Editing Thoughtcrime (section)

==Thought control==
{{main|Thought Police}}
In the story of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', the ''Thinkpol'' (Thought Police) are responsible for the detection and elimination of thoughtcrime, and for the social control of the populations of [[Oceania (Nineteen Eighty-Four)|Oceania]], by way of [[Surveillance|audio-visual surveillance]] and [[offender profiling]]. Such psychological monitoring allows the Thought Police to detect, arrest, and kill thought criminals, citizens whose independence (intellectual, mental, and moral) challenges the political orthodoxy of Ingsoc ([[Ingsoc|English Socialism]]) and thus the [[Legitimacy (political)|legitimate]] government authority of [[Nineteen Eighty-Four#The Party|the Party]].<ref>{{Citation |last=McCormick |first=Donald |title=Approaching 1984 |page=21 |year=1980 |location=Newton Abbot, Devon, England |publisher=David & Charles |isbn=978-0-7153-7654-6 }}.</ref> 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 [[telescreen]]s, and so can monitor any person's [[body language]], reflexive speech, and facial expressions:

{{Quote|Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by the [[telescreen]]; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.  There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.  How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.|Part I, Chapter 1, ''Nineteen Eighty-Four''}}

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."<ref>Part III, Chapter 1, ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1949)</ref> Such surveillance methods allowed the Thinkpol and the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) to become universally feared by the citizens of Oceania, especially by the members of the Outer Party, which includes Winston Smith.

===Crimestop===
{{Redirect|Crimestop|anonymous crime reporting|CrimeStoppers}}
In the [[Newspeak]] vocabulary, the word '''crimestop''' denotes the citizen's instinctive desire to rid himself of unwanted, incorrect  thoughts (personal and political), the discovery of which, by the Thinkpol, would lead to detection and arrest, transport to and interrogation at  Miniluv (Ministry of Love). The protagonist, [[Winston Smith (Nineteen Eighty-Four)|Winston Smith]], describes crimestop as a conscious process of self-imposed [[cognitive dissonance]]:

{{quote|The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. . . . He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions—'the Party says the Earth is flat', 'the Party says that ice is heavier than water'—and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.}}

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:

{{quote|''Crimestop'' means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ''Crimestop'', in short, means protective stupidity.<ref>Orwell, George. ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1949) Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, pp. 220–21.</ref>}}