The essence of the phenomenon
This piece was created under the influence of the Political forum of the city website of Nizhny Novgorod NN.RU and is purely ironic in character. Its contents have nothing to do with our world; they are a code of rules kept in the library of Orkashas in the north of Litania, on the planet Zerkus.
The theory of doublethink
1) Doublethink is a great instrument for playing on human weaknesses. It is the guarantee of your long and successful dictatorship, no matter how absurdly and bloodily you rule the country. Doublethink is a person's ability to think opposite things about one and the same subject. People must think in two ways about everything, except in the cases listed below.
2) The people must have no doublethink about you. You are infallible, great and all-powerful. You love your friends and your people, and you are merciless to enemies. Any information that contradicts this must be destroyed, hidden (if it cannot be destroyed) or drowned in a sea of other information (if it can neither be destroyed nor hidden). Those who carry this information must be destroyed or intimidated.
3) The people must have no doublethink about your enemies. Your enemies are the enemies of your people. They seek to destroy them at any cost. Your enemies do not belong to your people. This is an axiom. Any information that contradicts this must be destroyed, hidden (if it cannot be destroyed) or drowned in a sea of other information (if it can neither be destroyed nor hidden). Those who carry this information must be destroyed or intimidated.
4) The reverse is not true with regard to enemies: the enemies of your people are not necessarily your personal enemies. What is more, they may be your friends. Cultivate the people's doublethink about them.
The principles of doublethink
5) Do not be afraid to spread lies. The attitude towards information does not depend on its objectivity. It depends on how often it is repeated and on the authority of the people who repeat it. Therefore, entrust the telling of lies to those people who are the most authoritative and infallible in the eyes of the people.
6) Beware of uttering lies yourself: if your enemies find a way to publish refutations too often, the people will develop doublethink about you. In time, they may come to hate you.
7) Do not be afraid of bitter truth either. If there is absolutely no way to hide it, entrust the telling of such truth to the people most hated by the nation. To your enemies, for example. Your people will reject such truth and rush towards the sweet lie.
8) Not only does truth depend on authority, but authority depends on truth. If today people are convinced that you are right, tomorrow they will believe your lie as well. So earn your authority by telling truths that do you no harm. Report your successes, keep silent about your failures. Once your authority is great, you will be able to lie to your heart's content.
9) The key to doublethink is indicators that cannot be measured objectively. Spirituality, for instance. Today you can call fatherhood a manifestation of spirituality, and tomorrow kill your own son, saying that he was a traitor and that killing traitors is spiritual. No one will be able to accuse you, because spirituality is immeasurable.
The sources of doublethink
10) Religion is the most convenient and best thought-out source of doublethink. The contradictions in religious myths are served up in a beautiful poetic wrapping, so the people grow accustomed to doublethink with pleasure.
11) Do not take too widespread a religion as the state one. That would spoil your monopoly on interpreting its canons. Better create a branch of a well-known religion and declare it the only correct one. This will make it easy to bring the followers of the general religion under the banners of your branch, and then to play on patriotic feelings when you need to set two confessions against each other.
12) If a well-known religion cannot be used at all, create your own.
13) A religion does not have to be belief in God. It may be the worship of a hero well known to the people. A revolutionary, for example, who helped you come to power — even if you later shot him yourself.
14) Write down all the postulates that produce doublethink in a special list, and then publish them through the official religious representation, the church. Since the church represents the will of an infallible absolute, the people will trustingly absorb everything you have written, even if two neighbouring points completely contradict each other.
15) Grant the church the exclusive right to measure spirituality, and punish those who presume to measure spirituality outside the church. In this way you will make the official views the only correct ones in the eyes of the people.
16) If doubters appear, explain the contradictions by saying that simple people are not given to understand such things.
17) If the doubts grow too loud, destroy and intimidate such people.
18) Another source of doublethink is the tribal instinct, the "us and them" instinct. The emotions stirred by the words "ours" and "alien", "friend" and "enemy" cloud reason and make it impossible to notice that the people's enemies and friends are constantly swapping places in official propaganda. If you have nothing to answer an opponent in public, call him an alien. Reduce absolutely any discussion, even a purely scientific one, to the question of "us and them".
Lack of education
19) Education and a knowledge of the laws of logic hinder the introduction of doublethink. Therefore, the fewer educated people there are, the easier the country is to govern. Destroy education.
20) Do not overdo it, however. Someone will have to create the finest things and works of art for you. So keep educational institutions for a narrow circle of people.
21) Entrust teaching only to people loyal to you. Put pupils and students into bondage. You may leave the right to educate to religious institutions alone. This will let you pour generous doses of doublethink into young heads and keep them from becoming too fond of science.
22) Elevate the people's simplicity into a cult. Do not hesitate to use religion for this. Let a sacred text or the head of the church declare that God loves simple people and is preparing a better life for them after death. No one will be able to refute it, because only the church speaks in God's name.
23) Pay particular attention to the exact sciences. The exact sciences presume to measure all things, spirituality included. A multitude of technical specialists can therefore undermine your moral authority. Keep a tight control over the study of the exact sciences. Create an image of outcasts, antisocial types and nonentities for the people who study them.
24) Advertise the learning of people loyal to you as a public good. Let everyone know that the people have all the less need to think when such learned men stand up for them.
25) Call educated enemies cunning schemers and scoundrels. Since they are enemies of the people, they will use their cunning against the people. And cunning against a fool is a forbidden trick. The people will hate the enemies all the more.
26) Encourage the emigration of educated people from your country. Call them traitors.
27) Encourage the entry of low-skilled labour. As an option, set up labour colonies in the countries you have conquered.
A loyal entourage
28) Always keep a loyal entourage of sufficient radius. The radius is proportional to the sum of money you give that entourage. Do not be too greedy, or your enemies will kill you in your sleep.
29) Do not hesitate to sacrifice someone from your entourage if the people thirst for revenge for their sufferings. But beware if the victim might give away your secrets before dying. Sometimes it is punishment enough to scold a person publicly and move him well away from the people's attention.
30) Do not keep people of conviction in your inner loyal circle. You will always have enough money and threats for a greedy and cowardly man, but you may not have enough ideas for a man of ideas.
The media
31) The mass media must be your outer loyal circle. Do not begrudge them money either, or instead of your commissions they will start carrying out the commissions of the people or of your enemies.
32) The media work by a very simple scheme: they publish every useful truth and lie about you and every harmful truth and lie about your enemies. About everything else they keep silent. The ratio of truth to lies is regulated by the points on the Principles of doublethink.
33) Organise the media so that as few people as possible run them. The fewer people you need to bribe and intimidate, the more stable your rule and the less you have to bother with them. Liquidate superfluous media without embarrassment, especially insufficiently loyal ones. Organise censorship, introduce heavy punishments for offenders. Remember: it is precisely through the media that doublethink is implanted. They are vital to you.
34) At the lower levels of the media you may keep people of conviction. They will do their work sincerely and thereby convince the people of your infallibility. At the same time, the truth about you will be concealed by the upper levels of your entourage. Just never let such people of conviction rise to high posts.
35) In the intervals between glorifying you and destroying your enemies, the media must occupy themselves with showing shocking material. Let them show killings, sex and fashion trends, tell horror stories and tall tales, broadcast lectures by academicians of alternative academies. The psychological shock produced by such information both intrigues, distracting people from the wish to make their own lives better, and frightens, distracting them from real problems.
36) Taboo for the media must be not only scientific and educational programmes, but also programmes that teach self-organisation and self-government. Civic activity undermines any dictatorship.
A pocket opposition
37) Be sure to have a pocket opposition. Play "good cop, bad cop". The pocket opposition will criticise you publicly, thereby letting the people blow off steam, but every time it will be publicly defeated by your brilliant tactical and strategic moves.
38) The pocket opposition must always support your people. This is an axiom. That is what distinguishes it from your real enemies. Everyone in the country must know this.
39) Hire good actors as oppositionists, ones who inspire trust in certain social strata. Remember that the main goal of a pocket opposition is not competition, but the staging of a convincing performance about competition.
40) Reduce any attempt to start a conversation about an alternative to your dictatorship to a conversation about the pocket opposition. It alone is the alternative. Any discontent that does not grow into the frameworks you have created comes from the worst enemies of the people and must be destroyed.
41) The limit of action for the pocket opposition is elections, which it must invariably lose. Secure the win by means of administrative resources and by mistakes specially arranged by the opposition itself. The opposition must drown out any talk of coups and revolutions, explaining that it does not want the blood of its own people.
42) The pocket opposition must inspire not only trust but also sufficient disgust, otherwise people of principle will flow into it. A critical mass of people of principle will turn the pocket opposition into a real one. Do not publicize calls to join the ranks of the opposition. Create the impression that the opposition will cope with its problems on its own.
The cult of the state
43) The concept of the state must be entirely identical to the concept of the country. The concept of the country must be entirely identical to the concept of the people. The concept of you must be entirely identical to the concept of the state. Thus, by declaring the people the highest value, you declare yourself the highest value. Achieve this identity with the help of religion, the opinions of commissioned experts, and specially arranged philosophical and historical discussions.
44) Individual persons from among the people are not the people. Therefore, in destroying your enemies you are not destroying a part of the people. You are saving the whole people. Without you the people will perish. Count on the full and unconditional support of the population while carrying out repressions. To create the image of a state that simultaneously cares and punishes, you will need well-developed doublethink among the people.
45) Since your enemies do not belong to your people, they must belong to a foreign people, and consequently to a foreign state.
46) As the enemy state, choose the strongest state. This will frighten people more and make them hand over to you exclusive rights to govern their lives. Constantly maintain the image of the external enemy in all media, including church media.
47) If you de facto cooperate with a state that you declare to be an enemy, you will need well-developed doublethink among the people. As a last resort, declare that you are playing a subtle diplomatic game whose ultimate goal is, after all, the destruction of the adversary.
48) The image of the state must be unshakeable. When someone makes a mistake on behalf of the state, excommunicate him from the state. Call him a traitor and an enemy.
49) When you need to use up part of the people for your own purposes, call the state the Motherland. Create the feeling that every person is eternally in debt to the Motherland. You will need well-developed doublethink among the people, because poor uneducated people do not like living in debt.
The cult of the nation
50) The cult of the nation has second priority after the cult of the state. The nation may be sacrificed as a last resort. The cult of the value of the nation is necessary in order to set some nations upon others. Use this as often as possible.
51) Deliberately bring in representatives of some nationalities to the places where others live. Cultural differences will not only provoke people into conflict and thereby distract them from your crimes and mistakes, but will also allow you and your friends to save money on wages, if the difference in the level of culture and living of the two nations is significant.
52) While the cult of the nation is not yet too strong, see to it that your national provocations remain secret.
53) In unofficial propaganda, ascribe to every nation the very same unique traits. Every nation is cleverer, more beautiful, braver and stronger than the rest. The culture of every nation is more developed than the culture of any other nation. Every nation is more spiritual than other nations. No one has yet invented an instrument for measuring spirituality, so no one will ever be able to refute you.
54) For each nation, create one or several enemy nations. Endow the hostile nation with the most negative traits that come to mind. Let them be treacherous sorcerers who seized the rest of the world by deceit and are now stretching their gnarled paws toward your Motherland.
55) Once the cult of the ideal nation and the cult of the hostile nation have been created, unleash the machine of doublethink at full power. Declare your enemies to be representatives of the hostile nation. Fabricate birth certificates, data about parents, witness testimony. At the mere mention of your enemy's nation, the people will erupt in foaming rage. Your friends, who are de facto representatives of the hostile nation, declare to be representatives of "your own" nation. No one will be able to refute this, since there are no exact and objective ways of establishing nationality.
The cult of the patriarchal family
56) The family is another effective institution for justifying dictatorship. Guard the cult of the family slightly less than the cult of the nation. Constantly draw analogies between the state and the family in official propaganda.
57) A woman in a patriarchal family is crushed by domestic problems and feels incapable of changing anything in her life. She therefore strives to influence life with the help of supernatural forces, and easily yields to the influence of religion and of tall tales from the media. And this means that exactly half of the able-bodied people can be removed from civic life merely by maintaining the cult of the keeper of the hearth. Remember this. Use this.
58) The primacy of the man in the patriarchal family creates an attitude toward you as toward the head of a large family (for example, as toward the "father of nations"). Through the cult of male power in the family, the cult of dictatorship is maintained. Guard the cult of male power with the help of propaganda and church postulates.
59) The generalized cult is the parental cult, which allows adults to vent their feelings on children, taking advantage of their status. Parental dictatorship is the outlet you can grant your people while still coming out ahead yourself, for the next generation will be attached to dictatorial methods of governance even more strongly - it will simply know no other methods. Preserve the cult of parental dictatorship.
60) Stir up particular popular hostility toward any projects that destroy the traditional family: the cult of the tyrant-man, the dishwasher-woman, the subordinate-child. Call any attempt to cast doubt on traditions the machinations of external enemies. Repeat constantly that without the traditional family the people will not survive. Place the emphasis on the future of the children.
61) A good aid to you in this will be the instinctive attraction of some people to non-traditional sexual relations and the centuries-old traditions of ridiculing these relations. Always declare that anti-family propaganda has been commissioned by gays, lesbians, transvestites and bisexuals. Persecute them, display all your fury and might. They will not be able to answer you in any way, and the perverse preferences of your friends are always easy to conceal.
62) Restrict the right to divorce, justifying it by spirituality and the support of the family. People unhappy in marriage turn all their anger upon their relatives; they have no time left to examine the situation in the country and understand the real causes of their misfortunes.
63) Restrict the right to abortion. Unwanted children reinforce dictatorship within the family. A destitute abandoned mother is a citizen guaranteed to be out of commission. Homeless children are material for your future army of adherents of the cult of force. Most important of all - make sure that no one finds out that the state ought to eliminate the social causes of abortion, and not abortions themselves. Let all the blame lie on the adulterous parents themselves.
The cult of traditions
64) Create and strengthen the cult of traditions. Traditions help you wean the people from thinking for themselves. Everything has already been thought up by the great ancestors, and to doubt the rightness of the great ancestors is a crime against the people.
65) Declare traditions harmful to you to be relics of barbarism. You will need well-developed doublethink among the people in order to prove the authority of all traditions and at the same time destroy the authority of some of them. It sometimes helps to present traditions as alien borrowings. You will need a strong cult of the state and cult of the nation in order to destroy traditions declared alien.
66) Do not hesitate to create new traditions and to present them through the media as old traditions.
67) To make traditions easier to manage, turn history into your chief prostitute. Since your illiterate people have no access to primary sources, they will readily believe any lie about their past. Only do not forget, while doing so, to play on national pride.
The cult of hypocrisy
68) Hypocrisy is a generalization of the cults of the state, the nation, the family and traditions. Use the contradictions between the interests of the individual, the family, the nation and the state in order to create a general system of contradictions and to develop doublethink among the people many times over.
69) Create official hypocritical organizations and encourage the creation of autonomous ones. The hypocrites will defend your dictatorship even when your personal authority has been undermined. Do not forget to share hypocrisy with the pocket opposition as well.
70) Begin implanting hypocrisy in minds from an early age, starting with the teaching of literacy and of religious canons, when a person is not yet capable of a critical attitude toward information. Take the language apart using patriotic texts as examples. Let some talented poet write, in your name, a poem for children about love for the Motherland.
71) From those same years, begin instilling an attitude toward your enemies as enemies of the people. Warn that the enemies are very cunning, that they skilfully disguise themselves and bribe compatriots. This will make it easier for you to declare former friends enemies, and former enemies friends.
72) Love and hatred must be barely distinguishable in the public consciousness, so that they can easily be substituted for one another. Love and hatred must be justified by spirituality, and spirituality must be established by you and by religion.
73) By declaring as often as possible different levels of spirituality - now of love, now of hatred toward the very same phenomena - you will achieve a state close to schizophrenia. For example, you will make the masses demand in all seriousness the resurrection of a long-dead person to take revenge on the enemies of the people. Only do not overdo the lying. Use the principles of doublethink.
74) You and your inner circle need not observe a single hypocritical rule, but see to it that in public you look like a model of morality and virtue.
Advantageous laws
75) Pass laws under which anyone can be punished. For example, a law on foul language, on viewing pornography, or on improper appearance. There is no need to punish everyone, but it is necessary to punish those you find inconvenient and to hold show trials, in order to keep the rest in fear.
76) Protect hypocrisy by law. Moreover, try to destroy objective, precise legislation by which the people might live. Replace it with vague morality. Morality you can control completely, thanks to doublethink. Precise legislation you may leave to the privileged strata, who have no need of hypocrisy.
77) Admit only loyalists and the pocket opposition to the discussion and passing of laws. To calm the people, you may hold staged debates with the participation of those same trusted persons.
78) The most monstrous laws are best passed on days of national tragedy. If the tragedy does not occur by itself, organize it. Lay the blame on your enemies.
Direct stupefaction
79) Keep the people in sufficient poverty and hunger. This contributes to sharpening the instincts of survival and dulling consciousness.
80) Support the spread of drugs that destroy the personality. For example, alcohol. Justify this drug by religion and traditions.
81) So as not to destroy your authority, ban the other drugs, declare war on them. You will need well-developed doublethink for the people to acknowledge the evil of all drugs, yet the sacred benefit of some of them.
82) Do not hesitate to place secret orders for banned drugs in your own country, or better still, in a foreign one. If anything happens, you will declare the shipments to be the machinations of the enemies of the people.
83) Create a subculture of using banned drugs. Especially among the youth of the privileged strata. In this way you will obtain levers of pressure on their parents.
84) The highest art of doublethink: open in your own country a military base of a hostile country for transferring consignments of drugs from a third country, and declare that the hostile country was forced to take this step under onerous conditions in order to conduct a military operation in that third country. Relax and watch as your strategic genius is extolled.
The cult of force
85) A thoroughly stupefied people begins, like animals, to instinctively follow the cult of force, the cult of the alpha male. Support it, otherwise you will lose your authority.
86) Become an alpha male yourself, be photographed regularly in advantageous poses. Acquire an image-maker. Stage demonstrative punishments and rescues of people. Make use of a speechwriter who has a feel for humour. Laughter at an opponent is the mark of a winner.
87) Out of homeless children, or simply out of poor families, organize a guard of the most uneducated and devoted fighters. Set them upon your enemies among the people. In case of problems, disavow any involvement with them.
88) Fund the army and the police as the third priority - after your inner circle and the media. Remember that the army can betray you, and traitors with weapons are very hard to restrain.
89) Within the army and the police, create special morals departments that will bring up the fighters in the way you need. You may install a representative of religion in every unit. The army and the police have a heightened sense of duty to the state. Use this. Spread rumours that any discontent originates from abroad.
90) So that no doubts arise in the army and the police that your people cannot be discontented, give them pay an order of magnitude higher than that of the bulk of the population.
91) Demonstrate the strength of the state by periodically attacking small countries. Explain the attacks by the interests of the people. If the army, despite the funding, is weak, conceal this, and to questions about possible attacks on other countries answer that your state is too peace-loving for war.
The struggle against ideas
92) Any harmful ideas must be destroyed. Unfortunately, some ideas are so popular that banning them would do more harm than good.
93) In such cases, create Cargo Cults - special organisations that will formally support the harmful ideas, but in fact will distort them and channel them into safe waters.
94) Put experienced propagandists and actors of the pocket opposition at the head of such cults. Into the lower ranks admit genuine supporters of the ideas harmful to you. The propagandists must work over every true believer so that he himself then becomes a supporter of the distorted idea and can pass his perverted understanding on to others.
95) Strip the scientific component out of harmful ideas. Fill them with the meaning of "us versus them". You will need well-developed doublethink among the people, so that the original ideas and the distorted ones contradicting them are held in their heads at the same time.
And, finally..
96) When you help to lobby the interests of the ruling class, conceal the very existence of that ruling class. There is only you and the people, and you are one whole.
97) Pick out a country you can flee to in case of a serious revolt. Maintain good relations with it de facto, even if in official propaganda it is listed as hostile. Open an account there in a reliable bank that cannot tell one smell from another.
98) Share the very best with your family. Give your children an exemplary higher education. Abroad, if you like, if education in your own country is completely ruined or if they cannot be shielded from the people. Hide your emigrant children from the patriotically minded public.
99) If a relative starts getting in the way, get rid of him: kill him, banish him to a monastery, send him to the war. In the first case, pin it all on the enemies. In the last two, justify yourself with spirituality. You will gain even more rating as an unprincipled leader.
100) Be sure to create a record in your personal archive in which you predict that after your death the enemies of the people will slander you. Express your confidence that history will put everything in its place and cleanse your image of the mud. Foresight, in the eyes of people who lack it, is equal to proof, so in the future the peoples will go on exalting you and demanding your resurrection. Who knows, perhaps it will work out.