It’s supposed to be a warning, not a political manual!

doublethink

ˈdəbəlˌTHiNGk
noun

The acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination.

SB 1046 passed unanimously out of the Senate Public Safety Committee on Tuesday. This bill would mandate that all convicted drunk drivers have an ignition interlock system installed on their motor vehicles. The interlock would check their blood alcohol level before allowing the vehicle to start. Sounds sensible, right?

That’s because it is.

OK… So how could we make this good law resemble a typical California gun law? For starters, this law is limited to those who are already known to break the law: drunk drivers. A new California gun law would not be limited to law breakers. Indeed, it would target the law abiding instead. So a “gunified” SB 1046 would require interlocks an all motor vehicles. Sure this would add several thousand dollars to the purchase price of a car and punish those who obey the existing laws; but, “if it saves just one life”, right? A “gunified” SB 1046 might also declare all older vehicles to be “unsafe” and prohibit their sale. Or it might require a technologically impossible feature for all new vehicles. The list of asinine alterations that could “gunify” the bill go on and on. Still, one might wonder: Why aren’t those provisions there?

Because they’re stupid!

Nevertheless, the same politicians who would reject such idiocy for a bill like SB 1046 have no problem voting for gun bills that are packed full of dumb ideas. Why is punishing the law abiding a horrible idea in a bill like SB 1046, but a great idea in a bill like SB 880? George Orwell answered that question for us 67 years ago.

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.