I was thinking today about the idea of “blackwhite” that Orwell introduced in 1984. For those who may not know what that is, it’s basically the ability to accept whatever “truth” is introduced. For example, that black is white. It’s more than just believing that black is white, it’s knowing that black is white. I was wonder what the mind’s capacity to do this is after knowing that black is black and white is white for so long.
So what would have to happen for someone to change your mind about black being white? Would repetition really do it or would something else have to be associated with the repetition to make you actually know.
Orwell said it was the ability to accept these kinds of “truths” when the Party demanded it too. That would seem to indicate that when someone told you, “Oh, two plus two is five.” You would immediately accept that as correct and know yourself that two plus two is five. Just that idea alone seems really complicated to me. There are so many “facts” (that you know to be true that go along with that statement) that you would have to have previously ignored or forgotten about in order to be able to know that two plus two equals five is true. It seems to me that this idea, in practice, makes people more narrow-minded. A streamlining of political and moral views, if you will.
It just makes you think about how we’re told a lot of things over and over, or how the nomenclature for something (like war or national security) will change and no one really bothers to notice that it’s changed. I think we all need to pay more attention.
