"steven x brown" <madeupemail@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:c2fntv$1tf943$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://mensnewsdaily.com/archive/w/walker/04/walker030704.htm
>
> Letting the Left Rewrite Our Dictionary and Reinvent Our Grammar
> March 7, 2004
> by Bruce Walker
>
> Leftism has largely won the battle of language. The campaign was long
> waged by old communists like Marx, Lenin and Stalin. George Orwell
> grasped that crucial fact. His masterpiece, 1984, in which "War is
> peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength" and in his allegorical
> tale, Animal Farm, in which "All animals are equal, but some animals are
> more equal than others."
>
> Orwell understood that aboli****ng words, inventing words and inverting
> the meaning of words rendered people incapable of thinking clearly. He
> also understood that confusion and nonsense was precisely what Leftists
> wanted. How have purely Marxist terms affected our thought?
>
> Consider the word "capitalism." What on earth is it supposed to mean?
> The term “capitalism” itself assumes that capital governs economic
> activities, leaving thoughtful and moral people to choose between
> sup****ting rule by the wealthy or rule by the poor. This is simply the
> deliberate incor****ation of Marxist mythology into popular thought.
>
> The powerful control society, but power may be based upon religious or
> cultural suasion, upon gangsters and invaders, ideological jihads or
> upon government bureaucracy. What is called "capitalism" is simply an
> economic system free, or relatively free, of state coercion. Although
> terms like "free enterprise" and "market economies" ameliorates the harm
> somewhat, in other ways it makes the problem of muddy thinking worse.
>
> Both "free enterprise" and "market economies" presume that man is homo
> economus, a creature driven by money and by material comforts. This is
> patent nonsense, but nonsense which many nominal libertarians and
> advocates of human liberty often miss.
>
> The exchange of goods and services is a tiny fraction of human
> existence. The most im****tant things in life have no economic value at
> all, and it is a reflection of how little wealth matters that cause
> juries to award incomprehensible verdicts for wrongful death or serious
> physical injury.
>
> How much would a parent pay for his child? How much would a husband or
> wife pay for a beloved spouse? How much would grateful children pay for
> dead parents? Relation****ps of family, friends, coreligionists,
> countrymen and fellow artists (in those thousands of areas of human
> endeavor which are called, or should be called, art) - these are the
> very stuff of life itself.
>
> So those who favor "free enterprise," because of mangled and constricted
> words and phrases, do not argue on the vast expanse of human life, but
> rather than a tiny niche of economic activity. What makes this even more
> surreal is the overabundance of material wealth in modern society.
>
> Why do we dream that modern man is homo economus when the biggest health
> problem that the poor face today is obesity? Why have food banks and
> other incarnations of the Nazi "Winterhilfen" charities, when people are
> chubby coach potatoes?
>
> Why do we imagine that more resources are needed for education, when
> children and adults spend substantial fractions of their conscious lives
> drooling like idiots in front of some form of video screen? Public
> libraries provide an ocean of learning, wisdom and ideas far beyond what
> any structured system of education could provide.
>
> If our subliminal digestion of homo economus is bad, another Marxist lie
> rendered down to a single word is worse. This word ties directly to the
> current mask of Leftism ("liberal" discredited by its association with
> actual policies and the uncomfortable connection between that word and
> its root word.) So what do we call Leftists these days? What do they
> call themselves?
>
> Progressives! Yes, human progress, that inevitable march of mankind
> toward heaven on earth. What a seductive concept! What an infantile
> deception! Why do we imagine that mankind is getting better? Which
> century in recorded history was as vile as the 20th Century? What good
> reason do we have for believing that the best is yet to come?
>
> The notion of progress is at the heart of Marxism. It allows people to
> tromp around breaking eggs, sma****ng eggs by the carton, pu****ng
> railroad cars full of eggs into place like Karaganda, Aleppo and Dachau
> - all for the sake of "progress" and the "future."
>
> This Marxist corruption entices us with the pathetic sentiment that we
> are better than the people who came before us. This is a macabre vanity.
> Men and women five hundred years ago, one thousand years ago, two
> thousand years ago routinely endured hard****ps which we would consider
> unendurable.
>
> Ancient and medieval peoples demonstrated incredible capacities for
> thought, art and intuition. They buried most of their children before
> the offspring reached maturity, and still they carried on. They
> constructed cathedrals and pyramids, dedicating their lives to things
> greater than the current nighttime soap opera or sitcom. What childish
> arrogance to think that we are better than they! Marx, like us, had only
> one advantage over people of the prior centuries - they could not answer
> their accusers and slanderers.
>
> Then consider Marx's ideas on equality, which poison almost everything
> in modern life. Equality is a good value. It implies justice. When
> "progressives" talk about "equality," however, what they really mean is
> equivalence, not equality.
>
> Equality means a balancing of values and a personal choice about which
> values count most. Mothers who stayed at home rather than work came up
> not only money, but also control over how the money was spent. They
> valued the chance to raise children and stay at home more than the
> workplace and the right to earn money.
>
> When Marxists like Friedan started their baseless arguments, the
> complaint was not only that women were "compelled" to stay at home
> (Really? By whom?) but that it was somehow unjust - it was some odd
> version of inequality - that the coal miner or truck driver who earns
> the money to sup****t the family be allowed to dictate the use of that
money.
>
> Leftists have moved beyond old Marxism. Orwell, again, predicted that
> words which drew distinctions would be abolished. Leftists reflexively
> call all the failed Leftist misologies which they no longer wish to be
> associated with as “fascist.” Fascism was an awful misology, and it was
> a Leftist misology, but it is a useless term to describe the large
> population of disastrous Leftist misologies.
>
> Few Leftists, and thanks to them, few ordinary people understood what
> Fascism represented, who it favored, who it opposed, how it began and
> how it ended. Details, to Leftists, are always irrelevant. People are
> eggs, and Leftists love making omelettes. Facts are shadows, and
> Leftists love shadowy illusions.
>
> Perhaps the most interesting advance in the mental and social illness
> which is Leftism is how it has contracted ordinary vocabulary. Orwell
> noted that Oceania would replace words like “excellent,” “quite good,”
> “bad” and “dreadful” with words and phrases like “double plus good,”
> “plus good,” “ungood.” and “double plus ungood.”
>
> How do young adults converse today? “Well, dude, you know, it’s like,
> well, really, really like, you know, talking and stuff, that, dude, is
> really, really im****tant for us to, you know, like to talk and stuff.”
> Contem****ary language is endlessly repetitive, which drains meaning,
> opinion and cognition from correspondence or conversation.
>
> How do professionals write today? They write text filled with long,
> dull, empty words. They recite mantras which have no real purpose
> beyond conformity to political correctness. They construct rules,
> guidelines, laws, interpretations, decisions, and protocols which really
> say nothing but pretend, by their bulk and by the convoluted sentence
> structure, to say much.
>
> Have Leftists won? They have been winning, but there is hope.
> Conservatives and other normal people are responding with words like
> “Christophobia” and “Womenism” (I began using both terms several years
> ago.) We have stopped apologizing for clear, plain English in our
> conversations and writings.
>
> The key, however, is not just fighting back, but understanding that the
> maimed language of modernity changes how we think, if we let it. So let
> us stop taking about “free enterprise” as an alternative to “capitalism”
> but rather recognize that constricting the grand issue of freedom to the
> narrow area of money is precisely what Leftists want.
>
> Let us begin - individually, and not as part of some communal mind - to
> explore our very way of thinking to see what tools have been quietly
> stolen from us. Let us do what George Orwell did and begin to embrace
> independent and honest language as an absolute and indispensable virtue
> of human life.
>
Oh yes, it underpins the politics - and everything else
doesn't it?
I'll cite some people (not all) who've
had some perceptive things to say on these matters and
who begin to point, from diverse directions, at the essence
of things as they might be.
First of all, David Bohm the physicist:
". while the content of thought may be either "real" or
"unreal," its function is nevertheless always real.
This function is, first, to give meaning and shape to
perception by calling attention to what is regarded as
relevant or essential in the context of interest and, second,
to give rise to feelings and urges that promote actions
appropriate to the context, i.e., it contains what may
be called motivation."
"So the main function of a language symbol is not to
stand for or represent an object to which it corresponds.
Rather, it initiates a total movement of memory, imagery,
ideas, feelings, and reflexes, which serves to order attention to and
direct
action in a new mode that is not possible without the use of such symbols.
Thus, when man generally failed to observe how these
symbols actually functioned in the way described above,
he fell into a widespread and deep confusion that interfered
with proper attention and awareness in every aspect of his life."
Bohm appears to deal with words/word concepts
& relatively simple symbols - but one must be(come)
aware that those word forms, in primarily linguistic systems
of consciousness, actually circumscribe and direct actual
perception in conditioning the actual structure of memory.
To quote myself:
"Culturally defined micro and macro patterns (and the
word 'culture' is used here in its broadest sense such
as to indicate the broad swathe of human activities)
underpin and channel human behaviours; pattern, in
particular language is one of these & often possesses
common processes irrespective of its particular type
or content.
As examples of semiological activities, the paradigms
of both science and belief systems have much in
common in terms of language pattern, but there exists
a significant, irreconcilable break point between the two:
at root the former is based upon pragmatism (no matter
how circumscribed this may be), the latter upon subjective
supposition, speculation and cultural continuity.
The theories of science - insofar as they apply to the
practical world - are in essence logical and coherent
symbolic (linguistic) structures, means of describing
the fragments of world to which they refer sup****ted
by hard, consistent and repeatable physical evidence,
evidence, which although ultimately circular in its linguistic
definition, interfaces directly with our objective physical
world as observable cause and effect.
Our day to day existence, our sensory experience, arises
in that very same world of cause and effect. Such
experience is hardly subject to the same rigorous definition
found in the specifics of 'science', yet despite this our
daily pragmatic and mundane behaviours mirror - indeed
precede and underlie - the scientific models.We need no
knowledge of Newton's theories, or even his or their
existence, to understand the immediate effects of gravity
or force applied directly to mass.
In contrast to this, belief systems (religious, political, cult,
business, pseudo-scientific, management, etc.) essentially
depend upon a form of 'faith' or indoctrination handed
on by the repetition of the (symbolic) pronouncements
and 'revelations' provided by certain charismatic individuals - often
reinforced by ritual and fear to over enthusiastic, gullible
and/or dependent followers; in the particular case of minors,
they have no means of comparison, no means of resisting.
Evidence sup****ting such revelations is hearsay,
unconvincing and objectively non-repeatable, nevertheless
the conditioned states of mind brought about by such
behaviours become realities - conditioned states that those
trance-fixed by them are often willing to die for.
This is not to say that 'science' possesses the only view
of the world (indeed in the 21st Century much of the
scientific direction, investment and hence perception
derives from either direct or secondary selfish cor****ate
exploitation and commercialism). Similarly, the comments
of 'scientists', outside their own particular areas of expertise,
are rarely any more valid than those of anyone else of
reasonable intelligence and knowledge. Indeed, persons
who has immersed themselves in some obscure (and more
often than not cor****ately driven at some level) area of
research for years may have extremely narrow world views;
they are no less immune to the 'belief' forms of conditioning
than anyone else - especially when reputations, bursaries
and egos are at stake... speculation is speculation no matter
where or from whom it originates - and miners know less
about the practical effects of sunlight than farm labourers.
Neither is it to say that that the views of 'scientists' or any
other identifiable interest group who have common behaviour
patterns are necessarily invalid, just that we should doubt the
speculations of anybody irrespective of their self-supposed
authority. The scientific notion of 'big bang' consmology is
ultimately as much a fairy tale as the story in Genesis - both
viewpoints become pale, materialistic irrelevancies when one
begins to scratch beneath the surface of what we assume to
know as 'consciousness' and begin to explore (say) the
subtleties of paticca samuppada.
If we see the dangers in irrationality, superstition, dogma,
speculation and the conditioning of pattern by fear, ignorance
and rote - no matter who would foist them upon us - we
inevitably conclude we should perhaps use coherent 'scientific'
methods [not content, not theory, not conclusions nor
speculation, note, but METHODS] of experiment, measurement
and repeatability as the best available pragmatic basis of
discovering and sup****ting our conceptual (and hence
linguistic) systems.
Ultimately all our experiences are subjective and conditioned -
we merely agree, and constrain, their objectivity by means
of common metaphor and symbol systems, which are a
function of our consciousness (a circular yet stable, individual
yet collective, conditioned state). Jiddu Krishnamurti, David Bohm,
George Lakoff, Milton Erickson, Susan Strong, Francisco Varela
et al have all variously explored these directions.
Huxley puts all this more succinctly and warns us of the
potential and imminent dangers of not having world views
grounded in a consistent and coherent reality based as
far as possible on what we agree as objective, self-evident 'fact'.
He recognised the im****tance of the selection of
appropriate, physically meaningful, concise symbolisation and its
deterministic effect in human thinking & action - and the potentials for
confusion,
self delusion, herd behaviours, tyranny, competing
ideologies and ultimately physical conflict lurking in its
converse - as the most significant problem facing mankind,
a problem which touches the whole through individual
consciousness:
'Consider, for example, the domain of science on
the one hand, the domain of politics and religion
on the other. Thinking in terms of, and acting in
response to one set of symbols, we have come, in
some small measure, to understand and control the
elementary forces of nature. Thinking in terms of,
and acting in response to, another set of symbols,
we use these forces as instruments of mass murder
and collective suicide.
In the first case the symbols were well chosen,
carefully analysed and progressively adapted to the
emergent facts of physical existence. In the second
case symbols originally ill-chosen were never subjected
to thorough-going analysis and never re-formulated
so as to harmonise with the emergent facts of human
existence. Worse still, these misleading symbols were
everywhere treated with a wholly unwarranted respect,
as though, in some mysterious way, they were more
real than the realities.
In the contexts of religion and politics, words are
not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for
things and events; on the contrary, things and events
are regarded as particular illustrations of words.'
[Aldous Huxley: Foreword to Krishnamurti's 'First and Last Freedom']
and further...
'Language permits its users to pay attention to
things, persons and events, even when the things
and persons are not present and the events are
not taking place. Language gives definition to
our memories and, by translating experiences
into symbols, converts the immediacy of craving
or abhorrence, of hatred or love, into fixed principles
of feeling and conduct.
In some way of which we are totally unconscious, the
reticular system of the brain selects from a countless
host of stimuli those few experiences which are of
practical im****tance to us. From these unconsciously
selected experiences we more or less consciously
select and abstract a smaller number, which we label
with words from our vocabulary and then classify
within a system at once metaphysical, scientific
and ethical, made up of other words on a higher
level of abstraction.
In cases where the selecting and abstracting have
been dictated by a system that is not too erroneous
as a view of the nature of things, and where the verbal
labels have been intelligently chosen and their symbolic
nature clearly understood, our behaviour is apt to
be realistic and tolerably decent.
But under the influence of badly chosen words, applied,
without any understanding of their merely symbolic
character, to experiences that have been selected and
abstracted in the light of a system of erroneous ideas,
we are apt to behave with a fiendishness and an organised
stupidity, of which dumb animals (precisely because
they are dumb and cannot speak) are blessedly incapable.'
['Education for Freedom' - from Brave New World Revisited]
In addition to Bohm and Huxley we have the following:
'Human beings do not live in the objective world alone,
nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily
understood, but are very much at the mercy of the
particular language which has become the medium of
expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to
imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without
the use of language and that language is merely an
incidental means of solving specific problems of
communication and reflection. The fact of the matter
is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously
built up on the language habits of the group.'
This famous passage from the American linguist and
anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884-1936)'s 'The Status
Of Linguistics As A Science', written in 1929, demonstrates
the dominating thought of what has come to be called by
all sorts of names including the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis'...
and further...
'We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native
languages. The categories and types that we isolate
from the world of phenomena we do not find there
because they stare every observer in the face; on the
contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic
flux of impressions which has to be organised by our
minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems
in our minds. We cut nature up, organise it into concepts,
and ascribe significances as we do, largely because
we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout
our speech community and is codified in the patterns
of our language. The agreement is, of course, an
implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely
obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing
to the organisation and classification of data which
the agreement decrees.'
and even further...
'The question 'How does a thing become conscious?'
could be put more advantageously thus: 'How does a
thing become pre-conscious?'. And the answer would
be: 'By coming into connexion with the verbal images
that correspond to it'.
(Freud 'The Ego and the Id')
and Bertalanffy...
'from that great cake of reality, every living organism
cuts a slice, which it can perceive and to which it can
react owing to its psycho-physical organisation, that
is, the structure of its receptor and effector organs',
and further: 'any organsim so to speak, cuts out from
the multiplicity of surrounding objects [and actions!]
a small number of characteristics to which it reacts and
whose ensemble forms its "ambient". All the rest is
non-existent for that particular organism.
Every animal is surrounded, as by a soap bubble, by
its specific ambient, replenished by those characteristics
which are amenable to it. If, reconstructing an animal's
ambient, we enter the soap bubble, the world is profoundly
changed. Many characteristics disappear, others arise
and a completely new world is found.'
As said earlier, this does not merely refer to language,
rather it refers to the nature of our conditioned conception
and hence perception - although in the case of human
beings the (learned and acculturated) lingusitic systems
powerfully constrain, and indeed create, the consensus
perception we were forced into as young children in
acquiring the (obligatory and primarily lingustic)
consensus view.
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