So Serious Saturday #20

Fiction needs a basis in reality. Exercising non-fiction muscles once in a while benefits an active imagination, channeling creative energies as it focuses on a subject. So Serious Saturdays will be an active place for critical essays or writing about reality in the context of real events - even when it is not written on Saturdays.

Type: Discussion/Exercise

Knowing and Believing

Sometime ago I looked at proof and truth by using illustrations from 1984. Today I fulfill my promise to talk "about knowing and believing and the differences between them".

Knowing and believing have an interesting relationship in Wells' famous dystopian novel, contained in the word "doublethink".  In 1984 the term "doublethink" relates to something that is true and not true at the same time, thought of at the same time that something that is true and not true is thought of. Doublethink ensures that two things are true and not true simultaneously.

Truth in the fictitious nation of Oceania is officially whatever the Big Brother powers decide to tell the public. Of course, absolute truth is always true, so that the citizens of Oceania have two sets of truth they can keep track of: the official truth and the absolute truth.

Protagonist Winston Smith holds both sets of contradictory truths toward the beginning of the novel by engaging in the doublethink practice crucial to subtle social maneuvers, and important to Winston's sanity at his job. Winston works at making [up] so-called "facts" at his Minitru government job; he must know what facts were true before and yet forget them as he crafts the new facts ordered by the Big Brother regime.

Inwardly, Winston "knows" he is spreading lies, but sometimes he "believes" the lies, suggesting that knowing is a more steady belief than believing, or a belief that precedes believing, which seems to be able to be manipulated in Oceania.

The resulting "doublethink" created in Winston and in other citizens of Oceania is the insistent force driving the plot and the madness in the 1984 novel.  Wells' work implies that individuals will lose their grasp on what is really real when the known facts become contradictory.

Today our "doublethink" is the process of cognitive dissonance, which essentially has the same definition as the one given to "doublethink" above. The individual engaging in cognitive dissonance holds two different and contrasting perspectives in mind at the same time.

 A person can know that stealing is wrong, and yet believe that they are justified in pirating movies, copying test answers, etc. A person can know their friend is not a friend to them and yet believe that their friend really cares for them and has their best interests at heart. There are much better examples of cognitive dissonance out there, but the point is that people fool themselves all of the time -- it's the result of doublethink.

People can believe two contradictory things at the same time, and yet believe that they are being logical, which is why the author of this blog believes it is laughable to describe any human being as logical when humans generally do not follow proper logic.

So someone can legitimately know something is true, but believe something else.