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To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

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Double consciousness is knowing the particularity of the white world in the face of its enforced claim to universality. Double consciousness is knowing the history offered up to black people — its many interpretations and echoes of white superiority and black inferiority, of white heroism and black cowardice, and even the temporal and geographical location of history’s beginning as a step off of the African continent — is a falsehood that blacks are forced to treat as truth in so many countless ways. Double consciousness, in other words, is knowing a lie while living its contradiction.

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She understood that the truth of things was upside down. She grasped that those who thought they knew were ignorant, that those who thought they had power were powerless, and that those who thought they knew themselves were in great darkness.

أن تعرف وأن لا تعرف ، أن تعي الحقيقة كاملة، ومع ذلك لا تفتأ تقص الأكاذيب المحكمة البناء، أن تؤمن برأيين في آن وأنت تعرف أنهما لا يجتمعان ومع ذلك تصدق بهما.

أن تجهض المنطق بالمنطق، أن ترفض الالتزام بالأخلاق فيما أنت واحد من الداعين إليها، أن تعتقد أن الديمقراطية ضرب من المستحيل ، وأن الحزب وصي عليها، أن تنسى كل ما يتعين عليك نسيانه ثم تستحضره في الذاكرة حينما تمس الحاجة إليه ثم تنساه مرة ثانية فوراً ذلك هو الدهاء الكامل، أن تفقد الوعي عن عمد ووعي ثم تصبح ثانية غير واع بعملية التنويم الذاتي التي مارستها على نفسك.

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In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. And in order to realize that one is indeed in a state of sleep, one must recognize and fully understand the nature of the forces which operate to keep one in the state of sleep, or hypnosis. It is absurd to think that this can be done by seeking information from the very source which induces the hypnosis.
....One thing alone is certain, that man's slavery grows and increases. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.

Chao-Chou asked, “What is the Tao?” The master [Nan-ch’üan] replied, “Your ordinary consciousness is the Tao.” “How can one return into accord with it?” “By intending to accord you immediately deviate.” “But without intention, how can one know the Tao?” “The Tao,” said the master, “belongs neither to knowing nor to not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it’s like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?”2 [56b]

There's no chance of their having a conscious glimpse of the truth as long as they refuse to disturb the things they take for granted and remain incapable of explaining them. For if your starting-point is unknown, and your end-point and intermediate stages are woven together out of unknown material, there may be coherence, but knowledge is completely out of the question.

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