Thoughtcrime
In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, thoughtcrime, also known as crimethink in the official language of Newspeak, is the offense of thinking in ways not approved by the ruling Ingsoc party. It describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of The Party controls the speech, actions, and thoughts of the citizens of Oceania.
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 thoughtcriminals, citizens whose independence challenges the political orthodoxy of Ingsoc and thus the legitimate government 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 eliminating onself of unwanted, incorrect thoughts, the discovery of which, by the Thinkpol, could lead to detection, arrest, and interrogation at 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 book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Emmanuel Goldstein said that:
Contemporary English usage
In contemporary English usage, the word thoughtcrime describes personal beliefs that are contrary to the accepted norms of society; thus thoughtcrime describes the theological practices of disbelief and idolatry, and the rejection of an ideology.A similar term, wrongthink, emerged in 2014 on the US alt-right in a subreddit called r/SRSSucks, an anti-political-correctness community and use of the term increased in 2017 after James Damore was terminated from Google for making a remark where he claimed that women were biologically unsuited to coding.
In 2023, Wrongthink was used on the far right platform Rumble and as an alt-facebook.