Strange things are afoot in the political cosmos, but there is nothing stranger than the brazenly logophobic attacks on language (of which attacks on free speech are but a subset) by Agents of the Matrix, AKA the managerial class. It's frankly disorienting, so I guess it's time to reorient ourselves.
This morning we read that Agents have changed the definition of "recession" on the wiki page, and that corrections are not permitted. *Ironcially,* this was Winston Smith's job in 1984: to rewrite the past in order to make it conform to the needs of the present. Anything that contradicts the party line is airbrushed out and forgotten.
With extreme prejudice if necessary. In other words, there's an implicit threat that you had better forget it, or you become the problem that needs to be eliminated -- cancelled -- from history.
I don't want to repeat what others are saying about this obvious phenomenon, but rather, try to dig a little deeper into the origins of this intrinsically violent impulse to rewrite history, which is to say, to exert magical control over reality by changing the words.
Suffice it to say that something sinister is going on when George Floyd is a hero, riots are mostly peaceful, the Obamas are victims of white privilege, Brandon is a moderate, parents are terrorists, black lives matter to BLM, Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, J6 was an insurrection, William Thomas is a female swimmer, Monkeypox isn't spread by monkeying around with the same sex, Hunter's laptop is Russian disinfo, public schools should be safe for groomers, CRT isn't just academic racism, a teenage girl can prophesize what the weather will be like in a hundred years, etc., etc.
Change the language, change the reality -- which reminds me of the etymology of abracadabra, which is said to be from the Aramaic avra kehdabra, meaning “I will create as I speak." Or at least that's too good to check.
Whatever the case may be, abracadabra: inflation is transitory! Abracadabra! Trump is an agent of Putin. Abracadabra! Trump commandeered the Beast. Abracadabra! What insurrection on January 20, 2017?
It's really a kind of secular transubstantiation, isn't it? That is to say, the accidents remain the same, while the substance has undergone a transformation. Thus, the recession, for example, looks like any other recession, except that the Agents assure us that it is substantially different.
It's the other way around with transgenderism, because in that case we are forced to believe that the person is born with the wrong accidents, so to speak. Therefore, a man with the substance of a woman cuts off his merely accidental johnson in order make perception line up with reality. Instead of transubstantiation, it's more like transaccidentality.
Now, free speech is one thing, speech freed from reality another. And you will have noticed that the loudest voices opposing free speech are the same ones who insist that we can change reality by changing the word(s).
Think of what has happened to academia in the span of a generation. Maybe it's because I was still a child of the left when I was in grad school between 1983 and 1988, but I don't remember it being anything like this. Back then you could still call a pervert a pervert and a man a man, and even diagnose and treat ego-dystonic homosexuality.
Consider Josef Pieper's description of the purpose and function of a university: it is a "zone of truth,"
deliberately set aside in the midst of society, a hedged-in space to house the autonomous engagement with reality, in which people can inquire into, discuss, and assert the truth of things without let or hindrance; a domain expressly shielded from any conceivable attempts to use it as a means to achieve certain ends..., whether collective or personal, whether of political, economic or ideological import...
Good times. Nowadays, like journalism, it is (paraphrasing the above)
a zone of falsehood deliberately set aside to propagate the systematic disengagement from reality, in which dissenters are silenced or punished and people are compelled to affirm that lies are true; a secular seminary that exists for the express purpose of advancing a political, economic and ideological agenda.
Imagine a world -- it isn't hard to do -- where
"academic" means, in effect, "anti-sophistical," and thus to be academic means... to resist everything which impugns or destroys the absolute candor of the word in its expression of the bond with reality and its character as communication (Pieper).
The bond with reality. How quaint!
Nevertheless, if language isn't the bond between mind and world, intelligence and intelligibility, then human beings become untethered unglued, and unhinged. But only literally. Figuratively this is easy to overcome by simply redefining madness as sanity.
Abracadabra! Brandon has all his marbles.
To be continued...
14 comments:
Biden denies recession as U.S. enters recession.
Infertility, stunted growth, brain swelling, and permanent vision loss. Maybe trying to force the accidents to be the substance isn't such a good idea.
Kimball:
"All the old liberal virtues -- disinterested inquiry, due process, colorblind justice, advance according to merit, not some extraneous racial, ethnic, or sexual quota -- all that has been rebranded as the invidious patent of reactionary and therefore impermissible vice. In sum, the educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, created to nurture."
"And now the nation believes its own bullshit. Bullshit like 'We have the most capable military in the world.' Bullshit we do. Have you SEEN the representative examples?"
Back then you could still call a pervert a pervert and a man a man.
The Monty Python sketch with Loretta in The Life of Brian showed us how patently silly it all was - and also how easily everyone complied with "Loretta's" insistence that he be granted the right to have babies.
"It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them."
Except now, if like Cleese's character, you reply to the above statement with, "What's the point?!" It's off to cancellation jail for you.
It really is disorienting and more than a bit demoralizing. A psychologist is trained to analyze the feelings induced in the presence of a patient. Therefore, if I am aware of demoralization in the presence of the crazy left, this must be conveying some important information about them. They must be desperate indeed.
Attacks on language have been occurring for ages - "A word may travel around the circle until it comes to mean quite the opposite of what it once meant. The word "prevent" for instance once meant "help." It has quite reversed its meaning."
Lynn Harold Hough, Patterns of the Mind, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and London, 1942, pgs.36-37
I admit complicity in the destruction of language. The prime example is using the word "gay" to identify a homosexual. When we participate by substituting gay for homosexual as a descriptive word, we are not helping the situation, and it is easy to do this substitution because "gay" has become so ubiquitous in usage.
Even that is a denial of the reality, since homosexuality is associated with so much more depression, substance abuse, compulsive behavior, STDs, suicide, early death, and appreciation of Barbra Streisand. Gay indeed.
I was reading Ace's post the other day about the guy who caught monkeypox at one his recent orgies. I don't think most people have any idea how out of control the male sex drive is when all the boundaries are removed - and how profoundly wretched the lifestyle really is. I can think of a lot of descriptors, but "gay" - or anything denoting carefree happiness - isn't really one of them.
Actually, in our brave new world where accusations are actually confessions, focusing on the fact that language has always changed seems pretty petty. But still, I do think Trump is being demonized by some vast left wing conspiracy.
I dunno about this whole ‘Bob was once a leftist thing’.
Sounds a bit like Dave Rubin proclaiming that he didn’t leave the left that the left left him, and now he preaches all 106 tenets of conservatism to his audience as part of his day job especially the post-woke stuff. A bit like all the born-agains I met in the 90’s who all proclaimed that they’d dabbled in witchcraft. What the hell is dabbling in witchcraft even? Playing with a Ouija board long enough to learn it doesn’t work? Hell, I too watched Oprah, Gail and Deepak on my faked sick day but I never called that dabbling in witchcraft.
I’d more need details about this “leftism” and the deconversion.
Young people believe that youth is a destination, when it is merely a provincial bus stop.
Here's a handy word-redefinition chart, courtesy of Powerline's week in pictures.
It's such an important phenomenon, we'll probably be on the subject for awhile.
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