DOUBLETHINK

I'd like to talk a bit about the concept of DOUBLETHINK from Orwell's "1984."

Orwell invented the term to describe a system of political thought. It was intended to be a criticism of how dishonest and mind-crushingly anti-human totalitarian systems could be, and as such is deeply insightful. But I would like to discuss doublethink in terms of normal thought, as an everyday phenomenon that affects us constantly. Political doublethink is a terribly dangerous but unfortunately quite routine part of contemporary American politics, media dialogue, and national culture. However, in this post I would like to focus more on the concept as a personally-defined philosophical term related to my own artmaking and investigations into the working of my own mind.

In Orwell's "1984 doublethink is defined as -
"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

And further as -
"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."

"His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. 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 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 using doublethink."

This of course seems quite negative, but if we take it out of the political context, he is basically criticizing DISHONESTY. It is no coincidence that all the world's religions have some kind of moral injunction against lying, and Machiavellian systems of power-worship praise lies. More powerful to me, from a non-moral point of view, is that lying is mentally exhausting because it means having to keep track of two conflicting models of reality - the one in which you were at a boring business meeting in Washington and visiting your imaginary buddy Phil, and the one where you were in Miami with Ashley and you got a D.U.I. for which you will have to return to court. This means that your brain needs to create two simultaneous holographs, run twice as many cost-benefit analyses, and simulate an alternative limited system of false emotional responses. There are many points where the two models cross over, some of which are highly contradictory, and these lies often become unraveled. But what is amazing is that we generally have no trouble doing this, and in fact are doing it all the time, constructing elaborate fantasies about ourselves and our place in the world even when there are no risks or consequences. We do it when we put our faith in irrational systems of thought like religion or, to look at it with less of a sense of institutional critique, our own system of faith, whether it is a personal spirituality, or our best "rational" interpretation of the universe's workings taken from contemporary science. So in a way, doublethink is equal to lies and fantasy, or more deeply, to the construction of a personal identity, a sense of self. Seen this way, it is not such a negative concept because people are not computers, or rather we are not logical computers, but ones that run on emotion and fantasy. I don't think this is such a negative thing. Rather, I think it would a bad thing to deny our own nature. Fantasy can be beautiful, and emotions should be experienced and all this still leaves some room for rational thought.




I have long found truth in this quote by Walt Whitman from "Song of Myself" which relates directly to Orwell’s take on “holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously” -
''Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)''

Of course - I can believe and say two things that can be logically proven as mutually exclusive. In fact, I'm doing it all the time. What Whitman describes as "multitudes" I think of as an accurate way of describing how our mind works (I'd like to talk more about this, as related to the recently prominent popular science books of Daniel Dennet, Steven Pinker, and others, but perhaps this is another post..). Basically, if one quietly observes one's own mind one can hear a thousand voices, all competing for the limited space of awareness. Not one ghost in the machine, but an infinite set of homunculi. Each of these is a potential "you." Some of them have very tiny vague lives that last only one cycle of the mind's high-frequency vibrations, others have very long runs. They jump in and out, they merge and diverge, they die and come back to life, they grow as large as a house and shrink down to become a potent little virus. They go off and hide for a long time and then burst back onto the scene at unpredictable times ("drawn back from oblivion" as Orwell said). They change themselves completely, amputating parts of themselves without batting an eye. Or alternatively, they refuse to change, and would be willing to destroy the entire world to avoid losing a tiny piece of themselves. As Orwell says, the world of the doublethink mind is "labyrinthine."



What I find most interesting is the final sentence in the quote above "Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved using doublethink" - You can't understand doublethink unless you use doublethink to think about it. It is essentially a mystery cult. Doublethink is not a political ideology as much as it is an altered state of consciousness. You can only understand an altered state of consciousness in an abstract, intellectual way until you have experienced it for yourself. The "trialectic" I discussed in the last post is an artificial example of this - we can talk about it, but it remains opaque at best, or perhaps just wrong. Or we could talk about altered states brought about my drugs, but the most interesting example is the Zen concept of enlightenment - what is called satori or kensho (meaning a glimpse of satori) - the state of awareness described alternately as mindlessness and mindfulness, as awakening to ones' own buddha-nature, etc. This state of mind is routinely described as unexplainable and that the only way to understand it is by experiencing it.

So doublethink is a very particular state of consciousness, but (and this is the main point here) I would like to put forward that doublethink is the most common state of consciousness, the one that most of us human animals are in most of the time. I am talking not about Orwell's conscious and deliberate method of telling deliberate lies to construct a politically, ideologically acceptable public persona/avatar out of fear from the government, but rather a more subtle process that may be unconscious, but is essentially the same - a process of constructing false selves as motivated by social pressures. The "double" in doublethink is actually the mental identity about whom we would say "that is me." This is the construct who controls not only our public persona, but who decides what thoughts will be allowed though the gate to be incorporated into our self-conception. Of course, like all our ideas of self, it is actually a patchwork of many selves, but we work very hard to maintain the illusion of wholeness and continuity. If this illusion of self is disturbed the result can be terrible mental illness and unhappiness as the mind tries to meld the shattered bits back together.




The "singlethink" ("originalthink?") implied by the term doublespeak is not single at all. In fact it is infinitely multiple, decentralized, tangential, and does not congeal into a unified whole. The mind can stop clinging to the simulated double self and enter a state of consciousness where it can function without the pretense of a centralized self. I am saying that mindlessness is an alternative to this sense of self - one that we are in fact constantly experiencing, though we usually deny it automatically.


I'd like to relate this to the process of art-making with which I concern myself every day. When I am deep in a fantasy, when I am applying myself fully to solving a particular challenge, when I am communicating fully with another person, and especially when I am drawing I often enter a meditative state where I breathe differently, where all my mind is focused on where the pen touches the paper, where I am simultaneously fully aware of what I am doing, and not conscious of what I am doing. I am not claiming any kind of special enlightenment. I have spoken to many people who have experienced something similar - whether it is while playing music, walking on the street, writing by listening to the conversations of imaginary characters in one's head, swimming in the ocean, or mowing the lawn, there is a state of full engagement and involvement where obsessive self-analysis, self-censorship, and even self-consciousness seem to disappear, though other people have characterized it differently and some have disagreed with me about my conclusions (as well they should...). My conclusion being that this is the same thing as kensho - a glimpse of buddha-nature. After all, zen monks during sesshin - the week-long retreats where the most intense meditation and striving for enlightenment are undertaken - do physical work every day. There is a tendency of Americans to regard Eastern meditation as mystical, mysterious, and incomprehensible. To orientalize it. In a way this is disappointing, but it is also a wonderful celebration of the excitement of the other, and is a natural result of the meeting of two cultures. But in fact kensho is an everyday occurrence - I'm not talking about "unconscious drawing" to reach the "subconscious" or some kind of magick communion with spirits or possession by muses or buddhas. I often feel the terrible stress of maintaining a false self slip away as I am washing the dishes.

For the past week I have been having a frustrating time "promoting" my most recent project PERCEIVAL. I have written many emails to my friends and to strangers whose work I admire, constructed websites, etc etc. This is a very heavily social exercise, one that involves thinking about how people are going to feel when they read what seems like a very egocentric communiqué. Editing letters to create certain thoughts in the receiver, trying to engender a certain impression in their mind. I don't think that I am being more manipulative than anyone else doing these kinds of PR activities that are a natural part of an artist’s activities and the world in general. This is simply how this kind of activity is carried out. Indeed, all of the writing on social networks like myspace and public forums like YouTube is like this. In fact all letters, all writing, all art. There is always the element of considering how the receiver will interpret the work and therefore the element of considering how they will think of you, the social element of all activity, the constant simulation of conversations with the abstract "other." This is what makes communication possible, because without this editing not only would all people drift deep into their fantasy worlds to become incomprehensible egocentric maniacs, but there would be no shared referents, indeed all language would disappear as it depends on agreeing on common rules and sounds. But this simulation of a self that is acceptable to others, the relentless self-censorship and analysis is essentially the most exhausting and often negative aspect of the doublethink state of consciousness. Sometimes the doublethink is worth the energy - communication is one of my ideals - I have an irrational faith that it is "good." But this week I have sometimes found it to be tiring and unproductive.

Recently I wrote this in an email to my friend Dina -
"I love reaching out to other people with my art, to make my art live, but it pulls me away from the secret core of my own truth."

She asks me what I mean. I think communicating with other people is what art is all about. I put the ideas together in my mind, I plan out a project, I create an artifact, I create a cloud of ideas that inform the artifact, I somehow show these things to other people, I become involved in the dialogue (even when I try to remain as passive as possible - as in Perceival). I actually do love each aspect of this process - it enables the art to "live" - by which I mean it enters the sphere of public consciousness where it can compete freely, take up meanings I could never have imagined, perform functions it was not designed for, be copied and mutated, evolve, devolve, and die away. But I think that the core of the creative process is the act of creation that is not at all concerned with all the doublethink necessary to launch this process. I referred to this creative process as "the secret core of my own truth" and so fell into a common trap - a romanticization of the process of creativity as well as reinforcing the myth that there is a self who creates all this art. But again, this "trap" is not an entirely disagreeable place to be. I don't wholeheartedly disapprove of doublethink and I really want to feel my irrational emotions, not throw them away.

For all this, don’t forget the most advanced level of doublethink as described by Orwell - “That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness…”