Sometimes to be in temporary comfort zones, you can be in favor of the situations, in favor of the WRONGS, with your morals & logics by consciously being logical & illogical simultaneously. This concept is widely (actually not widely, or else there wouldn’t be such number of propaganda supporters) known as “DOUBLETHINK”, a term coined in the book “1984” BY George Orwell.

I have an eerie feeling that my language proficiency is not competent enough to make you understand such a complex term. So, there is a part of the story given below where writer tried to make the reader understand about the concept of it. Read it & then we shall carry on with the discussion relating to our current society.

There are always people around us trying to explain why the wrong things they do is the right thing to do. Actually, we all try to make an excuse to be in our comfort zones. On such scenarios, people think & say things quiet logically but also illogically at the same time, just to solidify their standpoint. I am giving some personally encountered scenarios below.

Scenario 1: I asked a very well related person that why did he support the current governing political party despite such thefts, rigged elections & genocides. In reply he told me about the roads and bridges that they made (by the taxpayer’s money) during a decade of their regime. No other leaders could have done that, according to him. For us the thing observable here is, how he neglected the negative aspects (consciously) & embraced the positive aspects (again consciously) despite the situation being messed up. He is not refusing the crimes they did, rather he knows very well. Just to be relevant & keep ties with his local companions (which is in fact his comfort zone), he chooses to tweak his thinking process in such a way that he will only receive and provide good things about the people in power (“BIG BROTHERS” as per in the book 1984) and consciously throw away any bad aspects. Such act of being consciously unconscious about facts is “DOUBLETHINK”.

Scenario 2: Next person is also a known one to me who is a police officer. He is an S.P. (Superintendent of Police). As you may know, the government job scheme is worst in our country. People need to pay a huge amount in bribe to get a job. From the chart below you can clearly see that such officer’s as him get no more than 40 thousand Taka er month as salary. Keeping the others extra facilities & rations in account, we may still estimate that his total legal earning can’t exceed 60 thousand. But he expends this much money just on his children’s tuition fees & car expenditures. His family lives in luxurious apartment with 2 maids also. On being asked, he first made excuses like, “The job can’t be sustained in current environment without having those illegal earnings.” & “I also need to give share to the upper masters, so there is no space of honesty”. The quotes are sad. But then he went further to legalize & glorify the acts of officers like him, how they helped some people during the pandemic & how he along with his team caught a big local mafia once. Here again, he started to neglect those wrong doings (consciously) & embraced some good works that he gets actually paid for.

I honestly hope till now, I was able to make you understand the concept of “DOUBLETHINK”. This intellectual practice let people be in a world of man-made fantasy. Ignoring the real problems, people support things that just bring chaos to the society, but a subtle mental comfort to those who are too blind to see. Sometimes ordinary people also try to legalize the things that they are comfortable doing although that’s wrong to do (like some student friends trying to explain why getting good grades by cheating is not bad). People who do DOUBLETHINK deceives themselves. They master the power of controlling their imagination so that they don’t exceed the artificial comfort zone of mind. The BIG BROTHERS want us to master this trick also so that the mass people become loyal to the power. As a conscious member of the society & state, we should not fall for such cheap traps like DOUBLETHINK. We should question problems, struggle for the truth till the end of life. Or else we will become toys to some elite dark minded powerful people & our society will be ruined just like the dystopian world of George Orwell where 2+2 = 4 & 2+2=5 both contradictory information resides in civilian’s mind simultaneously. They tweak their mind to believe one of them depending on the will of BIG BROTHERS.

Sura Baqara:42, The Holy Quran

And do not mix the truth with falsehood or conceal the truth while you know it.

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