits exists at a higher (more general) conceptual level of analysis than actions because they are action patterns. A specific habit represents a specific behavioral type whose medium is un-self-conscious thought and whose content is a specific kind of series of attentional and/or bodily movements that produce a specific kind of outcome.
It is impossible to doublethink in the moment for the same reasons it is impossible to do a habit. A habit is not a thing that exists, but a name for a type of behavior that has been repeated over time. You do not “have” habits, you do behaviors that are retroactively classified as belonging to the behavioral type represented by a specific habit name (e.g., “nail biting”).
You do a behavior habitually until you become self-conscious of it and intentionally decide to behave differently, at which point your behaviors cease to logically cohere in a way that can be described by invoking the concept of habit.
Doublethink is a habit that represents the repeated performance of a certain kind of attentional behavior, namely the reflexive shifting of attention away from doubts, which are thoughts about contradictions. You inherit doublethink when you are socialized into the behaviors of ignorance that constitute it. Doublethink inheritors practice behaviors of ignorance un-self-consciously (without thinking about the thoughts that drive the behaviors).
As 1984 and Brave New World depict, and psychological research has since supported (“don’t think about pink elephants”), you cannot ignore doubt when it arises by “trying to ignore it in the moment.” This translates to “intending an absence,” which is logically impossible. Since doublethink type behaviors are driven by un-self-conscious thought, there can be no trying/intending involved anyway.
The way behaviors of ignorance work is that the emergence of a doubt cues a pre-primed behavioral response that activates un-self-consciously. This response shifts attention away from the doubt to a different stimulus before the doubt can become an attentional focus and thereby activate the self-conscious thought (metacognition or thought about thoughts) necessary to examine the doubt.
Behaviors of ignorance include taking drugs, drinking alcohol, eating, exercising, engaging in sexual activity, gossiping, reading, initiating interpersonal conflict, among countless others. These are not essentially behaviors of ignorance, but they can qualify as such if they are automatic responses to the emergence of doubt. They are, in a sense, pre-programmed routines that initiate upon a hint of doubt’s discomfort.
Doublethink and dogmatism go hand in hand. Dogmatists’ dogmatism is partially maintained through doublethink. The incentives to remain dogmatic are almost always social. If a dogmatist attentionally embraces doubt, it practically guarantees that she will be harshly sanctioned by others in her dogmatic social group, if not excommunicated entirely. Therefore, doublethink always serves conformity at the expense of individuality.
Becoming an individual within a dogmatic group always entails self-consciously rejecting that group’s dogma. Individuation is not for all. Many prefer the security of a predictable life in a tight-knit group to the precarity of an unpredictable solo venture into the labyrinth of the unknown.
The social incentives for doublethink in a dogmatic group are created and maintained by the intellectual habits of the individuals who collectively comprise that group. Dogmatists are radical conservatives (psychologically, not politically). They treat new thoughts — novel ideas, interpretations, behaviors, etc. — with severe hostility.
Self-conscious thoughts about anything even remotely conceptually related to the group’s official dogmas are dangerous for someone in a dogmatic group. This is because self-conscious thoughts generally produce new thoughts through conceptual association and, if others nearby sense the introduction of a novelty that stands even the slightest chance of qualifying as heresy, they will raise alarm out genuine moral concern, vindictiveness, or the fear of potential punishment by others if their prioritization of the individual thinker over the dogma were to be socially discovered.
People who inherit doublethink through socialization differ from people who do doublethink because they do not intend to doublethink. Doublethink inheritors doublethink un-self-consciously. In their view, they are not “doing” anything like doublethink. Since they do not accept that their doublethink habit exists, they do not believe it is possible for them to be doing it at all. If you were to try to broach the issue with them, they’d reflexively turn away from you. They wouldn’t listen to you because they have been indoctrinated; they have been transformed into dogmatists who are ignorant of their ignorance.
Doing Doublethink: Intending Ignorance
If you are a self-aware person who does not take easily to dogmatism when exposed to it, is it possible for you to doublethink?
Yes, but it takes intentionality. If you who either do not or cannot inherit doublethink want to become ignorant of contradictions in dogma, you must intend to do doublethink.
You can only intend to do doublethink coherently and effectively if you understand the truths about the three big lies. You must know that “true” can only be an adjective (subjective property) that describes something’s relationship to your overarching life goals. Knowing this will protect you from being intellectually sidetracked by anyone who incoherently claims that “the truth” is a noun (object) whose existence obliges you to do anything other than what you aim to do. You must know that intentions can unfold in un-self-conscious ways for this knowledge will guide you through the process of self-indoctrination. And you must know that inactions and ignorances are really matters of prioritization over time so that your effort to self-deceive is not thwarted by the imprisoning delusion that you can intend absences.
You must be willing to apply these lessons for the sake of forgetting them in a way that prioritizes the perpetuation of dogma. Doing doublethink is playing a game of memory and priority with versions of you that only exist in the un-actualized potential future. You win this self-erasing memory game by habituating yourself to think only un-self-consciously about the contradictory dogmas you aim to promote.
Those who intentionally do doublethink self-deceive, while those who inherit doublethink un-self-consciously learn doublethink from others. Self-deception is lying to yourself. You can’t lie to yourself in the moment because there is only one you. Lying to yourself in the moment is implicitly “you lying to yourself now,” which necessitates the simultaneous existence of two of you. This is logically impossible.
Recall that a lie is an action that indicates something to yourself or others that conflicts with your overarching goals for your life. Self-deception is intentionally lying to your future self. Self-deception creates goal conflict within the trans-temporal you (you-over-time). The conflict is most clearly represented as a disagreement that you intentionally create between Present You and Future Deceived You.
Present You says, “I am bothered by thoughts of doubt about the dogmas. The fact that I am bothered by these doubts means that one of my goals in life is to overcome these doubts.” Future Deceived You responds, “What doubts? No doubts exist in my mind for the dogmas are ideal. How dare you suggest otherwise!”
Future Deceived You is deceived into thinking that all is well when the doubts continue to plague. The self-fragmenting effects of doubt continue to manifest, but Future Deceived You has been tricked into thinking that the problems experienced can’t be due to doubts because doublethink prevents self-conscious awareness of the doubts’ existence. The destructive doubt has been repressed through the successful self-habituation of doublethink.
If doublethink is a habit, and you cannot intend to do habits because they are abstractions, what does it mean to intend to do doublethink?
If you’ve understood the truths about the three lies, then “I intend to do doublethink” for you equals “I intend to repetitively practice the specific behaviors of ignorance whose eventual un-self-conscious performance is likely to prevent future me from self-consciously inspecting doubtful thoughts about the dogmas I want to perpetuate.”
Remember that you are not “trying to not think about” the contradictions but working to self-habituate instinctive re-prioritizations of attention.
Identify the environmental contexts (home, work, debate, bodily pain, etc.) and psychic contexts (grieving, angry, relaxed, lustful, etc.) in which your doubtful thoughts tend to arise. Eliminate your entrance into all environmental contexts that are unnecessary for the effective perpetuation of the dogmas. Prevent yourself from encountering novelty (new thoughts) as much as possible.
Next, identify several behavioral scripts you can run when a doubtful thought arises. Identify both behaviors that stimulate your attention (eating, scrolling social media, gossiping, listening to familiar music, reading familiar books, imagining violence or sex, etc.) as well as those that reduce your capacity for self-conscious thought (taking drugs, exercising intensely, engaging in sexual activity, drinking alcohol, etc.).
Train yourself to mentally associate these behaviors with specific contexts so that they can be primed by environmental and psychic cues. Create reminders for yourself that reinforce your conceptual association of a specific context with a specific behavior of ignorance.
The immediate goal when doubt emerges is to re-direct attention away from it as seamlessly and quickly as possible. Once you have already mentally associated a behavioral script with a context, you must repeatedly practice the behavior until it becomes automatic.
Your mission is accomplished once you successfully automatize these behaviors of ignorance such that their scripts immediately activate un-self-consciously in response to the emergence of a doubt of dogma. The doubts that once were noticeable are no longer capable of becoming objects of self-conscious examination. They no longer exist, thanks to you.
At that point, you will have inherited the doublethink that you created.
You will have transformed what is currently self-awareness of doubt into ignorant ignorance.
You will have killed a part of your psyche, a source of thought, by rendering it un-self-conscious.
You will have necessarily forgotten the truths about the three big lies and successfully deceived yourself.
"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 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