Oldthink

Oldthink is a word in the Newspeak B vocabulary in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, designated by the appendix "The Principles of Newspeak" as one of the few words whose function is not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. In the novel's dystopian society it labels every attitude and idea formed before the Revolution, and its connotations of wickedness and decadence make it inseparable from the Party's assault on objective and rationalist thought.

Definition and Function in Newspeak

The appendix singles out Oldthink as a word with highly subtilised meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who has not mastered the language as a whole. Its exemplary sentence, "Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc," can be rendered into Oldspeak as "Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism," but this translation is inadequate because the word oldthink is inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. The B vocabulary of Newspeak is constructed so that a word like Oldthink extends its meaning until it contains within itself whole batteries of words, which can then be scrapped and forgotten; in the case of Oldthink, what is absorbed is all vocabulary grouping itself round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism. The special function of such words, the appendix explains, is to make heretical thought literally unthinkable, since beyond the perception that a thought is heretical the necessary words are non-existent.

The Suppression of Pre-Revolutionary Thought

The elimination of objectivity and rationalism under the heading of Oldthink is part of a broader regression. The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the embedded treatise Winston reads, observes that scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society, and that as a whole the world of 1984 is more primitive than it was fifty years earlier. In Oceania the only research that continues is directed towards war and police espionage – the two problems the Party wants solved are how to discover what another human being is thinking and how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds. By folding objective and rationalist concepts into Oldthink, Newspeak makes it impossible to think of them as legitimate alternatives. A Party member no longer needs to know what such concepts meant; he needs only to know that they belong to the condemned past.

Oldthink and the Control of the Past

Oldthink is the linguistic face of the Party's control of memory. From the totalitarian point of view, memory is relatively easy to deal with when there is an agency like the Ministry of Truth to deny the memories of others and rewrite the past. The word Oldthink serves that project by giving a single, dismissive name to everything that might survive from the abolished past, so that any person who retains pre-Revolutionary ways of thinking can be categorised and eliminated. The Party's slogan "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past" demands that vocabulary itself be purged; the existence of a term like Oldthink is a permanent reminder that the past is not merely altered but destroyed as a category of thought. The linguistic purge is complemented by physical terror: the Ministry of Love, a windowless building that can only be entered on official business, awaits those whom the vocabulary condemns.

Significance in Orwell's Political Critique

Oldthink is one of the most pointed products of Orwell's dissatisfaction with political dishonesty. In a letter written while he was revising Nineteen Eighty-Four, he described a "schizophrenic manner of thinking" among the English Left, in which words like "democracy" could bear two irreconcilable meanings, and he traced this to the widespread acceptance of the Russian regime as socialist in the face of its own practices. Oldthink is the exact negative counterpart of doublethink: doublethink allows a Party member to hold contradictory truths at once, while Oldthink assigns everything that threatens the Party's version of truth to the discredited past. Orwell himself, after his experience in Spain, declared that every line of serious work he had written since 1936 had been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as he knew it. The invention of Oldthink belongs to that project: it dramatises the loss of the language in which one can say that two and two make four.