The Politically Correct Assault on our Minds
Timothy Birdnow
In a recent post by Dana Mathewson, Dana linked to an essay by David Kupelian about political correctness as a form of mind control. Our good friend from Down Under, Morris, replied quite positively to Kupelian, and he left the following message:
"An excellent article by David Kupelian. I've read his book 'The Marketing of Evil' - it's a masterpiece. He's absolutely right about PC - it's a deliberately introduced changing of language. I've known since almost the beginning of when it started that it's deadly to freedom. Even before I understood it I had an instinctive hatred for it."
This was interesting because I had spent last evening watching the old Crocodile Dundee movie, and it brought some interesting thoughts into my head - well, at least I thought they were interesting. I posted the following comment:
"Thanks, Morris!
Anyone who remembers Newspeak from 1984 should understand that PC is thought control; that was the whole purpose in the novel, to make it impossible to think certain things.
And they have had success. I was watching the movie Crocodile Dundee last night (I bought the DVD a while back because it was on sale) and at one point Dundee is told by a friend at a bar that the girl he thinks he's making time with is a man "a fag" as the cabbie puts it. I was SHOCKED at that word, because it's become something unspeakable.
That was banned because it had a negative image, and the plan was to paint homosexuality with kittens and sunshine.
Whether one thinks it impolite to use that word or not, the point is it was not impolite back when this movie was made - which wasn't all that long ago. They have succeeded in banning it through political correctness. There are plenty of others that have been banned, too.
Is it any surprise that gay marriage is now a hot topic here in America and terms with negative images associated have been extracted from our language? This is a tool designed to promote thought control. If any pejorative phrases are expunged from our vocabulary over a given thing, that thing then becomes a positive, or at worst a neutral. The word gay was promoted because that has a positive image; gay meant happy, fun, bubbly. To be gay suggests one is in a blessed state. The redefinition of that term has shorn the English language of a once useful word, coopted it to promote a form of behavior that was traditionally discouraged. Now it's hip to be gay to the younger generation, like being a natural blond used to be to girls. They have banned any less flattering terms for this, and the younger generation simply cannot think there is anything wrong with being gay because they have no words that suggest it.
You could do that with anything. Pimples, say; start calling them beauties, or sexmarks or whatnot, and say the word pimple or zit is unkind, and in a few years you have teenagers walking around with grease on their faces hoping to break out in a mass of pustules.
In short, it is mind control indeed!"
End comment.
And indeed this is a subtle way to twist the American mind (and the Australian, too.) Now, I am not advocating making people feel bad by using onerous stereotypical language, but some of this language is hardly onerous and yet it will be expunged in coming years as the Left seeks to recreate the way we think. Human beings think in language. It's the key to our ability to reason and to understand. Change that and you change the abilities to grasp certain aspects of things.
Consider the number zero. Mathematics was largely limited to arithmatic without it, and nobody invented the zero because there was no easy way to say it. It was an abstract concept that required a new word or two. Once we had it mathematics became possible. Without a formal word for it people sensed it was there, and understood the concept of nothing, but didn't have any way to manipulate that concept.
I know; mathematical symbols aren't words, but they function in a similar fashion. Were the keepers of wisdom in academia to decide that zero was an offensive idea and would demand we stop using it our entire system of science would crumble.
There are other concepts, too, that could well be erased by political correctness. In Crocodile Dundee Mick explains to Sue (his love interest) that the Australian Aborigines don't have words for owning land. They see it as ridiculous, the notion that somebody can own the land, since the land was there before you came and will be there after you leave. Of course, the Aborigines lived at the most primitive of subsistence levels, not even building houses to keep the sun off their heads or the rain away. They were dirt poor by any material standards, and that is because they had no conception of private property. They never developed the langauge for it, so they never developed the concept of it, so they never had it.
If the modern Progressives could somehow make the words about private property taboo, they could expunge the concept from post-modern Man. But they would never do that, would they? (Oh, wait; capitalism is a four letter word these days. As Glenn Beck chronicled, the OWS people were chanting "5,6,7,8 eat the rich, smash the State" and a whole generation has grown to quasi-manhood with ridiculous romantic notions of economic anarchy as somehow a wise policy. http://attackthesystem.com/2011/10/18/markets-not-capitalism-individualist-anarchism-against-bosses-inequality-corporate-power-and-structural-poverty/ Why? Because they have had the terms "rich" and "capitalist" and others redefined as horribly negative. So much of this comes not from reason but from the recreation of language. Evil images have been associated with terms that should be positive, while positive images have been associated with what should be negative. Marxism, for instance, has been a gigantic curse on Mankind (as, indeed, Karl Marx claimed in his play Oulanem "Soon I shall embrace eternity to my breast, and soon. I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind", and he's done a fine job of it!) That's why the Left changes names so frequently; they fear overcoming a negative image. But that image is there not because of some prejudice on the part of the public but because they have howled curses repeatedly on Mankind. People come to associate a certain aspect of Leftism with those curses, and so ACORN changes names, for instance, to avoid the work of overcoming the negative stereotype.
But what of a concept? Sometimes the name change can be made, and effort must be taken to redefine it as a positive. Socialized Medicine becomes "affordable health care" and yet it is still a pig in lipstick.
It's why the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case played out the way it did; the media and many on the liberal side have had the term minority come to mean innocent, pure, and mistreated, and so the very thought that perhaps the minority teenager was perhaps at fault for what happened simply did not register. There has been a definition of minorities to be eternally mistreated.
At any rate, George Orwell understood where this was leading, and he illustrated it with his concept of Newspeak, where language would be changed in such a way that it would be impossible to even think a seditious thought. This is what political correctness is attempting in modern America and elsewhere - with some degree of success.
There is also the breakdown of formal grammar and sentence structure. Yes, kids used a shorthand on the computer because it was easier, but it was easier because they have never learned to express themselves with proper sentence structure and grammar and eloquent vocabulary. The concept pushed in the schools has been self-expression and not the rules of speech. This has been catastrophic, because we cannot think logically if we cannot formulate a sentence or punctuate properly. Imagine, if you will, an equation thrown together without proper structure. How about this MeC=exp2.
This is completely meaningless because it has no structure. It's supposed to read e=MCexp2 - the famous equation of matter energy equivalency formulated by Einstein. Without proper structure it is meaningless. Ditto language. If language is not structured properly it degrades in meaning; after a certain point it means nothing. This is a form of political correctness that is being foisted off on our children, a way to keep them from thinking for themselves. There was a good reason for school teachers to ask "I don't know, can you?" when a student asked if he can go to the bathroom; the proper word was MAY. We often smile at this as unusually peevish, but the reality is it served a real purpose. Poor language skills make for a cluttered and jumbled mind.
The Left understands this, and promotes poor language skills for this very reason.
A nation that loses its language loses its ability to think. That plays into the hands of the Leftist Bourgeouisie, the new aristocracy.
This is a huge effort we must undertake. Reclaiming our language is reclaiming our culture. Without it we are lost.
In a recent post by Dana Mathewson, Dana linked to an essay by David Kupelian about political correctness as a form of mind control. Our good friend from Down Under, Morris, replied quite positively to Kupelian, and he left the following message:
"An excellent article by David Kupelian. I've read his book 'The Marketing of Evil' - it's a masterpiece. He's absolutely right about PC - it's a deliberately introduced changing of language. I've known since almost the beginning of when it started that it's deadly to freedom. Even before I understood it I had an instinctive hatred for it."
This was interesting because I had spent last evening watching the old Crocodile Dundee movie, and it brought some interesting thoughts into my head - well, at least I thought they were interesting. I posted the following comment:
"Thanks, Morris!
Anyone who remembers Newspeak from 1984 should understand that PC is thought control; that was the whole purpose in the novel, to make it impossible to think certain things.
And they have had success. I was watching the movie Crocodile Dundee last night (I bought the DVD a while back because it was on sale) and at one point Dundee is told by a friend at a bar that the girl he thinks he's making time with is a man "a fag" as the cabbie puts it. I was SHOCKED at that word, because it's become something unspeakable.
That was banned because it had a negative image, and the plan was to paint homosexuality with kittens and sunshine.
Whether one thinks it impolite to use that word or not, the point is it was not impolite back when this movie was made - which wasn't all that long ago. They have succeeded in banning it through political correctness. There are plenty of others that have been banned, too.
Is it any surprise that gay marriage is now a hot topic here in America and terms with negative images associated have been extracted from our language? This is a tool designed to promote thought control. If any pejorative phrases are expunged from our vocabulary over a given thing, that thing then becomes a positive, or at worst a neutral. The word gay was promoted because that has a positive image; gay meant happy, fun, bubbly. To be gay suggests one is in a blessed state. The redefinition of that term has shorn the English language of a once useful word, coopted it to promote a form of behavior that was traditionally discouraged. Now it's hip to be gay to the younger generation, like being a natural blond used to be to girls. They have banned any less flattering terms for this, and the younger generation simply cannot think there is anything wrong with being gay because they have no words that suggest it.
You could do that with anything. Pimples, say; start calling them beauties, or sexmarks or whatnot, and say the word pimple or zit is unkind, and in a few years you have teenagers walking around with grease on their faces hoping to break out in a mass of pustules.
In short, it is mind control indeed!"
End comment.
And indeed this is a subtle way to twist the American mind (and the Australian, too.) Now, I am not advocating making people feel bad by using onerous stereotypical language, but some of this language is hardly onerous and yet it will be expunged in coming years as the Left seeks to recreate the way we think. Human beings think in language. It's the key to our ability to reason and to understand. Change that and you change the abilities to grasp certain aspects of things.
Consider the number zero. Mathematics was largely limited to arithmatic without it, and nobody invented the zero because there was no easy way to say it. It was an abstract concept that required a new word or two. Once we had it mathematics became possible. Without a formal word for it people sensed it was there, and understood the concept of nothing, but didn't have any way to manipulate that concept.
I know; mathematical symbols aren't words, but they function in a similar fashion. Were the keepers of wisdom in academia to decide that zero was an offensive idea and would demand we stop using it our entire system of science would crumble.
There are other concepts, too, that could well be erased by political correctness. In Crocodile Dundee Mick explains to Sue (his love interest) that the Australian Aborigines don't have words for owning land. They see it as ridiculous, the notion that somebody can own the land, since the land was there before you came and will be there after you leave. Of course, the Aborigines lived at the most primitive of subsistence levels, not even building houses to keep the sun off their heads or the rain away. They were dirt poor by any material standards, and that is because they had no conception of private property. They never developed the langauge for it, so they never developed the concept of it, so they never had it.
If the modern Progressives could somehow make the words about private property taboo, they could expunge the concept from post-modern Man. But they would never do that, would they? (Oh, wait; capitalism is a four letter word these days. As Glenn Beck chronicled, the OWS people were chanting "5,6,7,8 eat the rich, smash the State" and a whole generation has grown to quasi-manhood with ridiculous romantic notions of economic anarchy as somehow a wise policy. http://attackthesystem.com/2011/10/18/markets-not-capitalism-individualist-anarchism-against-bosses-inequality-corporate-power-and-structural-poverty/ Why? Because they have had the terms "rich" and "capitalist" and others redefined as horribly negative. So much of this comes not from reason but from the recreation of language. Evil images have been associated with terms that should be positive, while positive images have been associated with what should be negative. Marxism, for instance, has been a gigantic curse on Mankind (as, indeed, Karl Marx claimed in his play Oulanem "Soon I shall embrace eternity to my breast, and soon. I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind", and he's done a fine job of it!) That's why the Left changes names so frequently; they fear overcoming a negative image. But that image is there not because of some prejudice on the part of the public but because they have howled curses repeatedly on Mankind. People come to associate a certain aspect of Leftism with those curses, and so ACORN changes names, for instance, to avoid the work of overcoming the negative stereotype.
But what of a concept? Sometimes the name change can be made, and effort must be taken to redefine it as a positive. Socialized Medicine becomes "affordable health care" and yet it is still a pig in lipstick.
It's why the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case played out the way it did; the media and many on the liberal side have had the term minority come to mean innocent, pure, and mistreated, and so the very thought that perhaps the minority teenager was perhaps at fault for what happened simply did not register. There has been a definition of minorities to be eternally mistreated.
At any rate, George Orwell understood where this was leading, and he illustrated it with his concept of Newspeak, where language would be changed in such a way that it would be impossible to even think a seditious thought. This is what political correctness is attempting in modern America and elsewhere - with some degree of success.
There is also the breakdown of formal grammar and sentence structure. Yes, kids used a shorthand on the computer because it was easier, but it was easier because they have never learned to express themselves with proper sentence structure and grammar and eloquent vocabulary. The concept pushed in the schools has been self-expression and not the rules of speech. This has been catastrophic, because we cannot think logically if we cannot formulate a sentence or punctuate properly. Imagine, if you will, an equation thrown together without proper structure. How about this MeC=exp2.
This is completely meaningless because it has no structure. It's supposed to read e=MCexp2 - the famous equation of matter energy equivalency formulated by Einstein. Without proper structure it is meaningless. Ditto language. If language is not structured properly it degrades in meaning; after a certain point it means nothing. This is a form of political correctness that is being foisted off on our children, a way to keep them from thinking for themselves. There was a good reason for school teachers to ask "I don't know, can you?" when a student asked if he can go to the bathroom; the proper word was MAY. We often smile at this as unusually peevish, but the reality is it served a real purpose. Poor language skills make for a cluttered and jumbled mind.
The Left understands this, and promotes poor language skills for this very reason.
A nation that loses its language loses its ability to think. That plays into the hands of the Leftist Bourgeouisie, the new aristocracy.
This is a huge effort we must undertake. Reclaiming our language is reclaiming our culture. Without it we are lost.
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 5:46 AM
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