Why wasn't O'Brien considered a thought criminal?

Question

Given that O'Brien shows a high level of awareness of the Party's deceptiveness and malice (e.g. the fact that he admitted to being involved in creating and promoting the Goldstein myth), to what extent does he actually believe in the system himself? Why wasn't he considered a thought criminal? Or were Inner Party members not *actually* expected to conform to the party's beliefs to the same extent that Outer Party members were as long as everyone else was convinced that they did? Or is he practicing some form of doublethink?By way of example, he said in chapter 3:>The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing.I suppose that a closely related question is whether the telescreen in his house actually worked and whether he could *actually* turn it off. If it worked, who was monitoring him, and what were they actually monitoring?

Answer 1

O'Brien, in 1984, was a member of the Thought Police and was part and partial of the system that controlled the thoughts and the actions of members of their society. He was involved in activities that were used to flush out subversives so they could be punished. It is not clear whether he wanted to do this because he simply wanted to and enjoyed power and control over other people or whether, he had himself been 'caught',and was now a puppet of the State. Either way, he would not be considered to be a thought criminal; rather he was an individual whose job it was to find 'thought criminals.'