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Thursday, May 6, 2010

1984 Passage

"A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated...and the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimi al to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible."

1984
George Orwell
Signet Classic Edition
Pages 211 - 212

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