–steveaz

I think that Orwell was merely describing, in a sense, a type of personality. Although I would IMHO classify it as a form of mental illness, such folk tend to do well in strictly hierarchical organizations, whether they be countries, corporations, religions, or whatever. They are the People of the Pecking Order, merciless toward those who are “under” them and fawning toward those who are above, unless of course they detect an opportunity to usurp their superior’s position, in which case they will turn upon their “superior” in an instant. They are the cholesterol of large corporations. Over time they tend to accumulate and make the organization unworkable as the goals of the business take a back seat to the internal politics. It does not matter if the ideas of Mr. X are good or not, the only consideration is whether the implementation of such an idea might have an impact of the hierarchies opinions of Y, Z, and A, who might be called to account for why they didn’t think of that idea to begin with. In corporations, if left unchecked, it leads to bankruptcy. In governmental organizations, by contrast, no such hope of auto-extinction exists.

And this dynamic has nothing to do with a left/right dichotomy. Functionally speaking, the Nazi’s and the Soviets were the same. If an alien race from another planet that had no understanding of any human language had observed and compared them, I doubt that they would have noticed any significant differences between the two systems. Their slogans and reasons for existing were very far apart, but functionally there was little or no difference between them.

In essence, to use the Hegelian nomenclature which Karl Marx was so fond of, an all powerful centralized government contains the seeds of its own destruction. “Doublethink” is nothing more than a symptom of a sick, cancerous world view that is in denial. It is not the cause.