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Double think: Two plus two equals five

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Tuesday, 29 September 2026

Written by Pitt Dickey

Let’s see what our old pal George Orwell might say about the fun times in which we find ourselves. For reasons unknown, I recently revisited George’s rollicking laugh riot book “1984.” If you haven’t read it recently, consider taking a gander at it. George imagined Stalin as Big Brother, who became the life of the Party.
Any resemblance to Big Brother and our current Administration is purely coincidental, accidental, and I don’t mean nuthin’ by it. Draw your own analogies if you dare.
Big Brother developed his own language called New Speak in order to control the masses’ ability to think. The goal of Big Brother was to have all his subjects master the art of Double Think. Double Think is the ability to simultaneously hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time and accept both of them as true.
For example, consider the Western Michigan vs. Michigan football game in which it appeared time had run out and Western Michigan had defeated Michigan in an amazing upset.
Oops.
The Big Ten officials suddenly found another one second left to play despite what the field clock said. The Big Ten has a Double Secret Clock in which they store additional time if Michigan needs to try another Hail Mary Pass. The Refs on the field called the game over until the Overlords in the sky box pulled out the Double Secret Clock, giving Michigan another shot at winning. Like Schrödinger's cat, which is both alive and dead, the football game was both over and not over. Double Think in action.
Diversions are key to Big Brother’s control of the population. To keep the common folks occupied and politically inert, Big Brother supplied Prolefeed, which is entertainment for the masses like ancient Rome’s Bread and Circuses, or more recently White House lawn UFC fights and car races in downtown DC.
Big Brother had three main priorities to be Double Thought: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”
The Ministry of Love was in charge of law, order and obedience. If you believed, you were practicing Good Think. If you did not agree with the Party’s position, you were guilty of Thought Crime.
The Ministry of Love’s Thought Police would round you up to send you to the Joy Camp for indoctrination or extermination. Some soreheads might apply the term Thought Police for ICE and Joy Camps for DHS detention camps. But that would be wrong and Thought Crime.
If you really stepped outside of the Party line, you would end up in Room 101 in the Ministry of Love where something Double Plus Ungood would happen to you. If you were too much trouble, you would become an Unperson, vaporized, and all references to your existence wiped out.
It was necessary to keep the masses riled up by an enemy. To do so, citizens were required to participate in a daily Two Minute Hate where enemies of the Big Brother would appear on all the TV screens.
The people would then scream hatred and threats at the TV against whoever the enemy of the day was. Once a year, there was Hate Week, in which everyone was required to spend a week hating who Big Brother hated. Ungood things would happen if you didn’t scream your hate loud enough.
If you did not screw up your face into an appropriate grimace of hate, you were guilty of Face Crime, which led to a visit from the Thought Police.
One of my favorite New Speak terms is Duck Speak, which is the ability to talk using only your larynx without using your brain to recite mindlessly whatever Big Brother wanted you to say. Quacking like a duck without thought is the ideal means to stay out of the clutches of the Ministry of Love and Room 101.
The protagonist of "1984" was Winston, who worked in the Ministry of Truth rewriting news articles and books to comply with the current Party line. Old newspaper articles that did not agree with Big Brother’s recent lies were tossed into the Memory Hole and burned to eliminate anything contrary to Big Brother’s current position. Rewriting history was crucial for Big Brother. His quote was “ Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Ponder the Memory Hole’s success in destroying Confederate statutes or the metamorphosis of the violent DC January 6 rioters into peaceful tourists filled with love.
Who are you going to believe? Big Brother or your lying eyes? Practice Good Think by believing 2+2 = 5.
Cheer up. It could be worse. You could be a Western Michigan football fan.

(Illustration by Pitt Dickey)

Learning to Fall

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Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Written by Dan DeBruler

As a person of a certain age, one of the questions I’m asked when I call or see my primary care physician is, “Do you feel unsteady when standing or walking?”
To be honest, I feel a little unsteady that they asked. I realize they’re just looking out for my well-being, but no. I don’t otherwise feel unstable.
When we were children, falling was part of the deal. We fell learning to walk. We fell off bicycles, playground equipment and whatever else somebody told us not to climb. We scraped knees, bruised elbows, cried for a minute and usually got back up.
Somewhere along the way, though, falling became something we learned to fear. Adults aren't supposed to fall. We're supposed to have the plan, make the payment, keep the job, hold the family together and know what comes next. We become pretty good at building lives designed to keep us upright.
Then life reminds us that we were never completely in control. A diagnosis comes. A relationship changes. A career ends. Someone we love dies. The carefully planned future suddenly looks nothing like the one we expected.
I can still recall how excited I was to get my first bicycle at about six years old. One of my mom’s best friends had a husband whose side hustle was fixing and selling used bikes.
In the 1960s, a kid could get a bike, jump on without a helmet and ride the neighborhood streets all they wanted. My parents let me ride that bike several blocks, through intersections and everything, that first day. I took the long way home, and they never gave it a second thought.
The only thing I didn’t know how to do was stop.
I simply had no idea how to apply the brakes, slow down and get off the bike while maintaining some sense of dignity. In other words, I had to learn to fall.
Now that I’m older, and perhaps even a little wiser, I look back and realize I’ve had the opportunity to replay that lesson many times over.
I’ve tumbled and stumbled just about every way a person can. And while it hasn’t gotten to be more fun, I’ve learned that those experiences can make me useful to people who are wobbling a little themselves.
I know what it’s like to hit the bottom. But I also know the experience doesn’t have to be the end. There’s a proverb that says a righteous person may fall seven times and rise again. Maybe that’s more than just a saying about perseverance. Maybe it’s an observation about life.
Perhaps one of the most important things we learn isn't how to keep from falling. Maybe it's how to fall. Or, more than that, how to get back up—no matter how long it takes, or how many tries.

Why Carolinians Liked Strong Legislatures

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Tuesday, 29 September 2026

Written by John Hood

How should North Carolina be governed? The same question can be asked about any other state in America, or any other country in the world. It’s a critical question. It lies at the heart of every political dispute you can think of, from education reform and environmental protection to tax policy and economic development.
I have strong opinions about the subject. Perhaps you do, too. My task today is not to advocate mine or criticize yours. Rather, it is to argue for humility.
Questions about how good governments are structured and what they should do aren’t mere abstractions. They have a history. Past generations thought about them, struggled with them, and tried out different answers to see how they would work in practice.
Obviously, past generations have no monopoly on wisdom. They made big mistakes and often paid a big price for it. To say that history ought to inform our political thinking today is not to say we must be bound by tradition. But it would also be foolish to think modern wisdom is always greater, or to discount the lessons history can teach us about the constraints of human nature and the limits of good intentions.
Over the centuries, North Carolinians have developed governmental institutions and traditions that favor legislative over executive power, statewide consistency over local sovereignty, and fiscal solvency over grandiose plans. These preferences aren’t random or the product of some insidious scheme by corrupt insiders. They were constructed in stages, as the leaders of the day sought either to solve immediate problems in North Carolina or to avoid problems other states had gotten themselves into.
During the colonial era, for example, North Carolina was largely settled from north to south, not from the coast westward. Many settlers were fleeing what they saw as oppressive laws or unjust taxes. Many of my ancestors, for example, were Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and other dissenters whose religious liberties were being suppressed by the established church in Virginia.
During the mid-1700s, they moved southward to the Carolina frontier. Eventually, the long arms of colonial governors found them even there, and again sought to interfere with their desire to conduct their own marriages, educate their children according to their own beliefs, and keep their own money. The backcountry rebelled. In the ensuing series of state constitutions, North Carolinians made sure to keep the executive branch divided and on a tight leash.
Much later, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, leaders grappled with a different challenge: how to ensure that basic services were provided across North Carolina, both economically and without disruption. Many localities had run up large debts and then defaulted on them. Through their lawmakers, they sought state bailouts. Meanwhile, how were courts, schools, and roads to be maintained?
Lawmakers decided to make the state the primary funder of basic services, while limiting local capacity to issue future debts. Taxpayers would pay the bill either way, of course, but a state-dominant funding system reduces inequities and manages risk.
These and other traditions of North Carolina government are hardy free from legitimate criticism. I’ve challenged them myself on occasion. But they aren’t simply vestigial. If we thoughtlessly perform a constitutional appendectomy, we may rudely discover in the future that we’ve discarded something vitally important.
Georgetown University philosopher Daniel Robinson once used a wonderful image to describe the present value of studying the past. Remember the story of Theseus and the Minotaur? The former resolves to end the latter’s reign of terror over the Athenians. But the Minotaur resides in a labyrinth on Crete. Ariadne, a Cretan princess who loves Theseus, gives him a ball of thread. The hero ties the thread to a door post and lets it unspool so he can find his way out again after killing the beast.
North Carolina faces a range of challenges and opportunities. As we make our way through the resulting maze of choices, we may yet find value in tradition’s thread.

Editor’s note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).

Margaret Dickson: Have we no shame?

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Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Written by Margaret Dickson

When it comes to politics, apparently not.
Nothing—not child and domestic abuse, not illicit love affairs, not 60-something electeds traveling with 20-somethings of the opposite gender, not indictments for securities fraud, or allegations of bribery and obstruction of justice, even impeachment—seems to affect voters. We just keep electing these people year after year, state after state.
Nothing seems offensive, repulsive, or derelict enough to prevent anyone from serving in elective office from the Presidency down to our own North Carolina member of Congress who was censured by his colleagues but who remains in office as you read this. Our current President once bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without consequences, and that has been true so far. As Amanda Taub put it in The New York Times, “his political fortunes have remained buoyant even after he was impeached twice, was found civilly liable for sexual abuse and enriched himself by billions of dollars while in office.”
The entire concept that actions have consequences no longer appears to be true, as no action appears reprehensible enough to make individuals unelectable, much less shameful.
Given our state of affairs today, the premise of Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter seems positively quaint.
That said, we have to wonder how we got to this truly dreadful and terrifying point. If no action is ever wrong, then is every action acceptable?
Political scientists are increasingly pointing at political polarization, not just in the United States but around much of the world.
The argument goes something like this. My political beliefs are superior to yours, and my “team” is promoting the correct policies while your beliefs and your team’s actions are hurting our nation. Therefore, whatever my “teammates” do must be ignored or excused for the good of all. This argument is made by both sides with varying degrees of strength and truthfulness. We are appalled by the crooks and perverts on the other team while we give our own guys and gals a pass no matter what they have done.
I would be massively relieved if I thought this were reparable by people of good will and faith in humanity, but I do not. People in other countries polarized by right and left suffer from the same loss of shame that apparently accompanies acute political division, and they seem no closer to healing than we are. Elected officials at all levels feel totally free to behave and take illegal actions with abandon, secure in the knowledge that the voting public that supports them will be fine with it.
Amanda Taub assessed the loss of shame in public life this way in the Times.
Our current political state “has serious implications for accountability. That chain reaction was traditionally one of the ways that norms and rules were enforced in democracies. If the power of scandal goes away, then we’re left with a vicious cycle in which moral or legal wrongdoing doesn’t lead to consequences, which undermines trust in government and public institutions, which in turn widens polarization and allows more corruption, abuse and lawbreaking. This cycle is hard to break.”
Abraham Lincoln understood the American people, and he said this almost 200 years ago about the danger to our nation.
“It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
I pray we can survive ourselves.