Subject: Re: The Scn/1984 Parallel - Doublethink (RVY)
Date: 8 Sep 1997 22:06:08 GMT
Number 3 (seekon@ix.netcom.com) wrote: snipping other remarks
i'm curious if you have any thoughts about the similarities or differences between doublethink and mind control (e..g. as described by hassan). one aspect that seems similar is the sort of unconscious development of a separate belief structure/identity, while yet retaining (but maybe not using) the first.Quite frankly, I would be relunctant to step into this debate for several reasons. First, I hate the term "mind control" about as much as I dislike "brainwashing." For whatever reason, we have yet to come up with a proper English word/phrase for a phenomenon that DOES exist, despite the arguments of some apologists that I've seen here.
I posted the "doublethink" description because it described what I experienced and it had the advantage of being a "novel" and thus purposefully away from "scientific" or "cult" oriented material. I was trying to say that this decription is what I was familiar with, just for starters.
There IS a coercion that occurs and it is quite staggering to experience it and then look back at it. My problem is that if I choose to describe it, then I am into some category of "Oh, that's just like..." or "That's really nothing more than..." when I really can't say that what I decribe is the entirety of the experience.
I read Hassan's text years ago and I've come quite a way since then so I can't really comment on his as I don't trust my then-perception of it. But I do stand by what is found in "1984." What is expecially powerful about the book is that it gives the environment that holds it in place and it gives the motives of those in control and the parallels were, for me, staggering because it shows the "lie" that Party memebers lived in and how they simply ignored it. That is what happens in a cult and people outside it can't understand it and ask (e.g.,) "How could you belive this?" But in "1984" Orwell gives you WHY people believed it. To simply ask the question as to why the person deluded themselves or put themselves under such control without knowing of the environment is to be quite naive.
Let's try "1984" as the example. Would the apologists call what happened to Winston to be "mind control" that he comes to love Big Brother? What do THEY call "doublethink"?
Move it away from Hassan, me, Singer, whoever. Put it on Orwell. Is there "mind control" in that novel for THAT is the world that one can find in Scientology's Sea Org.
Robert Vaughn Young
