Orwell’s definition can’t be put forward too often, especially for those Conservatives who believe that “we create our own reality” (and are well-funded to do so):

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

I thought of doublethink reading tristero on the tender sensibilities that Christianist loons like Huckabee display when the very word “evolution” is mentioned.

You can be sure that if a child unlucky enough to have a Christianist for a parent is in the hospital and gets an infection from a superbug, the parent will demand, and rightly so, the very latest antibiotic for treatment—even though the superbug evolved, in historical time, from an “arms race” by micro-organisms against anti-biotics, and even though anti-biotics were originally evolved by fungi or bacteria in an earlier arms race. [Apologies in advance to any scientists reading this!]

And yet that same Christianist parent who reaps the benefits of science will go home, go to the school board that night, and try to get a teaching scientist fired for espousing the very science that saved his child’s life; will, in Orwell’s prophetic words, “deny the existence of objective reality and all the while … take account of the reality which one denies.”

Sure, the Christianists and the latest head of their secular church, Mike Huckabee, can go Fuck themselves, right out in the public square, I hope, and with a great deal of fuss and noise, but what I want to know is this:

Is a cure for doublethink possible?  Read more