doublethink

From double +‎ think. Coined by George Orwell in 1949 as part of the Newspeak in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

doublethink (usually uncountable, plural doublethinks)

1. The holding of two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them as true or correct, without realizing the contradiction.
   • 1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter 3, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, OCLC 690663892; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001, part 3, page 242:

     The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?

   • 1965 May 11, William S. White, “Doctrine of Nonintervention Comes Cropper In Dominica”, in The Morning Record‎, Meriden-Wallingford, Connecticut, page 4:

     Any effort by the United States to halt these creeping advances of Communist imperialism became, by the same mad process of double-think, the only kind of "intervention" there ever could be.

   • 1992 March 5, Sylvain Fribourg, “The Agony of the Extasy [Letter to the Editor]”, in Los Angeles Times‎:

     Or does the hypocrisy and doublethink go beyond a loathing of the human body and an acceptance of violence to a very practical fear that such a club in a predominantly middle-class Caucasian neighborhood will drive down property values?

   • 2019 December 2, Eric Lutz, “Trump Lawyer Cites No Due Process as Reason to Sit Out Due Process”, in Vanity Fair‎:

     The same sort of doublethink is evident in the White House’s treatment of firsthand impeachment witnesses.

• cognitive dissonance