"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." — George Orwell, 1984 Been thinking about this. It's not so much the Party that tells you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Rather, it's the paradigm. It's the mental model that you have in mind, the prism through which you interpret information. This is a form of self-censorship: what you see is determined by your pre-conceived thoughts. As long as you talk to someone with an 'us versus dem' paradigm, you may as well be talking to a brick wall. Indeed, all your words will seem unintelligible as the paradigm determines what is intelligible and what is not. Thomas Kuhn is the best authority on this, if anyone is still reading.