George Orwell had an extraordinary gift of saying in a sentence or paragraph what others struggle to say in entire book. Emphasis added.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me -1984
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
There you go. If you wonder why the corporatocracy fails to support resilient communities, wonder no more. If you wonder why we make more war than peace, why we can’t seem to take renewable energy seriously, why our leaders don’t care that our actions today condemn much of the world (including many Americans) to starve or die of thirst because of climate change in a couple of decades… you just answered the question. Centralized power becomes power for its own sake. The only solution is to take back our power to the community level – and we don’t need (and will never get) their permission.