From Nineteen Eighty-Four

From Thomas Pynchon's introduction to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four:

"We recognize this 'sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking' as a source for one of the great achievements of this novel, one which has entered the everyday language of political discourse – the identification and analysis of doublethink. As described in Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a dangerously subversive text outlawed in Oceania and known only as the book, doublethink is a form of mental discipline whose goal, desirable and necessary to all Party members, is to be able to believe two contradictory truths at the same time. This is nothing new, of course. We all do it. In social psychology it has long been known as 'cognitive dissonance'. Others like to call it 'compartmentalization'. Some, famously F. Scott Fitzgerald, have considered it evidence of genius. For Walt Whitman ('Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself') it was being large and containing multitudes, for Yogi Berra it was coming to a fork in the road and taking it, for Schrödinger's cat, it was the quantum paradox of being alive and dead at the same time."

In reading Orwell and comparing the differences between the perspectives of Animal farm and his final novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the author seems to have shifted from a view that the state is an effective social equalizer to one that is skeptical of even those of like mind yielding that power, hoping some positive change will come of that inherent incompatibility.