Doublethink

I recently reread George Orwell's 1984, and while reading it I had several conversations about politics with people who seemed to me at the time to be exhibiting Doublethink. This led me to write the following essay, which lacks a decent introduction.
One can hold two contradictory opinions unknowingly; cognitive dissonance only takes effect when one is confronted with holding two contradictory opinions or sees something they believe to be real that contradicts their previously held opinions. Thus, the difficulty in doublethink is not allowing cognitive dissonance to rectify itself. This can be done in the simplest way by simply denying the evidence shown to you that your opinions are false. More difficult is avoiding the realization that two completely contradictory things that you believe actually contradict each other. This is achieved by such a strong emotional investment in beliefs that one becomes unable to question them logically.
This is the challenge set to propagandists: to make people believe things, things which run counter to their nature as decent humans, so strongly that they cannot question them logically. For example, many people have been inundated from birth with the percepts of some moral code, the Ten Commandments and their extensions in Judeo-Christianity, and analogous constructs in most every religion. These codes nearly always include some provision against killing others, and usually go so far as to mandate kindness and hospitality to others. In addition to religious codes, nations often have principles on which their Revolution was made and that their government was founded on. In America these are called the “Core Democratic Values.”
Political figures often play to these sorts of moral codes when running for office or simply trying to garner trust from the people. They are made to seem sympathetic to these causes and promise to enforce these sorts of moral codes over the populace if they are elected into office. In more powerful offices, primarily here those that deal with foreign policy and the military, politicians even promise to spread our moral precepts to other nations.
Kings and Popes launched Crusades to bring Christianity to the Muslims; European and American Imperialists invaded nearly half the world to bring industrial civilization to heathens. Now, Presidents and Prime Ministers stockpile nuclear weapons to “deter” opponents, and invade both right and left wing countries to bring them democracy, or, in some cases, simply to fend off the possible advances of unwanted Communists. Of course, almost without exception, these have been merely emotional justifications for economic motivations.
As the people are the ones who have the power to stop unwanted wars, they are the ones that propaganda is directed against. They have almost certainly been indoctrinated by their parents, teachers, and religious leaders with one of the aforementioned moral codes. This gives propagandists a good base to appeal to when making their pleas, but they must somehow avoid allowing people to realize that someone is using their moral code to persuade them to condone something fundamentally opposed to it.
At this point, propagandists most often invoke a cruel combination of fear and racism. Intense fear is generated by excessively exaggerating the threat to the people. This can be done by either using an incident such as the sinking of the Lusitania or the USS Maine to convince people that they are actually under attack, or by developing mass hysteria, as was done about the Soviet Union during the Cold War and about “Terrorism” today. Usually this entails hype in the media that suggests the enemy has super weapons, like the fictional “dirty bomb” that can supposedly be made from radioactive metals, Iraqi, North Korean, and Iranian nuclear weapons programs, and the hundreds of different absurd weapons the Soviet Union was accused of possessing during the Cold War.
In addition to a direct threat or general fear, propagandists create racial stereotypes and attempt to dehumanize their enemies. These two efforts are vitally tied, because their enemies are the basis for the stereotype, but the effect is to apply that stereotype to all racially similar people. This allows people a slight psychological leeway in which they no longer feel obligated to defend the lives of a certain group. Often, as in the case of the Jews in Nazi Germany, the enemy is assigned blame for a particular ill. Sometimes, a real attack is used to cast the entire race of the perpetrators as terrorists or enemies.
There are two dangers associated with this already cruel doctrine. The first is that an artificial sense of fear of other races can lead a populace to allow their government to enact laws they think will protect them. These sorts of laws in general allow percieved enemies of the state to be denied all sorts of rights, which the populace's moral code has set out in the constitution and otherwise. The problem with these laws is that they can be applied to anyone; usually there is no control over the execution of these laws because the matters they deal with are "sensitive." Thus, a law intended to allow the government freedom in abducting and torturing suspected terrorists can be used just as effectively against political dissidents or even normal citizens exhibiting suspicious behaviors or aquintances. Even worse, the entire thing could be based on a mistake. Overall, these laws are specifically intended to avoid having to deal with consitutional rights.
The other issue brought about by artificially created racial hatred is that it is the basis for the propagandists' creation of doublethink. The fear and hatred people feel for whomever the government and the corporations have directed it against prevents them from realizing how much this feeling runs counter to their personal moral code. When this dichotomy of feeling is presented to them, people often don't rethink their decisions because they are so afraid of the artificial enemy. They have been presented with a mortal danger to themselves and their children, and in the face of this, they cannot realize that the danger does not actually exist.
The final task left to propagandists is to give people an intellectual way to conform their two contradictory feelings. This allows them an avenue to pour their doublethought into when confronted with it by another. That is, it is not the reason they believe what they do; it is simply a shield for it; if it were lacking, they would not change their beliefs immediately upon reflection, but it does supply them with an excuse that allows them to not think when provoked to do so. When someone confronts a victim of doublethink, they do not have to resort to ad hominem attacks, because now they have a reason that actually responds to the criticism being levelled. As we've noted before, a justification such as this usually involves an appeal to the person's moral code. Almost inevitably it claims that the victims of the government's actions will either benefit from them, or that they are not actually human at all, sometimes both.
Thus, propagandists create doublethink by creating an intense hatred of some race or group, drawing on the populace's shared moral code when justifying their actions, which clearly cross the boundary of this moral code. People have an extremely strong feeling invested in both the hatred and their moral code, and somehow do not question the fact that the two blatantly contradict each other. This is because they have such a strong emotional investment in each that they manage to avoid logically thinking critically of either. They are provided with an intellectual justification, but this is simply a mask for their feelings, not the actual justification for them.