The Unbearable Usefulness of George Orwell

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled 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." - from George Orwell's 1984


From The BlogProf. Thanks. Maybe we shouldn't have sent those Russian spies packing so quickly—which reminds me—how come it is almost impossible to send home other undesirables or at least takes a very long time? The Russian spies might have been useful in instructing us commoners in the way of reading Pravda in order to get at the truth.