Doublethink: The Psychology of Fear, Trauma, and Denial in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

by Nik Dobrinsky
March 5th, 2017

George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four describes a horrific world in which every aspect of life is watched over and controlled by the state, known as "The Party" and symbolized by its figurehead "Big Brother". In this world, called "Oceania", total control is maintained by the state's continuous surveillance of all citizens, incessant broadcasting of political and war propaganda, and threat of imprisonment and/or execution of anyone who even slightly questions Big Brother's authority. To survive and evade capture by Party agents, people must display complete obedience and belief in Big Brother, despite frequent contradictory information given by him. Challenging Big Brother's assertions would mean subjecting oneself to being arrested, interrogated, tortured—as indeed happens in the story. As a result, people exhibit absolute conformity to system constraints and exist in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance, denial—a phenomenon Orwell calls "doublethink"; a person's ability, or perhaps tendency, to accept completely contradictory pieces of information as being true, without any evidence. With the current political climate, in a "post-truth" era in which "fake news" and "alternative facts" influence popular consciousness, Orwell's dark satirical work continues to resonate in profound ways.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, denial of truth is elevated to the extreme; people accept control over every aspect of their lives by Big Brother and the ruling bureaucracy, fearing repercussions of any even mildly rebellious action. So to avoid the pain and trauma that would result from challenging the totalitarian regime, people instead live in a state of denial and don't really live at all, except to serve the perpetuation of the totalitarian system. Is such a world possible? Are there mechanisms in the human brain, in the reality of our world, that could actually lead to the existence of such an extreme totalitarian regime as the one described in Nineteen Eighty-Four? What is occurring inside the brains of the characters in Nineteen Eighty-Four to permit such servile behaviour? And is Orwell's depiction of this world, in regard to human psychology, possible, plausible, and/or based in scientific truth?

Considering Orwell's nightmare world of Nineteen Eighty-Four from this perspective, numerous academic psychology articles discuss the parts of the human brain that deal with emotion, trauma, fear, denial (as a mechanism to cope with pain), and memory, examining how fear-based and traumatic experiences affect a person's behaviour. In "Cerebral Delights", Susan Gaidos writes of the importance of the "amygdala", a part of the brain "essential both for perceiving fear and expressing it". Evolutionarily speaking, the amygdala is an old part of the brain, a component of the "limbic system, a primitive set of brain structures involved in emotion and arousal" (Gaidos).

The amygdala is in communication with the senses, and can "take in danger signals—the sight of a snake or the sound of a gunshot—and flash messages almost instantly through the nervous system, alerting the body to respond. Chemical messengers are then released into the bloodstream to ready a flight-or-fight response, providing the energy needed to run faster or hit harder" (Gaidos). Furthermore, Gaidos asserts, "Early humans relied on this system to avoid all types of deadly threats, from saber-toothed tigers to falling trees". In Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, the threats that protagonist Winston Smith faces are not snakes, tigers, or falling trees, but rather, as mentioned, arrest, imprisonment, torture, and death. The effects on the brain are the same, but within this system of heightened oppression, Smith cannot fight nor take flight without risk of capture. So what results is a kind of splitting of self. On the surface Winston goes about his daily life as usual, but he simultaneously lives out a second secret life.

Although more is known about the amygdala's fear response, Gaidos also writes of the amygdala as a part of the brain that responds to positive stimuli. Whether it be the excitement or anticipation of a reward of some kind, or the perceived threat of danger, the ongoings in the amygdala remain unconscious. But nerve cells in the amygdala, known as "neurons", communicate with conscious centers in the brain, such as the hippocampus, resulting in decisions made by an individual regardless of consciousness as to the emotional reasons why: "behavior is driven by some sort of interaction between the amygdala and the frontal lobe, known to be involved in thought, memory and consciousness" (Gaidos). Winston Smith has no positive stimuli to respond to, however, so his amygdala and its neurons are constantly firing fear-based messages, which in turn cause him, and other Oceanians, to respond in a subservient manner towards The Party.

However, perhaps because Smith's conscious mind—the hippocampus and related sections of the brain—are stronger in him then in some of his fellow citizens, he maintains a rebellious outlook secretly yet consciously, which overpowers his amygdala's unconscious fear response (that is until the end of the book when he eventually succumbs entirely, following imprisonment and torture). Orwell writes, of Winston, "It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say" (64). This passage relates directly to Gaidos' discussion of the fight-or-flight response, as Winston "knew instinctively who would survive", yet he didn't know why—the "instinct" being a fear response in the amygdala, while simultaneously possessing no conscious knowledge as to the reasons for this response.

The article, "Noradrenergic Signaling in the Amygdala Contributes to the Reconsolidation of Fear Memory", by Jacek Debiec and Joseph E. LeDoux, examines the condition of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It states that PTSD "develops following an exposure to a life-threatening event. One of the characteristic features of PTSD is a recurrence of intrusive memories for an experienced trauma" and that "intrusive memories resulting from an emotional trauma are a defining feature of PTSD" (521). Is Winston Smith suffering from PTSD?

Given the nightmarish makeup of the world created in Nineteen Eighty-Four wherein family members and coworkers can be killed in front of one's eyes or vanish without explanation, and indeed that threat extends to oneself, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that Smith and all Oceania citizens are suffering from PTSD. Winston was born before The Party's existence and has faint memories of a world better and far more liberated than the present one. Since his early thought processes were formed in a time prior to The Revolution, perhaps he experiences PTSD more than those younger than him. Or rather than simply post-traumatic stress, it is continuous, extended, perpetual traumatic stress that Winston Smith suffers from. Given The Party's constant restructuring of "the past", as it were, it's no wonder he's continually confused about reality and seeking answers in his dreams and memories. The following passage illustrates this:

The amygdala and its function as a fear receptor in the brain, Debiec and LeDoux write, contains chemical reactions, called "noradrenergic signaling", that occur upon experience of fear and trauma. They postulate that when trauma occurs, and remains untreated, a kind of unconscious memory of the traumatic experience is encoded in the amygdala (521). This noradrenergic activity then serves as a "blockade" in the amygdala, limiting the subject's ability to effectively retrieve the fear memories and resulting in a sustained condition of trauma. The article's assertions resulted from studying "fear conditioning in rats" (521-523), ironically, since rats are Winston's worst fear and an instrument of torture in Orwell's book.

Another article, "Dissociating Response Systems: Erasing Fear from Memory", by Marleke Soeter and Merel Kindt, further addresses the effects of trauma and fear on memory. Like Debiec and LeDoux, Soeter and Kindt also write of the significance of the noradrenergic blockade in the amygdala as a key factor in fear, trauma, and memory, yet they posit a slightly differing view. They claim that when disrupting the consolidation of fear memory (the "unconscious" encoding of a memory of a traumatic event) by administering drugs such as propranolol, the effect is "amnesia" of the original fear response in human subjects. While the unconscious imprint of the memory is erased, the conscious association of the subject's fear response to the initial cause of the fear remain in tact. This observation is crucial as it relates to Orwell's concept of "doublethink" and "reality control" in describing the simultaneous coexistence of multiple conflicting memories and/or perceptions of reality as born from the emotional pain and confusion associated with fear and trauma, conscious and unconscious memories:

So how do these studies qualify Orwell's depiction of human psychology and behaviour in Nineteen Eighty-Four as being possible, or realistic, or not? Reflecting on Susan Gaidos' article about the amygdala as a part of the brain that evolved in early humans in relation to Orwell's concept of doublethink, we might think of the following imagined scenario: some early human predecessors are attacked by a group of wolves, for example. Before they may be consciously aware of what's happening, the amygdala and its neurological impulses kick into gear, sending unconscious signals to the centers of conscious thought in the frontal lobe that tell the body to run. And so they do, yet one who is slower than the others gets clawed at and hurt badly, yet still manages to escape. If that injured person were to stop at the moment that the wolf clawed him, he would surely be eaten—so for his own survival, the amygdala buries the feeling of pain, physical and/or emotional, and the resulting trauma over the incident, by way of its noradrenergic blockade function. The human victim must, in effect, deny the fear and pain felt in the moment in order to carry on and survive. The conscious memory of the incident may later still exist in the mind of the injured, yet an encoded unconscious memory of trauma exists as well, simultaneously, in the amygdala.

And if a person were not to escape the wolves, but be caught and eaten, then the other human witnesses would have a similar experience as the injured in the first scenario—their amygdalas would repress the fear, sorrow, and trauma experienced over their fallen comrade so that they could carry on and escape. Because to stop and express their pain in the moment would mean their violent deaths as well.

This is of course but a simplified comparison to what occurs in Nineteen Eighty-Four with modern humans—the wolves here symbolizing the Thought Police or other Big Brother agents. But the difference is that citizens of  Oceania have no option to run, out of fear, nor stop and examine or express their pain—because this would mean death as well. In our real world, there are recourses to deal with trauma and its aftereffects—various forms of therapy, treatments, medications—to reconnect the unconscious repressed memories with conscious thought, process them, heal, and move on. But in Winston Smith's world, no such options exist. He can't take "flight", for that would be seen as a rebellious act for which he would be violently punished, he can't "fight" because the powers of the state are so great that he would be overcome, and there are no means by which to seek therapy. So in its complexity, the human mind has no option but to fold in on itself, denying the split between conscious acceptance of reality and unconscious denial of reality, compounded into one contradictory state of mind in which everything is perceived as believable, and nothing is questioned; doublethink. Numerous passages in Nineteen Eighty-Four encapsulate this paradoxical dichotomy of acceptance and denial:

So, to return to the questions posed at the beginning of this essay; is this world possible?  That is to say, are there mechanisms in the human brain, in the reality of our world and not that of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which could actually lead to the existence of such an extreme totalitarian regime as described in the book? And is Orwell's depiction of this world, in this regard of human psychology, possible, plausible, and/or based in scientific truth? The answer is not absolute. The studies about the human brain and its functions in regards to fear, trauma, memory, and denial or repression of painful memories as a mechanism to cope and survive, as explored in this essay, had not yet been conducted at the time that Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, so his imagined concepts, such as doublethink, were based on observations of human behaviour during political upheavals and wars of his time. Yet with the progression of science, and in this case studies of psychology and human brain physiology since the original publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, have shown that the building blocks on which doublethink is structured are frighteningly real.

To merely subsist, as inhabitants of Orwell's world do, is not to really live. Yet biologically, perhaps, humans as a species are not yet evolved enough to deal with the complexities of trauma that the world unflinchingly offers up. In Orwell's words, "reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life—the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like" (206). But far more than base survival of this kind, of paramount importance and crucial to the growth and evolution of humankind, is to dream, to challenge, to exercise choice, and to question meaning. If we can continue to do these things, then Orwell's world of Nineteen Eighty-Four will remain but a dire warning and never become a reality.

WORKS CITED

Debiec, Jacek, and Joseph E. LeDoux. "Noradrenergic Signaling in the Amygdala Contributes to the Reconsolidation of Fear Memory." Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences. 1071.1 (2006): 521-524. Web. 25 November 2011.

Gaidos, Susan. "Cerebral Delights." Science News. 179.5 (February 2011)

Kindt, Merel, and Marleke Soeter. "Dissociating Response Systems: Erasing Fear from Memory." Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 94.1 (July 2010): 30-41

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin, 1949.