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...
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