“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell (post 6): Only multiple personality could account for the switches, memory gaps, and contradictory beliefs about war.

It is a running joke in this novel that the nation’s enemy and ally frequently switch places; that the people immediately change which nation they hate; and that the people immediately forget that they have made that switch. This could only happen if each person had two personalities who differed in their view of who was the enemy.

The attitude toward war also illustrates that multiple personality is present, perhaps even more present, in the most powerful members of the Party:

“The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members…is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously…(1, p. 128).

“Splitting of the intelligence” (see above) is a euphemism for split personality (an informal term for multiple personality).

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.