And then it is too late for self-deception. You can’t know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. I don’t mean to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence, but I think Orwell did a good job of extrapolating where this path leads. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. (You’re welcome!) You might even believe you were happy and self-deceived but you would not in fact be happy and self-deceived.įor second-order rationality to be genuinely rational, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. You might be able to believe you believed it-though I have just made that more difficult for you by pointing out the difference. You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will. Second-order rationality implies that at some point, you will think to yourself, “And now, I will irrationally believe that I will win the lottery, in order to make myself happy.” But we do not have such direct control over our beliefs. Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen. That way you can decide which cognitive biases should govern you, to maximize your happiness. What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us-gasp!- unhappy? Surely, true wisdom would be second-order rationality, choosing when to be rational. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.
And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. “But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air it was vanishing in a flash of flame. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. Home About Search Contents Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)Īn oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers.
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