Crimestop
Crimestop is a Newspeak term for the first and simplest stage of the mental discipline imposed on every member of the Party in Oceania: the trained, instinctive capacity to halt at the threshold of any dangerous thought. Defined in Nineteen Eighty-Four as "protective stupidity," it is the least elaborate of the three interlocking disciplines grouped around the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite and doublethink, and it is the Party's most intimate device for making heresy impossible by strangling doubt before it can become conscious.
Definition and Place in the Party's Mental Discipline
Within the ideology of Ingsoc, crimestop means "the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought." It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. The term is not a prohibition but a description of an acquired reflex: the orthodox Party member does not resist doubt, he never quite arrives at it.
Yet the book insists that stupidity alone is not enough. Orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body, because Oceanic society rests ultimately on belief in Big Brother's omnipotence and the Party's infallibility, beliefs that reality does not support. Since the Party is not in fact infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts; the key-word here is blackwhite, a word with two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white; applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands it.
Crimestop is not an isolated device but part of an "elaborate mental training" undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite and doublethink, which makes the member unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever. It is the first and simplest stage of the discipline, teachable even to young children; the later stages lead into the full paradoxes of doublethink, whose ultimate subtlety is consciously to induce unconsciousness and then to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis just performed.
Forged Under Surveillance and Inner Discipline
The training that produces crimestop takes place inside a total surveillance system. A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police; even when alone he can never be sure that he is alone, and his friendships, relaxations, behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep and even the characteristic movements of his body are all jealously scrutinised. Any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle is certain to be detected. Crimestop is the internal complement of this external watchfulness: it sees to it that there is no inner struggle to betray.
Because in Oceania there is no law, thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden; the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments and vaporisations are not punishments for crimes actually committed but the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions but the right instincts. If he is a naturally orthodox person - in Newspeak a goodthinker - he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion, and crimestop is the childhood training that manufactures that instinct. Outward ceremonies reinforce the inward reflex: the discontents of a bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by devices such as the Two Minutes Hate, so that within thirty seconds all pretence is unnecessary and a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness flows through the whole group like an electric current.
The habit is cultivated in a sensorium of permanent watchfulness. The telescreen receives and transmits simultaneously, so that any sound above a very low whisper is picked up and any movement within its field of vision is seen, and there is no way of knowing whether one is being watched at any given moment. The citizen must live, from habit that becomes instinct, in the assumption that every sound he makes is overheard and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised. The same regime reaches into the body at waking, when the telescreen's whistle sends the Outer Party worker through the Physical Jerks before a coughing fit has emptied his lungs; crimestop is the mental counterpart of this bodily drill.
Brainwashing and the Conditioning of the Mind
When Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared, its contemporary readers were primed to see the hero's ordeal as a case of "brainwashing," a set of techniques said to be based on I. P. Pavlov's experiments in which dogs were trained to salivate on cue, and understood to be used by Soviet technocrats to condition human subjects into political reflexes useful to the State. In this light the Ministry of Love sequence is a lengthy and terrifying demonstration of such conditioning; crimestop is the name for the stage at which the conditioning no longer needs the interrogator, because it runs automatically inside the skull.
The relation between crimestop and doublethink is one of deepening inwardness. Doublethink, as described in Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, is a form of mental discipline whose goal is to be able to believe two contradictory truths at the same time; Winston's mind, meditating on the Party's slogans, slides away into its labyrinthine world, knowing and not knowing, holding simultaneously two opinions which cancel out, and applying the process to the process itself. Crimestop is the earlier, simpler layer of the same training: where doublethink reconciles contradictions, crimestop prevents the dangerous thought from arising at all.
Winston's Practice of Crimestop
In the re-education that follows his arrest, Winston is finally brought to practise crimestop on himself. After his capitulation he sits with the white slate and pencil he has been given and writes down the thoughts that come into his head: "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY." and "TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE." He accepts everything - that the past is alterable, that Oceania is at war with Eastasia and has always been at war with Eastasia, that the photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford disproving their guilt never existed. Then he sets to work to exercise himself in crimestop, presenting himself with propositions such as "the Party says the earth is flat" and training himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradict them.
To perform crimestop is not easy. It needs great powers of reasoning and improvisation; the arithmetical problems raised by such a statement as "two and two make five" are beyond Winston's intellectual grasp, and the discipline requires an athleticism of mind able at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. "Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain." The paradox is deliberate: protective stupidity must be produced by an effort of intelligence.
The same mechanism is visible earlier in the interrogation room, when O'Brien holds up four fingers and turns the dial of pain. Winston first answers "Four," then "Four! Four!", and at last, under the needle, "Five! Five! Five!" - and afterwards says that he would see five if he could, that he is trying to see five. For a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed, he did see five fingers, with no deformity, in a moment of luminous certainty when each new suggestion of O'Brien's filled up a patch of emptiness and became absolute truth. That is crimestop completing itself: the mind no longer needs to be forced, because it has learned to stop itself at the edge of its own disbelief.
The Abolition of Dangerous Thought
Taken together, crimestop, blackwhite and doublethink constitute the psychological machinery by which the Party proposes to arrest the course of history. The point of the whole elaborate training is that a Party member should be unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever; the discontents of his life are vented outward through the Two Minutes Hate, his dangerous speculations are killed in advance by his early-acquired inner discipline, and the need for the Thought Police to act from outside grows smaller as the inner police grows stronger. When Winston, at the end, has learned to love Big Brother, he has arrived where crimestop was always pointing: a condition in which the state no longer needs to suppress heresy because the heretic has already suppressed it in himself.
