Ever feel like the truth is slipping away? That reality depends on who’s telling the story? I sure have.
This is Arlene Dickinson’s opening to an important post about truth and polarization.
It got me thinking about George Orwell’s classic dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949.
It is as relevant now as it was during the Cold War.
Orwell describes a dystopian totalitarian superstate called Oceania.
One of the main techniques the Oceanian government uses to control the population is called “doublethink”.
The Ministry in charge of doublethink is the Ministry of Truth.
It disseminates lies and propaganda.
The Ministry of Truth forms the government, together with the Ministry of Food (charged with starvation), the Ministry of Love (charged with torture) and the Ministry of Peace (charged with war).
The Ministry of Truth deploys doublethink to create cognitive dissonance amongst the population, intended to untether their perception of reality from objective reality, and thus make them easier to control.
This is exemplified on the Ministry of Truth’s building itself, which prominently displays the slogans:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
In Oceania, there is no such thing as an objectively true fact. All facts are relative and subject to being revised by the Ministry of Truth.
Two contradictory statements can both be true at the same time. 2+2=4 is true, but 2+2=5 is also true.
For anyone to recognize, much less verbalize, any falsehood or contradiction in the party line is considered blasphemy and an offence against the state.
Doublethink is:
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 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.
1984, meet 2025:
🔹Surrendering Ukrainian citizens, cities and homes to an aggressor state is peace.
🔹Canada is the United States’ 51st state and Prime Minister Trudeau is Governor Trudeau.
🔹Canada is not a real country and its borders are not real borders.
🔹Buying goods from a trading partner is a subsidy.
🔹Suppressing hate speech is censorship.
🔹The Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America.
Who else thinks “Truth Social” is positively Orwellian a name?
In her New York Times article “‘You Can’t Pin Him Down’ Trump’s Contradictions Are His Ultimate Cover” (The New York Times, March 8, 2025), Erica Green reflects on the implications of Donald Trump’s tortured relationship with the truth:
President Trump’s shifting positions and outright lies have presented the American public with dueling narratives at every turn. […]
Since storming back into office, Mr. Trump has used a dizzying rhetorical tactic of shifting positions like quicksand, muddying his messages and contradicting himself, sometimes in the same day. The inconsistencies have presented the American public with dueling narratives at every turn, allowing people to pick and choose what they want to believe about the president’s intentions.
Mr. Trump has long dealt in distortions and lies, including in his first term. But as he executes a much more aggressive agenda at home and abroad, his contradictions have become more brazen and more pronounced. […]
Mr. Trump has boasted about his meandering speaking style, which he calls the “weave,” and he often muses about things — like whether he should be granted a constitutionally prohibited third term — with a wink and a nod.
But experts say the dissonance can become dangerous.
“Once you undermine consistency, the shared sense of reality, you’re undermining the basis of democracy,” said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor who has written books about propaganda and the erasure of history. “If there’s no shared sense of reality, we can’t collectively make decisions. So the only decision maker will be the disrupter in chief.”
Mr. Stanley said Mr. Trump’s contradictions boil down to a simple truth.
“If you’re constantly contradicting yourself,” he said, “you’re constantly lying.”
Truth is not relative.
Let’s decry propaganda and disinformation when we see it.
