Discover Top Posts Tagged with #de evolution

“It’s about internalizing correct thought. Orwell understood very well the relationship between language and thought and how control of the former permits control of the latter: “[If] thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

He devoted much of “1984” to exploring how the exercise of power over what may be said makes it easier to enjoy dominion over what can be thought, over how individuals understand themselves and their place in society. “Don’t you see,” says Syme, a lexicographer at the Ministry of Truth, “that the whole aim of Newspeak 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.”

The real-world version of that fictional effort to overhaul man’s inner life through controlling the language he is allowed to use in society is expressed more softly, though no less sinisterly. “New language… can become a useful tool for changing how people deal with each other,” say the Symes of today.

Allowing the subjective beliefs of people in the present to override the objective recording of events in the past would be extraordinary – a testament to the extent to which political correctness had overpowered reality entirely.

We now know the price of not speaking back, of letting others instruct us on what we may utter and how we must think. We now know the cost of allowing incursions into our inner lives. Man must be “master of his own thoughts,” said Spinoza. He must never be “compelled to speak only according to the diktats of the supreme power.” That is the first task of the heretic, then: to resist compulsion. To speak as he sees. To never fear to express the truth.”

———

Brendan O’Neill 𝘈 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘤'𝘴 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘰: 𝘌𝘴𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦