Lies and “Alternative Facts”: Possible Symptoms of Multiple Personality

Members of former President Trump’s staff coined the term “alternative facts,” which many people considered a bizarre Orwellian joke:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

However, as I pointed out in a 2017 post, Orwellian concepts like “doublethink” may be symptoms of multiple personality:

“Doublethink” of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell is taken from multiple personality: Alternate personalities have alternate views of reality. 

It is a basic feature of multiple personality that one personality will know something that another personality does not; that two personalities will hold contradictory opinions; and that different personalities will differ in their views of reality. With that in mind, consider these definitions of “doublethink” from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell:

“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.”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth” (1).

1. Wikipedia. “Doublethink.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink

Comment: It is possible, then, that former President Trump’s “lies” are based on his having alternate personalities with their own alternate facts.

Of course, he may not have multiple personality, but may knowingly state “alternative facts” for political advantage.

Since I will never interview him, I will never know.