No Treason

From Wikipedia

Doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs. It is an integral concept of George Orwell‘s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

War and Peace, turning their backs on one another.

One of my favourite examples of doublethink is

“War is Peace” or, “We have to fight’em over there, so we don’t have to fight’em over here”.

The premise being that only through war abroad can there be peace at home. Or that killing creates safety. Or that murder is a tool to prevent, yep, you guessed it, murder.

FSK addresses some of these on a recent blog post. But he sees them as trolling, not realizing that they are just stupid arguments, made by people who are doublethinking or holding two contradictory opinions simultaneously.

“People are intrinsically evil. Therefore, government is needed.”

This is a favourite of mine, and apparently many liberal progressives! If people are intrinsically evil, and the government is composed of people, then do we need a government of intrinsically evil people, to deal with intrinsically evil people? It’s a good question, isn’t it?

To date, governments have proved to be much more evil, on a much larger scale than individual citizens, or even gangs and groups.

After all, who can mass kidnap (arrest and convict) people and place them in rape rooms (prisons), without actually committing a crime by any popular legal definition?

Who can bomb, maim, draft, shoot, sink, demolish, assassinate and torture, and it’s all legal? Government.

Which brings me to another example FSK posted;

“Without the State, won’t small disputes escalate into war?”

When people say things like this, it really makes me wonder if they understand that the state already escalates disputes into wars. If the state was known for diplomacy, given that there are literally hundreds of states world wide, we would not be coming out of a century of massive suffering and warfare, but an era of unheard of peace!

One last word on doublethink. It’s everywhere. The number of people holding multiple contradictory opinions simultaneously today is off the charts. If you stop to look and listen for them, you will be astounded by the fact that most of what man entertains between his ears is completely irrational.