#language manipulation | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 years ago

Link

By: Bruno Waterfield

Published: Sep 17, 2022

Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.

He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.

And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.

Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time

The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell. Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state. They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.

Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’

Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too. He was concerned about the Sovietisation of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties. He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.

Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviours and attitudes. This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it, ‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.

Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.

Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing. He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927. And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinised left.

The hostility was mutual. Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travellers continue to display towards Orwell today.

The importance of words

Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. Just think, for example, of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government – a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia (1938)).

Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview. Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation. As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:

‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’

As Orwell wrote elsewhere, ‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’

This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.

But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control. Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak. Newspeak is more than mere censorship. It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible. It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thoughtcrime’).

As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:

‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated. In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police. There is little of that in our societies today – people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.

However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thoughtcrime. And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realised in an openly dictatorial manner. No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.

The intellectual turn against freedom

But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.

Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organisation, English PEN. Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticise Soviet Russia or wartime censorship. Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.

‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.

Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.

An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is ‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.

These are insights which have stood the test of time. Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus. They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.

And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged. This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age. Free speech does not support privilege. We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC. But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.

Orwell’s legacy

Orwell is everywhere today. He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture. But his value and importance to us lies in his defence of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.

His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.

Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry. Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language’ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’. He said: ‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’

Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:

‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’

Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.

#Bruno Waterfield #language games #language manipulation #authoritarianism #totalitarianism #totalitarian ideology #redefining words #George Orwell #Orwellian #religion is a mental illness

30 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years ago

Text

Language games do not grant wishes.

Reality cannot be bullied. Be who you want to be, but you are what you are.

#Wesley Yang #language games #language manipulation #redefining words #identify as #social contructivism #reality denial #magical thinking #religion is a mental illness

20 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years ago

Text

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #724

You cannot have my language.

It is my right to describe the world as I see it, using words of my choosing.

If those words offend vou. too bad.

Be offended.

Or just simply ignore me.

My feelings will not be hurt.

Your feelings, on the other hand, are as fragile as a snot bubble leaking from a stupid child's nose.

#Chuck Lorre #language manipulation #freedom of speech #free speech #be offended #fragility #emotional fragility #offended #freedom of expression #religion is a mental illness

18 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 years ago

Link

By: Wilfred Reilly

Published: Jan 13, 2023

The fact that many people take this sort of stuff dead seriously reveals a major cultural problem in American middle-class life.

Almost a decade back, a group of buddies and I were watching a newish Robin Hood movie, and a young mentee asked why British authorities were hanging a Caucasian bandit: “He’s white — that ain’t realistic.”

The story is funny, but the sincere energy underlying the question is surprisingly common. To give an all-too-real example, academic leaders at USC recently declared a de facto ban on the use of the word “field” during discussions of scholarly work. Across at least the sizeable School of Social Work, the University of Southern California/Spoiled Children will “remove the word . . . from its curriculum and practice and replace it with the word ‘practicum’ instead.” The apparent reason for this is the perception that only blacks and Latinos have worked in the United States’ actual fields in the recent past: “The term may have . . . connotations for descendants of slaves and immigrant workers.” Per a rather lengthy official letter from the institution: “This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or immigrant in favor of inclusive language.”

The “field” example hardly stands alone (the field behind it is crowded!). Just a year or two back, the Grey Lady herself — the Times of New York — noted the decision of major East Coast realty groups such as the Real Estate Board of New York to stop using the term “master” to describe the largest and best-appointed bedroom in a home. In a piece titled “The Biggest Bedroom Is No Longer a Master,” Times-woman Sydney Franklin pointed out that the push against the language “comes in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests,” and quoted Southern Star Realty agent Tanna Young to the effect that the term “master” “evoked images of pre–Civil War plantation life.” New York City real estate board COO Sandhya Espitia summarized the situation as: “(We are) assessing what meaningful steps should be put in place to bring greater diversity and inclusion to the industry.”

In perhaps the most notable of this speech-change trend, Stanford University — although it has pulled back a smidge after coast-to-coast mockery and cabbage-tossing — released a list of several dozen words that right-thinkers are no longer to say. The roster broke down forbidden terms into no fewer than ten categories, including “ableist, ageism, colonialism, culturally appropriative, gender-based, imprecise language, institutionalized racism, person-first, violent, and additional considerations.” While a small number of the words or phrases were potentially offensive, others included the term “American” (this might imply that U.S. citizens think their country the best in the whole hemisphere), “brave” (could describe either our own warriors or indigenous opponents as “savage”), “walk-in” (implies that most people perambulate on two legs), and even “beating a dead horse” (legitimizes violence vs. animals).

All of this is, again, hilarious to describe. But, as with the Robin Hood example, the fact that many people take this sort of stuff dead seriously reveals a real and major cultural problem in American middle-class life. Many of us have been trained to associate universal human struggles or vices uniquely with America, including the historical mistreatment of blacks within America. This trend is not only ahistorical, but legitimately dangerous for national morale.

For example, while slavery was a national disgrace between 1776 and 1865, it is simply not true that “workin’ in the fields” has been a uniquely or primarily black or Latino job in the historical United States. According to a major recent book — a left-leaning one that I reviewed critically — 50 to 55 percent of all residents of a typical white-majority state such as Wisconsin were free or tenant farmers as late as the 1850s. For that matter, there are a ton of landsmen out in the fields today: The U.S.A. still contains 2,010,650 working crop and animal farm operations, with 36 percent of these located in the notoriously pale Midwest. And most farmers of all shades are hardly rolling in the filthy lucre. Any list of the ten poorest counties in the U.S. is almost certain to include hardscrabble rustic locales such as Holmes County (Miss.), Buffalo County (S.D.), Owsley County (Ky.), Clay County (Ky.), and McCreary County (Ky.).

Similarly — if this even needs to be said — the term “master bedroom” is not a uniquely American one deriving from the historical practice of slavery. Slavery itself, of course, was not a singularly American vice: It dates back to the dawn of man, and the great Greek Aristotle gave written advice on feeding slaves (not much) and identifying “natural” bondsmen. The Arab slave trade plagued Africa for centuries longer than the Western-driven Atlantic slave trade and resulted in the transshipment of perhaps 5 million more victims.

And, all this almost aside, the word “master” as used in housing sales in the northern U.S. never had a damned thing to do with slavery in the first place. “Master” is also a term for a skilled craftsman able to afford — if not simply build — a big home, and even the NYT points out that “the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development determined in 1995 that ‘master bedroom’ was not discriminatory.” So far as anyone can tell, the language traces back to the 1926 Modern Homes catalog from Sears, Roebuck. Similarly, as regarding Stanford’s recent cringing, one might suspect that language honoring traits such as military prowess has existed — generally in a race-neutral fashion — across most human societies for virtually all of time.

While we Americans play the bizarre and sickly game of (1) trying to link everything imaginable in our society today to conflict or oppression in our past and then (2) blubberingly apologizing for that past, other countries with violent histories take a different route. In rapidly modernizing Mongolia, a 130-foot-tall stainless-steel statue of the great conqueror Genghis Khan greets visitors to the capital of Ulan Bator. South Africa boasts beautifully done monuments depicting both the Zulu king Shaka and his rival Boer voortrekkers. A common message associated with this sort of thing — almost verbatim from the plaques in the South Africa case — is: “We all fought each other, then. Let’s get down to business and improve the country, now.”

We Yanks might not want to be quite that blunt — although I basically do. But while working out our final national message, let’s ignore the quivering daisies (is that offensive?) and go on saying “field,” and “master bedroom,” and the usual terms for our countrymen, without ever giving in to unnecessary panic and guilt.

Honestly, the histrionics, the competitive piety and performative liturgies have gone past amusing into just boring. These people, and the institutions they control, are unserious idiots holding us back as badly - or worse - than the “intelligent design” mob.

#Wilfred Reilly #language games #language manipulation #University of Southern California #fieldwork #in the field #master bedroom #antiracism #antiracism as religion #cult of woke #woke activism #wokeism #woke #wokeness as religion #religion is a mental illness

18 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 years ago

Video

youtube

Andrew Doyle reacts to 'authoritarian' imposed changes to language

Compton Mckenzie was indulging in this hobby of collecting "literally”s back in the early 20th century, but the error has never really gone away. Anyone who is online will have seen activists saying that someone or other is literally Hitler, even though only Hitler was literally Hitler.

Or how about the claim that words are literal violence? Such activists are of course butchering the English language - that's another metaphor by the way - but literal-minded people have always existed.

But the tendency for literal mindedness among modern social justice activists is particularly pronounced. When a couple of weeks ago, the Pleasance Theatre Trust defended its cancellation of the comedian Jerry Sadowitz’s stand-up show, it issued a statement saying that “opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable.”

But jokes aren't opinions. They're jokes. The chicken didn't literally cross the road, unless by literally you mean figuratively. And even then there isn't an actual chicken. Or a road.

Just as words aren't violence, jokes aren't real life.

Now, I've spoken before on this show about how the companies that compile dictionaries are now seemingly staffed by activists. The role of the dictionary is to record common usage, but over the past few years you'll have noticed that some staff members at dictionary companies change definitions to better suit their ideological creed. An attempt at social engineering, you might call it.

Because really, the culture war is all about language, and who gets to define the meanings of words. So take America's oldest dictionary, Merriam-Webster, whose contributors have deemed it necessary to change the definition of the word “racism” to reflect “systemic oppression.”

Now, most people understand racism to be hatred or prejudice against others due to their race. But for social justice activists racism is an equation: prejudice plus power. Which is why they say that only white people can be racist.

That's why when two Indian teenagers were arrested at a football game in New Jersey having verbally abused and urinated on a group of black schoolgirls, the New York Times didn't say this was a racist attack, but that the perpetrators were “enacting whiteness.”

And all of this constant redefinition is maddening because it means you're forever doubting your senses.

Here's another example of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary changing definitions to suit their ideology. This is how they've defined female for many years: “of relating to or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs.”

But sometime in the past few months, they sneakily added this second definition, which is: “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”

So, all of a sudden, being female is being defined in terms of what it's not.

Have they been getting Baldrick to write their definitions?

youtube

When the compilers of dictionaries are telling you that words no longer mean what you think they mean, it's a means of control. As the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick said, “the basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words you can control the people who must use the words.”

And this is also why so many people go along with social justice activists. After all, they claim to be in favor of “social justice.” Who wouldn't be in favor of that?

And yet, their ideas seem so regressive. Calling for censorship. Removing books from library shelves. Dividing people by skin color. Encouraging young gay people to think there's something wrong with them and they might need medication.

Most of us can see how regressive this stuff is. But wait! They call themselves “progressive.” They call themselves “left wing.” But they don't seem to care about redressing economic inequality. In fact, they often seem to demonize the working class.

They say they're for justice, but they seem to bully and attack decent people and ruin their livelihoods. For people who claim to be “on the right side of history,” their viciousness knows no bounds. Confusing isn't it?

Just like when people in black masks calling themselves “anti-fascist” or “Antifa” for short are pepper spraying Trump voters, or attacking feminists in the name of compassion. I mean, isn't violence used to suppress opposition a fascistic tactic?

But authoritarians always misuse words. They always have. Do you really think that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is an authentic democracy? So why then, ought you to assume that those claiming to be promoting social justice are doing anything of the kind?

Take the phrase “anti-racism.” Up until relatively recently the phrase “anti-racist” was universally understood as straightforwardly signaling an opposition to racist attitudes and behavior. But Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Anti-racist,” writes that “the claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism.”

Alana Lentin, author of “Why Race Still Matters,” takes it a step further arguing that to be “not racist” is a form of “discursive racist violence.” So to be “not racist” is a form of racism.

This ideology has spread because it uses appealing words to describe some terrible ideas. I mean who wouldn't say that they were “anti-racist”? We're all against racism.

But “anti-racist” activists are telling us that not being racist is a form of racism and that we must be actively anti-racist. But what they mean by that is that we must accept the presupposition of Critical Race Theory that racism underpins all human interactions, and that all white people are inherently complicit.

In other words, people are being coerced into accepting some very regressive ideas because the fear of being branded as “racist” is so great.

Let's take another example. Remember when all those Labour MPs held up those signs saying they wanted to ban “trans conversion therapy”? Conversion therapy is a terrible thing, I mean one thinks of how gay people used to be wired up to electrodes and tortured in an effort to make them straight.

But what activists are calling “trans conversion therapy” is something very different. It's simply when specialists talk to children about their feelings of gender dysphoria to determine what other factors might be at play. In most cases, gender non-conforming kids grow up to be gay, and they are often simply struggling with their homosexuality. But the scandal at the Tavistock Clinic has shown how many of these children were fast-tracked into medicalization, to be fixed in accordance with heterosexual assumptions.Now that's a form of conversion therapy.

So when these Labour MPs hold up signs saying they want a ban on conversion therapy, they are in truth supporting conversion therapy.

And this is why at, the end of the day we have to restore the shared definitions of words. We need to be wary of activists who redefine words while denying that they are doing so. We need to keep an eye on those dictionaries, because these changes are being implemented all the time.

Language evolves, and that's natural and inevitable. But when changes to language are imposed, that's authoritarian.

And by, the way I've noticed that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has recently added a new definition of the word “literally.” Now if you go to the website, you can still see the original meaning, which is: “in a literal sense or manner.”

But you can also now see this secondary meaning which appeared a couple of months ago: “in effect. Virtually. Used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible.”

So when The Guardian back in 1930 claimed that “the play literally brought the house down,” they weren't wrong. Because under the new definitions, “literally” can literally mean figuratively, just as “progressive” can mean regressive, “liberal” can mean illiberal, and “social justice” can mean social injustice.

No wonder everyone's so confused.

That confusion is deliberate. When everyone is confused, you can go about the business of enacting your activist agenda in a way that delegitimizes legitimate critique or opposition, without ever actually addressing that criticism or opposition.

Xians do this all the time. “Not a true Xian,” “it’s a metaphor,” “fear means respect.”

#Andrew Doyle #word games #language manipulation #redefining words #manipulation #gaslighting #literally #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #woke activism #wokeism #woke #antiracism as religion #antiracism #gender ideology #queer theory #religion is a mental illness

18 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 years ago

Link

By: Andrew Doyle

Published; Jan 6, 2023

It is a truism that people are often educated out of extreme religious beliefs. With good education comes the ability to think critically, which is the death knell for ideologies that are built on tenuous foundations. The religion of Critical Social Justice has spread at an unprecedented rate, partly because it makes claims to authority in the kind of impenetrable language that discourages the sort of criticism and scrutiny that would see it collapse upon itself. Some would argue that this is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church resisted translating the Bible into the vernacular for so long; those in power are always threatened when the plebeians start thinking for themselves and asking inconvenient questions.

This tactic of deliberately restricting knowledge produces epistemic closure, and is a hallmark of all cults. The elitist lexicon of Critical Social Justice not only provides an effective barrier against criticism and a means to sound informed while saying very little, but also signals membership and discourages engagement from those outside the bubble.

It is inevitable that the principle of freedom of speech should become a casualty when powerful people are obsessed with language and its capacity to shape the world. Revolutionaries of the postmodernist mindset would have us believe that societal change can be actuated through modifications to the language that describes it, which is why Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School maintained that it was not possible to conceive of the liberated world in the language of the existing world. As for the new puritans, they have embraced the belief that language is either a tool of oppression or a means to resist it. This not only accounts for their approval of censorship and “hate speech” legislation, but their inability to grasp how the artistic representation of morally objectionable ideas is not the same as an endorsement.

It further accounts for their hostility to debate. According to this view, the airing of toxic ideas enables their promulgation, and so there is a moral duty to ensure that they are silenced. This is the logic behind the practice of “no platforming” or “deplatforming,” which sees visiting speakers disinvited from appearing on university campuses due to their contentious opinions. The new puritans’ longed-for utopia, in which all forms of prejudice are eradicated from the human instinct, will apparently be brought about through the control of how we speak and, by extension, how we think.

In addition to calls for censorship, language can be manipulated through what is known as “concept creep,” by which words lose any meaning through endless misapplication. The most disturbing example has been the expanded meaning of terms such as “far right,” “fascist,” and “Nazi,” which has needlessly raised the temperature of current political debates. A new make-believe domain has emerged, in which many are gripped by an irrational conviction that we live in a country dominated by fascists, poised to rise and seize control like a rerun of Mussolini’s march on Rome. So one left-leaning commentator informs us that “fascist extremism and terrorism is being legitimised and fuelled by ‘mainstream’ newspapers and politicians alike.” Another insists that “all white people” are implicated “in white supremacy.” The rhetoric has become so ubiquitous that these terms have begun to lose their potency.

Fascist extremism and terrorism is being legitimised and fuelled by "mainstream" newspapers and politicians alike. pic.twitter.com/nHyjUqJhlb

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) August 13, 2017

So why is it that so many journalists and activists are persuaded that neo-Nazism has gone mainstream? Why do so many on social media feel the need to identify themselves as “anti-fascist”? Like most people, I have never met an actual fascist. I have encountered some racists, a few far-right advocates, and one white nationalist during the filming of a programme for the BBC—but no fascists, so far as I am aware. My default expectation of my fellow creatures is that they would instinctively oppose such pernicious ideas. Claiming to be an “anti-fascist” is rather like wearing a badge saying “I am not a paedophile”; it makes others wonder what you’re hiding.

The illusion of a crypto-fascist epidemic is buoyed by the misapprehension that white supremacists and neo-Nazis tend to keep their views to themselves. This is untrue; one of the problems we face in combating these ideologies is that fealty to the cause is considered a source of pride. By failing to use terms accurately and with care, commentators and journalists have created the impression that such groups are pervasive and have thereby inadvertently promoted them. It is no great leap to suppose that this goes some way to explaining why the far Right has lately been recruiting members with greater ease. Although still extremely marginal, there is evidence to suggest that the far Right is growing, and while we ought to take this very seriously, we should not allow the truth to be distorted through lazy hyperbole.

Then there is the slippery term “alt-right,” a catch-all that rivals “fascist” and “Nazi” for the way in which it is deployed so thoughtlessly. Even Jordan Peterson, the famous clinical psychologist whose opposition to tyranny in all its forms could not be more well documented, has been branded as “alt-right” by numerous media outlets. In common parlance, the term has become irrevocably associated with white nationalism and movements helmed by the likes of Richard Spencer. So when Peter Walker, political correspondent for the Guardian, claims that the meaning of “alt-right” is “subjective,” he is either being disingenuous or naïve. According to Walker, it “can be associated with a sort of highly robust, fairly confrontational libertarian right-leaning politics with a dash of support for Trump,” but his use of the modal verb is telling. That a phrase with such potentially libellous connotatioxr4xrns can be defined in multiple ways should surely give journalists pause for thought. Unless, of course, their intention is to imply a correlation with white supremacy, safe in the knowledge that the get-out clause of ambiguity will excuse the smear.

We see the same problem with the notion of “Islamophobia,” which has been weaponised to great effect. As a consequence, people with legitimate criticisms of Islam are gratuitously pigeon-holed alongside the sort of reactionaries who shout abuse at women in hijabs or throw bacon at mosques. Even Muslim critics are dismissed as suffering from “internalised Islamophobia” if their ideas are not deemed sufficiently deferential. In a free society, no religious belief should be ringfenced from analysis or mockery, and the accusation of “Islamophobia” has become the primary tool by which to discourage potential critics.

We need to restore some clarity. We are right to call groups such as the British National Party “far right,” because they have always been dominated by those who believe in the concept of racial superiority, but once the meaning of the term spreads to incorporate civic nationalists, readers of right-leaning tabloids, those who voted for Brexit, or gender-critical feminists, the words become denuded of their power. Hysteria is no sound basis for political analysis, and nor is it advisable to allow genuine fascists the opportunity to claim greater support than they actually command. For all the alarmism of the new puritans, we do not live in a country in which racism, homophobia, misogyny or anti-trans hatred are considered in any way acceptable. Even the mildest suspicion of such tendencies can result in a form of social excommunication. That is not to say that such prejudices have been eliminated—human nature is far too flawed for that—but it is reassuring that we appear to have reached a civilised consensus.

There was a time when the right-wing press seemed to be dominated by fantasists. Reports abounded of asylum seekers being showered with benefits, ethnic minorities forcing local councils to ban the word “Christmas” in favour of “Winterval,” or nurseries teaching children to sing Baa, Baa, Rainbow Sheep so as not to offend black people. Such histrionic “PC gone mad” stories were typically propagated by reactionary tabloid polemicists. They were describing a fantasy Britain, one distorted by fear, ignorance, and possibly a few too many boozy press lunches. Not to be outdone, the new puritans have seemingly conjured a different kind of imaginary Britain, in which the behaviour of a few extremists is magnified to an absurd extent. These are the reactionaries of our present culture war, occupying a nightmare land of their own making.

Some sympathy is warranted here; it must be exhausting to harbour such convictions, untethered as they are from reality. But the fact remains that it is our security services and intelligence agencies who are taking on the handful of fascists in our midst. The rest are just scrapping with ghosts.

That the new puritans have consolidated their power through the manipulation of language might explain why they have secured so much influence over public libraries. During the past few years, we have seen a bizarre militancy from librarians who are keen to “decolonise” their collections or berate people for their reading habits. I am not suggesting here that there has been some kind of conspiracy among ideologues to infiltrate libraries by stealth, but rather that the role seems to attract activists who are convinced that society can be re-engineered through censorship of the words we say and the books we read.

I am aware of how ludicrous the concept of “woke librarians” might sound, but the evidence is compelling. Even the British Library has a “Decolonising Working Group,” which has successfully persuaded its management to review its collections, “powerfully reinterpret” statues of its founders, and put more than 300 authors on a watchlist if they have even the flimsiest of connections to the slave trade. One of the group’s more risible findings is that the library’s main building is a monument to imperialism because it resembles a battleship.

Recently I have noticed the weird rise of “woke librarians”; militant ideologues who are intent on revising the past and “decolonising” libraries. Needless to say, these are the last people who should be entrusted with the custodianship of knowledge.https://t.co/CH3Ygih6vG

— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) August 30, 2020

When archivists at Homerton College, Cambridge, were engaged in a project to upload their collection of children’s literature to the Internet, they decided to apply “trigger warnings” to texts that might cause offence due to outdated racial stereotypes. These included Little House on the Prairie (1935) by Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Water Babies (1863) by Charles Kingsley, and various books by Dr Seuss. Typically, such gestures are a reliable indication that those responsible are ideologically captured, and this was confirmed by a statement issued on behalf of the college. The archivists apparently sought to make their digital collection “less harmful in the context of a canonical literary heritage that is shaped by, and continues, a history of oppression.” Note the familiar invocation of “harm” unfittingly applied to the written word, and the underlying assumption that art and literature is a means by which the oppressor class perpetuates its power over marginalised groups.

Most revealingly, the archivists stated that it would be “a dereliction of our duty as gatekeepers to allow such casual racism to go unchecked.” This is what has become known colloquially as “saying the quiet part out loud.” The role of the archivist is that of the custodian, not the gatekeeper. Yet it is clear from this statement that those in charge of this digital project consider it their duty to shield the public from potentially corrupting texts rather than to facilitate access. Any competent teacher will confirm that even young children are capable of appreciating the concept of historical context and how values shift over time, particularly with the proper guidance. These self-appointed “gatekeepers” evidently believe otherwise.

The application of “trigger warnings” has been common practice in universities since at least 2013. These can range from literary works on English Literature courses to the study of rape cases in law schools. One professor at Harvard University writes how a colleague was “asked by a student not to use the word ‘violate’ in class—as in ‘Does this conduct violate the law?’—because the word was triggering.” It is hardly crass to point out that if undergraduates cannot bear to hear about unpleasant crimes, they should avoid the study of law. It would be like someone who cannot stand the sight of blood specialising in heart surgery.

Those who defend the practice of trigger warnings argue that they are simply protecting certain students from the reignition of a pre-existing trauma. If someone has been the victim of a violent attack, the reasoning goes, they should be made aware in advance if a text contains distressing imagery. The intention is clearly compassionate, and few would deny that it is upsetting to be reminded of past experiences we would rather forget. Early in my short-lived teaching career, I was blindsided by an incident in an English Literature class that might have been prevented had warnings been issued. I was teaching a poem in which an execution by hanging was vividly described. As I was reading the text aloud, a pupil ran from the classroom in tears. It was only later that I discovered that one of her relatives had recently hanged himself. After this unfortunate incident, I reflected on whether a warning at the beginning of the lesson might have prevented this outcome, or if this was simply the consequence of a failure of communication among teaching staff.

As it turns out, there is a consensus among cognitive behavioural therapists that trigger warnings are counter-productive when it comes to trauma recovery. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explained in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), “avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.” They quote Richard McNally, the director of clinical training at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, who writes: “Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD.”

There is a distinction to be drawn here between trigger warnings at universities and the kind of notifications we find before films aimed at helping parents to determine whether the content is suitable for their children. When the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) alerts viewers to potentially upsetting material, they do not make the claim that it is “harmful,” only that it may be inappropriate for certain age groups. Trigger warnings, on the other hand, are justified on the basis of this putative nexus of words and violence, one that is informed by the ideology of the new puritanism.

Worse still, this flawed notion can be weaponised by activist students who wish to exert some degree of control over their teachers. A letter from seven anonymous academics to Inside Higher Ed drew attention to the potential risk:

We are currently watching our colleagues receive phone calls from deans and other administrators investigating student complaints that they have included ‘triggering’ material in their courses, with or without warnings. We feel that this movement is already having a chilling effect on our teaching and pedagogy.

Trigger warnings have also been deployed as a form of appeasement to activists, a signal that their concerns are being heeded even if they are groundless. For instance, after students and staff demanded that the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge acknowledge the “systemic racism” of this entire field of study, trigger warnings were added to ancient Greek and Roman literary works. Given the litany of sexual violence in these texts, one would have assumed that squeamish students would have avoided the subject altogether. Consider Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses of how Adonis was conceived; his mother Myrrha tricked her own father into copulation and, while heavily pregnant, was transformed into a tree. This is surely the very definition of a dysfunctional family.

[ The Birth of Adonis and the Transformation of Myrrha, by Luigi Garzi (1638–1721). ]

A further aspect of the faculty’s “action plan” was to add signs to the display of plaster casts of Roman and Greek sculptures explaining that their “whiteness” was not to be taken as a sign that the ancient world lacked diversity. Of course, this sort of performative handwringing is hardly necessary. The whiteness of the plaster casts can be readily accounted for by the fact that plaster is white.

Such needless and patronising explanations are entirely in keeping with the trigger-warning mentality, which perceives adults as being locked in a permanent state of infancy. In the summer of 2021, Brandeis University in Massachusetts published an “oppressive language list” of phrases best avoided by students and staff. Examples included “female-bodied,” “lame,” and “spirit animal.” The phrase “person experiencing housing insecurity” was recommended as an inoffensive alternative to “homeless person.” A category headed “violent language” featured phrases such as “rule of thumb” and “you’re killing it”; the latter apparently could be misconstrued as an allegation of homicidal intent. This is evidently a university for the congenitally literal-minded.

Brandeis University expands list of ‘oppressive’ words and phrases to avoid using https://t.co/ohJK1MRAms

— Boston Herald (@bostonherald) August 28, 2021

Of course when it comes to the culture wars, the United Kingdom is never far behind the United States. Soon after the publication of the “oppressive language list” at Brandeis, it was reported that the University of Glasgow had instructed staff to apply trigger warnings to course content to prevent distress. As an added twist, it was decreed that the phrase “trigger warning” might itself be triggering as it invokes guns and violent imagery, and so “content advice” was to be preferred.

Other universities have competed to see who can invent the most asinine warnings: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) has a plot that “centres on a murder”; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) “contains depictions of murder, death, family betrayal and kidnapping”; Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) includes scenes of “graphic fishing.” Even George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has been slapped with a warning that students might find the contents “offensive and upsetting.” Of course, those who would assume that a famous dystopian novel would be inoffensive and uplifting probably shouldn’t be studying literature in the first place.

Political commentator Brendan O’Neill has described trigger warnings as “a slippery form of censorship,” insofar as they “don’t outright ban books but they do shroud them in suspicion; they treat them as dangerous objects; they tell readers, ‘Watch out—this book might hurt you.’” And once we countenance the premise that words can be “harmful,” the next logical step is the withdrawal or destruction of books. Following a review of its collections, the Waterloo Region District School Board in Canada identified and removed books that were considered “harmful to staff and students.” Other school libraries did away with copies of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), following complaints about “racist, homophobic, or misogynistic language and themes.”

Those involved in these decisions evidently lack the most basic interpretative abilities. To Kill a Mockingbird is, of course, explicitly anti-racist, but for those who have invested words with the power to wound, the inclusion of racial slurs is sufficient to see it condemned. Never mind that the novel is set in the Deep South during the era of the Great Depression when such terms were commonplace, nor that Lee invites us to sympathise with the characters who believe, as does Atticus Finch, that “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it,” and how justice is the right of every man “be he any colour of the rainbow.”

When NewSouth Books published an edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in which the racial epithets were eliminated, they were demonstrating a similarly myopic approach. Like Atticus Finch, Huckleberry is a rare figure who can see beyond the ingrained prejudices of his time. Through its first-person narrative, we are invited to share the vantage point of a boy who instinctively rejects the prevailing conventions. The target of Twain’s satire is a community whose members believe themselves to be moral and godly but are happy to enslave and degrade their fellow creatures. In this we can detect Rousseau’s conception of the child uncorrupted by “civilisation”; it takes the innocence of a boy to see through the sanctimony and hypocrisy of a society built on exploitation.

The impulse to censor, or remove entirely, such explicitly anti-racist texts in the name of “anti-racism” is a reminder of how the new puritanism can only be sustained where critical thinking is absent. Language is reduced to a series of cyphers intended only to bolster oppression or resist it. The prioritisation of the “lived experience” of the reader—or, more often, the non-reader—means that even the most egregious misinterpretation may be taken as evidence of a text’s capacity to “stir up hatred.” How else might we explain the removal of The Handmaid’s Tale, a mainstay of contemporary feminist literature? The novel depicts a dystopian future in which women are reduced to broodmares for the ruling class. It is no accident that it is set in New England; Atwood draws a direct connection between the theocracy of this era and the totalitarianism of Gilead, her fictional dystopia, particularly in the treatment of women and the assumption of their inherent servility. Like the women of New England, who dressed plainly and were prohibited from using combs or mirrors, Atwood’s handmaids are attired in a manner that denies them an individual identity: ankle- length red skirts, a flat yoke with full sleeves, and white wings around the face that prevent them “from seeing, but also from being seen.”

Atwood has described her “take on American Puritanism” as “not that far behind” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne’s novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, a woman convicted of adultery and forced to wear an embroidered letter A as a mark of shame and expiation for her sins. Both Atwood and Hawthorne share an ancestral connection to the puritans of New England. Hawthorne was the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, one of the leading judges in the Salem witch trials, and found little pleasure in revisiting these ghosts of his family’s repressive past. Perhaps more than any other author, Hawthorne is most responsible for the view of the puritans as repressive, bigoted, and hypocritical. He considered The Scarlet Letter to be a “positively hell-fired story,” into which he “found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light.” Atwood’s family connection is through Mary Webster, one of the dedicatees of The Handmaid’s Tale, who was hanged for being a witch in 1683 but survived the execution process.

Those responsible for the removal of The Handmaid’s Tale from libraries might not be executing women who fail to conform, but they are certainly embodying the kind of ideological fervour that the novel explores. I am reminded of the comedian Victoria Wood’s short television play The Library (1989), which depicts a tyrannical librarian called Madge who likes to bowdlerise Jackie Collins novels with a felt-tip pen and draw bras on the women in breastfeeding manuals. “She thinks book-burning is a sensible alternative to oil-fired central heating,” Wood tells her audience in the show’s opening monologue. Little could she have known that, 30 years on, the absurdist notion of a librarian who approves of censorship would become a habitual figure in the industry.

youtube

Wood’s jibe was somewhat prescient, given that school board in south-western Ontario recently authorised the ritualistic burning of books for “educational purposes.” In what they described as a “flame purification” ceremony, almost 5,000 books were removed from shelves and were destroyed or recycled if they were judged to contain outdated racial stereotypes. Some of those that were burned had their ashes used as fertiliser to plant a tree. An uplifting, progressive, and environmentally conscious gesture, if one ignores the overtones of Fahrenheit 451.

At this point the book burnings are no longer just metaphorical. https://t.co/jr3FZfOM0r

— Pedro Domingos (@pmddomingos) September 8, 2021

The new puritans are similarly attracted to positions in which they are able to participate in the revision of dictionaries. Although the conventional role of the dictionary is to record common usage, the rise of the Critical Social Justice movement has meant that definitions are often modified to better reflect the ideological beliefs of staff members. Take America’s oldest dictionary, Merriam-Webster, whose contributors have deemed it necessary to change the definition of the word “racism” to “reflect systemic oppression.” Likewise, the Anti-Defamation League has changed the definition of “racism” on its website from “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another” to “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” In this, they are following the diktats of critical race theorists who believe that “racism” is an equation—prejudice plus power—rather than prejudice or hatred towards individuals on the basis of their race, which is how the vast majority of people understand the term.

In White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018), Robin DiAngelo rejects as “simplistic” the notion that racism is best understood as “intentional acts of racial discrimination committed by immoral individuals.” Rather, racism is “a system” or “a structure, not an event.” Furthermore, the “prejudice plus power” formulation explains why the new puritans believe that only white people can be racist. So when two Indian teenagers were arrested at a football game in New Jersey having verbally abused and urinated on a group of black schoolgirls, the New York Times claimed that the perpetrators were “enacting whiteness.” What we might perceive as racism between ethnic minority groups is known instead as “colourism.” Furthermore, it is supposed that a white person cannot experience racism. DiAngelo even offers the theoretical scenario of a white person being “mercilessly” bullied due to the colour of their skin, but resorts to a definitional fudge to explain this away as an example of someone “experiencing race prejudice and discrimination, not racism.” As a linguistic gymnast, DiAngelo often ends up face-down on the mat.

Merriam-Webster has a track record of this kind of paternalistic behaviour. In 2019, “they” was added to the dictionary as a non-binary pronoun and was even judged to be “Word of the Year.” For all these efforts, the use of “they” as singular has not caught on with the general public; further evidence that most people are not the kind of malleable drones that the new puritans believe them to be. According to Oxford University Press, publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, recent words of the year include “post-truth,” “climate emergency,” and “youthquake.” Note how these choices are conspicuously political. Apart from media circles, the term “youthquake” was hardly ever used in 2017—the year it was honoured—and has since all but disappeared.

In August 2020, Dictionary.com published a new entry for the acronym “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), often used as a slur against gender-critical feminists or anyone who believes that there are biological differences between men and women. That Dictionary.com tweeted out a link to its definition, along with the phrase “Beware the TERF,” leaves us in no doubt as to where the company stands on this issue. Many feminists have expressed concerns that the more extreme trans activists are seeking what is tantamount to the erasure of womanhood, denying women’s rights to single-sex spaces and even attempting to shoehorn the neologism “womxn” into mainstream vocabulary, in spite of the fact that no one knows how to pronounce it. These feminists’ suspicions are certainly validated by Dictionary.com’s original choice of illustration for the TERF entry: the female symbol (a circle with a cross underneath) struck through with a red line. Nor was it particularly reassuring to see that one of Dictionary.com’s original example phrases, now deleted, was “punch a TERF.”

As the power and influence of the new puritans accelerates, we can expect to see more capitulation to these efforts at social engineering through the manipulation of language. Take the Encyclopedia Britannica’s transcript of Martin Luther King’s most famous speech: “I have a dream that … one day right there in Alabama, little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” The attentive reader will note that the word “black” has been capitalised, but the word “white” has been left in lower case. This follows the patently ideological decision by the Associated Press to amend its style guide to reflect the view that “white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin colour.”

It sounds like the stuff of fantasy. Yet the proliferation of activists in libraries, dictionaries, schools, advertising, the arts, and the media makes complete sense when one considers that the devotees of the religion of Critical Social Justice have a vested interest in seizing control of outlets that influence how language is used. One thinks immediately of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who said that “the basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”

Excerpted, with permission, from The New Puritans: How The Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, by Andrew Doyle. Copyright © Andrew Doyle, 2022. Published by Constable, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.

#Andrew Doyle #The New Puritans #language manipulation #language games #redefining words #social constructivism #trigger warnings #ideological capture #ideological corruption #woke activism #cult of woke #wokeness as religion #wokeism #woke #wokeness #religion is a mental illness

12 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 6 months ago

Text

By: LGBT Courage Coalition

Published: Feb 13, 2025

Linguists have long understood that language is power. Words don’t just describe reality—they shape it. Style guides, dictionaries, and institutional norms have always played a crucial role in setting the boundaries of acceptable language. Yet when those boundaries are deliberately manipulated, language becomes a tool not for clarity, but for control.

The pronoun debate—starting with “preferred pronouns” and culminating in ze/zir, bunself, and tree/treeself—is not about kindness or inclusivity. It is about forcing compliance with an ideology by rewriting the rules of language.

This is where style guides come in.

Style Guides as Weapons of Authority

From The Associated Press Stylebook to The Chicago Manual of Style, professional style guides dictate how writers, journalists, and institutions use language. They provide the scaffolding of public communication: what to capitalize, how to use punctuation, and which words are acceptable for describing the world.

Historically, style guides have evolved slowly, reflecting cultural consensus rather than enforcing it. Yet in recent years, style guides have become weapons for activism—tools for linguistic revolution, often at the expense of clarity and truth.

The Associated Press Stylebook now mandates that writers respect “preferred pronouns” and use they/them as singular pronouns. A demand once relegated to niche activist circles is now a formalized rule in mainstream journalism. Reality is obfuscated by enforced language, as writers are instructed to prioritize identity claims over clear communication.

Consider the recent changes in academic publishing. The American Psychological Association (APA) Style Guide now suggests writers avoid terms like mother or father in favor of “gender-neutral” alternatives like parental figure. Similarly, the AMA Manual of Style, used in medical writing, encourages the avoidance of biological sex by substituting terms such as gestational parent for “mother.” A search of medical articles on Google Scholar for the phrase “pregnant people” in the title since 2018 yielded over 500 results. These are not neutral decisions. They strip words of their clarity and obscure material reality under the guise of inclusivity.

Even dictionaries have joined the fray. In 2020, Merriam-Webster added a new definition of they to mean “a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.” While dictionaries once documented language as it evolved organically, they now play an active role in shaping cultural norms. Words are redefined not to clarify meaning, but to enforce ideological positions.

Neopronouns: From Style to Chaos

Once the linguistic dam broke, neopronouns flooded in. Ze/zir, fae/faer, bun/bunself—pronouns that bear no relation to sex, grammar, or reality—have now entered activist discourse. These words are not natural evolutions of language. They are ideological inventions.

Here’s the thing about style guides: by codifying language, they give it legitimacy. The mere act of inclusion transforms nonsense into something “official.” Once enough institutions normalize ze/zir as a pronoun set, refusing to use it will not just be unfashionable—it will be heresy.

This isn’t about linguistic diversity or creativity. It’s about control. Neopronouns serve no communicative purpose. They do not clarify who someone is. Instead, they demand that others participate in an individual’s self-concept—often at the expense of their own principles.

Linguistics and Reality: The Disruption of Shared Meaning

Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure taught us that language works through shared symbols. A tree is a tree because we agree that the word refers to a tall, woody plant. The system works because words have meaning—agreed-upon, stable meanings rooted in reality.

Pronouns historically functioned as linguistic shortcuts for biological sex. They help us navigate the world without constantly restating someone’s name or their sex. By insisting that pronouns no longer correlate to sex—or worse, by inventing entirely new sets of pronouns—we shatter that shared meaning.

The result is confusion. A pronoun like bun/bunself tells us nothing about the speaker except that they demand linguistic obedience. It is not descriptive, it is performative.

And when language ceases to describe reality, it becomes impossible to communicate it.

Who Decides? The Institutional Capture of Words

The style guide is not neutral. It carries authority because it tells writers what to do. But who gets to decide what the rules are?

Organizations like the AP, The New York Times, and GLAAD exert immense influence over language. Their decisions on pronouns, gender-neutral terms, and “inclusive” language are not reflections of organic linguistic change. They are ideological prescriptions, enforced from the top down.

Consider recent developments in The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals in the world. In a 2021 cover article, the journal referred to women as “bodies with vaginas,” reducing women to anatomical parts in the name of gender neutrality. Words that once communicated clear meaning—like “woman” or “mother”—are systematically erased.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health now uses terms like egg-producer or chestfeeding parent in its official publications. These shifts are not evolution of language—they are political choices to obfuscate sex and replace it with gender ideology.

Style guides, medical journals, and dictionaries are institutions of authority. When they rewrite language, they rewrite reality.

The Consequences: Reality on the Chopping Block

When words lose their connection to reality, truth becomes subjective, and meaning becomes meaningless.

Women cease to exist as a coherent category because “woman” becomes “anyone who identifies as such.”

Lesbians—women attracted to women—are pressured to accept males who claim she/her pronouns as part of their orientation.

Children, confused by language and ideology, are told they can be ze, fae, or even catself—whatever they feel.

This linguistic breakdown does not free anyone. It traps us in a world where language reflects ideology, not reality.

Reclaiming Language: Resisting the New Rules

What can we do in the face of this linguistic revolution? We can refuse to comply.

Speak plainly. Call men “he” and women “she.”

Resist style guides that mandate ideological language.

Challenge the institutional capture of words and insist on their connection to material reality.

Language matters because words matter. When institutions redefine words to obscure sex, erase women, and confuse children, they are not helping society—they are dismantling its foundation.

It’s time to reclaim language as a tool for truth, not tyranny. The style guides don’t own our words.

In the end, this is about more than pronouns. It’s about the power of words to define reality—and the responsibility to resist when they are weaponized to erase it.

#LGBT Courage Coalition #pronoun culture #pronouns #language games #language manipulation #control #truth #objective reality #objective truth #linguistic games #linguistics #neopronouns #redefining words #religion is a mental illness

8 notes · View notes