Thought Police
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The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) was the secret police in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was the job of the Thought Police to uncover and punish thoughtcrime, using psychology and omnipresent surveillance to find and eliminate members of society who were capable of the mere thought of challenging ruling authority.
In the government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labeling unapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime or, in Newspeak, "crimethink".
Orwell's Thought Police and their pursuit of thoughtcrime was based on the methods used by the totalitarian states and competing ideologies of the 20th century. It also had much to do with Orwell's own "power of facing unpleasant facts", as he called it, and his willingness to criticise prevailing ideas which brought him into conflict with others and their "smelly little orthodoxies". Although Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist, many other socialists (especially those who supported the communist branch of socialism) thought that his criticism of the Soviet Union under Stalin damaged the socialist cause.
The term "Thought Police", by extension, has come to refer to real or perceived enforcement of ideological correctness in any modern or historical contexts.
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | |
|---|---|
| By George Orwell | |
| Characters | Winston Smith | Julia | O'Brien | Big Brother | Emmanuel Goldstein |
| Places | Oceania | Eastasia | Eurasia | Airstrip One | Room 101 |
| Classes | Inner Party | Outer Party | Proles |
| Ministries | Love | Peace | Plenty | Truth |
| Concepts | Ingsoc | Newspeak | Doublethink | Goodthink | Crimestop Two plus two | Thoughtcrime | Ownlife | Prolefeed |
| Miscellaneous | Thought Police | Telescreen | Memory hole | The Book | Newspeak words |
| Other media | Film | TV programme | Opera | 1985 | Me and the Big Guy |
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