Just a short one, because we ran out of time...
Confucius say, Rectify names. If name names not match reality, language have no object. If language have no object, intelligent action impossible. Politics disintegrate; management of collective action pointless and impossible (my translation).
Aphorist say, in order of pithiness:
Leftism is lexicographical tactic more than ideological strategy.
Wordiness not excess of words but dearth of ideas.
Effect of liberal rhetoric on taste called nausea.
Only ideas save us from adjectives.
The deluded are prolix.
Orwell say,
There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.
What did Lenin say? According to Morson,
In Lenin’s view, a true revolutionary did not establish the correctness of his beliefs by appealing to evidence or logic, as if there were some standards of truthfulness above social classes.
Rather,
his purpose was not to convince but to destroy his opponent.... Marxists who disagreed with his naïve epistemology were “philosophic scum.” Object to his brutality and your arguments are “moralizing vomit.” You can see traces of this approach in the advice of Saul Alinsky -- who cites Lenin -- to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it”....
[T]here was no need to understand opposing views before denouncing them, since the very fact that they were opposing views proved them wrong -- and what was wrong served the enemy and so was criminal.... He disproved a position simply by showing it contradicted what he believed (https://archive.fo/0wCmb).
So, the left has always been with us, and always will be with us, because prior to it is human nature, and it doesn't get worse than that. Importantly, these idiots don't even lie, but but do something far worse to language:
the concept of “lying,” if one stops there, does not reach the heart of the matter.... a true Leninist does not decide whether to lie. He automatically says what is most useful, with no reflection necessary. That is why he can show no visible signs of mendacity, perhaps even pass a lie detector test....
The Soviets did not find out the truth and then exaggerate; they often did not know the truth themselves. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith hears that fifty million pairs of boots were produced that year and reflects that, for all he knows, no boots at all were produced.
What is going on with man and with language in order to render the left both possible and inevitable? To help me find out, yesterday I reread an essay by Josef Pieper called The Abuse of Language and The Abuse of Power.
The first thing that occurs to me is that when people who pretend to communicate are abusing language, they are abusing you. Indeed, you are being brutalized. Ever see a White House press briefing? These so-called journalists prove it is possible to ask a lie.
"Speaking truth to power" is always fatal to the left, hence the deeper strategy of converting language into a hammer, which the left never stops doing.
The left doesn't merely lie, because it's worse than that. For in rejecting the Absolute they undermine the very link between speech and reality, and then it is no longer even necessary to consciously deceive; rather, language is the deception it pretends to uncover, hence the old gag that Speech was given to man in order to deceive.
This will become clearer as we proceed, I'll bet.
Pieper agrees that this threat "exists in every society and in every age," and most certainly "applies to contemporary events." It is "an eternal temptation which, through the course of history, man has been, and always will be, called upon to resist."
So, bad news/good news: just as the linguistic temptation is always there, so too is the Resistance.
One question is why language has become so sick in our day. Two words: journalism and tenure. Or the media-academic industrial complex. It wasn't that long ago that journalists weren't necessarily college indoctrinated activists.
Now, Big Journalism functions like a nasty autoimmune disorder to identify and destroy even vaguely independent or curious journalists like a Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, or Glenn Greenwald. For the latter two, even being homosexual is no defense!
Back to Pieper. Even though this essay was published in 1970, he was on to the fact that it is precisely the intelligent who are most susceptible to indoctrination, for "to call someone 'highly educated' is in reality a dubious compliment." Today this is obvious, but back then it was a new phenomenon. Now we know that
A person must not have progressed very far in his education if he has not discovered good reasons to justify the worst behavior. All the evil that has been done since Adam's time, has been justified by means of good reasons.
It reminds me of the Crazy-Hot Matrix. Call it the Intelligence / Indoctrination Matrix, whereby the threat "becomes increasingly dangerous as the level of... 'education'" rises. Thus, a person who is both intelligent and educated but not a crazed ideologue is a... unicorn.
The analogy needs work, but in any event, unicorns exist, Pieper himself being one of them. To be continued...
7 comments:
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith hears that fifty million pairs of boots were produced that year and reflects that, for all he knows, no boots at all were produced.
Funny, I feel that way about the news on an increasing basis each day.
The first thing that occurs to me is that when people who pretend to communicate are abusing language, they are abusing you.
Reminds of the time there was a speech being given, and the person in the background who was supposed to be using sign language was actually just faking it. Nobody realized until some people who actually know sign language complained.
Some relevant aphorisms:
--There are a thousand truths and only one error.
--It is enough to state a truth in order to make the fool laugh.
--The young are not so much the future as they are the tedious reiteration of the past.
--After today’s masters, yesterday’s are less shocking.
--Few discussions are more than debates between a triviality and a nonsensicality.
--There are few intelligences that we do not hear fluttering blindly in their cage of unconscious convictions.
--The liberal always discovers too late that the price of equality is the omnipotent State.
To be fair, a lot of liberals apparently really do love Big Brother, so would consider that a feature. Ironically, they probably prefer the idea of an omnipotent State to an omnipotent God who loves them enough to allow them to be themselves.
--Ideologies, properly speaking, do not exist; ideological uses exist. In order for an ideology to provide a service, it must be an ideology that is utilized abusively.
Liberals love Big Mother.
"What is going on with man and with language in order to render the left both possible and inevitable? To help me find out, yesterday I reread an essay by Josef Pieper called The Abuse of Language and The Abuse of Power. "
I just reread that again a couple weeks ago. Fantastic essay, available online here, and another tidbit here:
“..."The sophists’’, he says, “‘fabricate a fictitious reality.”’ That the existential realm of man could be taken over by pseudorealities whose fictitious nature threatens to become indiscernible is truly a depressing thought. And yet this Platonic nightmare, I hold, possesses an alarming contemporary relevance. For the general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language..."
Post a Comment