In the dystopian novelNineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, the wordthoughtcrime describes a person's politically unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc, the dominant ideology of Oceania. In the official language of Newspeak, the word crimethink describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of the Party controls the speech, the actions, and the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania. In contemporary English usage, the word thoughtcrime describes beliefs that are contrary to accepted norms of society, and is used to describe theological concepts, such as disbelief and idolatry, and the rejection of an ideology.
Thought control
In the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Thinkpol are responsible for the detection and elimination of thoughtcrime, and for the social control of the populations of Oceania, by way of audio-visual surveillance and offender profiling. Such psychological monitoring allows the Thought Police to detect, arrest, and kill thought criminals, citizens whose independence challenges the political orthodoxy of Ingsoc and thus the legitimategovernment authority of the Party. In the detection of thoughtcrime—and to overcome the physical impossibility of simultaneously policing every citizen of Oceania—the Thinkpol spy upon the populace through ubiquitous two-way telescreens, and so can monitor any person's body language, reflexive speech, and facial expressions: The universal, physical presence of the telescreen, in public and in private spaces, exerted psychological pressure upon each citizen of Oceania to presume that they were under constant Thinkpol surveillance, and thus in danger of detection and arrest as a thought criminal; thus, whenever near a telescreen, Winston Smith was always mindful of that possibility: "If you made unexpected movements, they yelled at you from the telescreen." Such surveillance methods allowed the Thinkpol and the Ministry of Love to become universally feared by the citizens of Oceania, especially by the members of the Outer Party, which includes Winston Smith.
Crimestop
In the Newspeak vocabulary, the word crimestop denotes the citizen's self-awareness to immediately rid themselves of unwanted, incorrect thoughts, the discovery of which, by the Thinkpol, would lead to detection and arrest, transport to and interrogation at the Miniluv. The protagonist, Winston Smith, describes crimestop as a conscious process of self-imposed cognitive dissonance: Moreover, from the perspective of Oceania's principal enemy of the state, in the history bookThe Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Emanuel Goldstein said that:
