Goodthink

Goodthink is a term in Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, for orthodoxy, and one of the novel's clearest demonstrations that the Party wages war on language because language is the vehicle of thought. Winston Smith reaches for its adjectival form when he tries to explain his wife Katharine to Julia, defining goodthinkful as "naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought." As a B-vocabulary compound word, goodthink names the positive, affirmative pole of the Party's mental discipline: where thoughtcrime and doublethink describe what must be prevented or managed, goodthink describes the ideal condition of a mind that is correct without effort, and therefore the point at which the Party's control of words becomes control of reality.

Definition and linguistic structure

Goodthink is constructed like all B-vocabulary words: two or more words welded into a single easily pronounceable compound that always functions as a noun-verb and inflects by the regular rules. Its full paradigm is goodthink, goodthinked, goodthinking, goodthinkful, goodthinkwise, goodthinker. It means, very roughly, orthodoxy, or, taken as a verb, to think in an orthodox manner. The verbal noun goodthinker labels the person who is naturally orthodox: in the analysis of Party rule, such a person will in all circumstances know, "without taking thought," what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. This is what the Party requires of its members — not merely the right opinions but the right instincts, since Oceania has abolished law and punishes thoughts that have not yet become deeds. The goodthinker is the solved problem of that system: a citizen who never has to pause at the threshold of a dangerous idea because he never arrives there.

Design and purpose in Newspeak

The B vocabulary to which goodthink belongs was deliberately constructed for political purposes, not merely to express the Party's world-view but to impose a desirable mental attitude on the person using the words. Newspeak's declared aim was to make all other modes of thought impossible; its vocabulary was designed to diminish the range of thought, and the reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, so that no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. The word free, for instance, remained usable only in the sense of being free from lice or weeds, because political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts and were therefore nameless. Syme, the philologist working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, explains that once the language is final, thoughtcrime will be literally impossible, because there will be no words left in which to express it. Goodthink is the positive counterpart of this negative work: it gives the Party member a ready-made word for the required mental state while heretical alternatives remain unnamed. In 1984 Newspeak was still a provisional version, written mainly in Times leading articles and expected to supersede Oldspeak entirely by 2050.

The goodthinker and Party discipline

The figure of the goodthinker appears in the book's account of a governing order that has dispensed with laws. In Oceania there is no law: purges, arrests, tortures and vaporisations are not penalties for crimes already committed but the wiping-out of persons who might at some time in the future commit a crime. A Party member is therefore required to have right instincts as well as right opinions, and many of the beliefs demanded of him could not be plainly stated without exposing the contradictions of Ingsoc. The naturally orthodox goodthinker knows, in every circumstance and "without taking thought," what is true and what ought to be felt; he has been shaped by elaborate mental training in childhood so that orthodoxy functions as instinct. Goodthink is thus the name the Party gives to the successful outcome of that educational machinery: a citizen whose correctness is not the result of reasoning but its replacement.

Use and significance in the story

The word enters the novel's intimate life in the belfry hideout, when Winston asks Julia whether she knows the Newspeak word goodthinkful and then explains what it means. She has never heard the term, but she recognizes the kind of person immediately. The exchange shows how completely Newspeak has colonized even the private speech of a man engaged in secret rebellion, and it attaches the Party's grandest abstraction to a single domestic figure: Katharine, the wife Winston describes in that conversation. Julia's instant recognition also marks the distance between the two lovers — Winston can name the Party's ideal in its own language, while Julia, who has simply refused the ideal, has no need for the word. Goodthink is thus more than a piece of vocabulary; it is a measure of how far the system has reached into the minds it controls.