Thought Crime

In the dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', thoughtcrime is the offense of thinking in ways not approved by the ruling Ingsoc party. In the official language of Newspeak, the word crimethink describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of The Party controls the speech, the actions, and the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania.

Thought control

In the story of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', the ''Thinkpol'' (Thought Police) are responsible for the detection and elimination of thoughtcrime, and for the social control of the populations of Oceania, by way of audio-visual surveillance and offender profiling. Such psychological monitoring allows the Thought Police to detect, arrest, and kill thought criminals, citizens whose independence (intellectual, mental, and moral) challenges the political orthodoxy of Ingsoc ( English Socialism) and thus the legitimate government authority of the Party. In the detection of thoughtcrime—and to overcome the physical impossibility of simultaneously policing every citizen of Oceania—the Thinkpol spy upon the populace through ubiquitous two-way telescreens, and so can monitor any person's body language, reflexive speech, and facial expressions:

The universal, physical presence of the telescreen, in public and in private spaces, exerted psychological pressure upon each citizen of Oceania to presume that they were under constant Thinkpol surveillance, and thus in danger of detection and arrest as a thought criminal; thus, whenever near a telescreen, Winston Smith was always mindful of that possibility: "If you made unexpected movements, they yelled at you from the telescreen." Such surveillance methods allowed the Thinkpol and the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) to become universally feared by the citizens of Oceania, especially by the members of the Outer Party, which includes Winston Smith.

Crimestop

In the Newspeak vocabulary, the word crimestop denotes the citizen's instinctive desire to rid himself of unwanted, incorrect thoughts (personal and political), the discovery of which, by the Thinkpol, would lead to detection and arrest, transport to and interrogation at Miniluv (Ministry of Love). The protagonist, Winston Smith, describes crimestop as a conscious process of self-imposed cognitive dissonance:

Moreover, from the perspective of Oceania's principal enemy of the state, in the history book ''The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism'', Emmanuel Goldstein said that:

Contemporary English usage

In contemporary English usage, the word ''thoughtcrime'' describes the personal beliefs that are contrary to the accepted norms of society; thus thoughtcrime describes the theological practices of disbelief and idolatry, and the rejection of an ideology.

Wrongthink emerged in 2014 on the US alt-right in a subreddit called r/SRSSucks, an anti-political-correctness community and use of the term increased in 2017 after James Damore was let go by Google for publishing that women were biologically unsuited to coding.
In 2024, Wrongthink was used on the far right platform Rumble (company) and as an alt-facebook.

Analogy in Iran

Various groups such as human rights organizations, journalists and activists have likened the Iranian regime, along with the IRIB and IRGC, to an Orwellian government. This sentiment is due to reports of the Iranian government distributing death sentences for the crime of "advertising against the holy system". “Zabane eghelab”, an Iranian phrase that translates to “tongue of revolution”, is used to describe the rhetoric used by the government to maintain ideological dominance over the population and is often compared to newspeak.

See also

* Censorship
* Freedom of thought
* Internal sin
* Mens rea
* Pre-crime
* Secret police
* Thou shalt not covet
* Thought Police
* Victimless crime
* Hate speech

References

Further reading

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{{Nineteen Eighty-Four

Fictional elements introduced in 1949
1940s neologisms
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Words originating in fiction
Authoritarianism
Political terminology
Linguistic controversies