When Leaders Persist in Lunacy
Battling insincerity and unseriousness in the age of doublethink.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. —George Orwell
Almost 40 years ago, in the fall of 1984, I had just entered grade 9. I still remember my student number from Garden Valley Collegiate because it was 84077, the first two digits being the year and the last four digits blissfully being the same as the unit number of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital on the popular TV show M*A*S*H. It’s amazing how the mind makes these connections. I mean, how many of you remember your student number from high school?
By some happy coincidence (or maybe not), the book we studied in English class that year was George Orwell’s 1984. This was the only assigned school book I remember reading all the way through. I read lots of books in junior high and high school (that’s about all I did when I wasn’t playing guitar), but despised every book I was ordered to read by my teachers - except 1984. Most of them I read the first and last chapter, and a few bits in between, just so I’d be able to quote something. But 1984 was amazing to me, and I didn’t even have much life experience to compare it to. The only real parallel I was able to draw in my sheltered life at the time was how I viewed the school system. Since then, of course, and particularly in the last decade or so, it’s taken on a whole new meaning for me.
This article is going to be filled with quotes from that book, so you’d best prepare yourself for that now. Keep in mind that this book was written in 1948. Orwell was a masterful writer and he talked a lot about language in 1984.
A while ago, I wrote about an idea that I had called language hijacking only to realize during my research that it was already an acknowledged phenomenon called “Linguistic Hijacking.” Here’s the definition from the author of the paper, Derek Anderson:
the phenomenon wherein politically significant terminology is co-opted by dominant groups in ways that further their dominance over marginalized groups.
My concept of language hijacking differs from the above in that it is currently being used by self-proclaimed marginalized groups to assert influence and dominance over perceived dominant groups. It also differs from the above in that, unlike Derek Anderson, I have no recognized credentials other than my admittedly average observational skills. Anyway, what I’ve noticed is that this is being accomplished through the changing of words with universally understood meanings to mean something completely different.
As expected, Orwell addresses that concept rather succinctly:
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
Insincerity is all around us today, and language is most definitely suffering because of it. The language suffers because if it escaped unscathed, then their real aims would be revealed. Instead, what we are left with are their declared aims. Things like diversity, equity, or inclusion — words that mean one thing to the casual listener, but an entirely different thing to the speaker. Again, one needs only to open one’s eyes and look around to see the discrepancy between the stated aims and the actions that stem from them.
Consider this single example: To a large extent in academia, politics, and elite culture - activists and special interest groups have imprinted upon the national psyche that a transwoman (someone who was born male, but “identifies” as a woman) is a real woman, to the extent that our Prime Minister gets up and says precisely that on International Women’s Day, and people vehemently defend that statement.
This being what it is, the most basic understanding of humanity that any child could eloquently explain, begs the question: what else could we possibly be made to believe? Taken to its logical conclusion, this is a chilling thought.
Time for another Orwell quote:
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Indeed. This is essentially what you’re being told all day long if you spend a lot of time listening to the news. Here are a few of the things (in no particular order) that are now supposed to just be accepted as truth:
You are not an expert, therefore you have no right to an opinion or to “do your own research”.
The Science™ is always right and your leaders understand it much better than you do.
There is a consensus that certain things are good (or bad) and if you disagree, you are a denier.
An opinion from a minority group carries more weight than that of someone from a majority population because of something called “lived experience”, which you, if you are white, can’t possibly understand.
Western society is irredeemably racist and a product of white supremacy.
Gender is a spectrum.
We are in a climate catastrophe and must do all we can to avert impending disaster, regardless of the cost.
The world consists solely of oppressors and the oppressed.
Now, you may believe some of these, or all of these, or none of them, but regardless - these are statements that one could easily make on most social media platforms and they would receive almost universal acceptance, or no reaction at all. If someone were to show up and voice their disagreement with any of these, they would be instantly condemned for being bigoted, hateful, racist, and ignorant.
Truly we live in the age of doublethink. We are encouraged to believe unintelligible ideas couched in incomprehensible language, while rejecting the hard evidence of our own eyes and ears. So much of what we’re expected to believe resembles what Orwell described as “a cuttlefish spurting out ink,” or what the modern vernacular may term verbal diarrhea, or word salad. I sometimes combine those two terms into the simple, yet eloquent, shit salad.
This is why it’s so difficult for some intellectuals to define the word woman. To do so accurately betrays their belief system, and to do that is anathema to the woke mind - nothing short of heresy, and the constant stream of cancellations among academics painfully makes this point.
Yes, when the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer, because the alternative would be to admit that things are bad, and that mistakes were made, and that someone needs to pay for that. And then there’s the practical matter of actually doing something that will make things good again.
And here’s the rub: arguing with a person so consumed by this Woke mindset is impossible because the language they use is not the same as ours, even though it uses the same words. And the intelligent ones are even worse, for as Peter Boghossian says, “Being intelligent doesn’t mean you won’t believe crazy shit, it just means you can come up with better reasons to justify the crazy shit you believe.”
And one last time, I’ll let old George drive that point home:
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
I remember reading this when it was first published. I was an avid reader at the local library, not being able to afford to buy books. It has remained in my memory all those years, along with similarly distopian novel, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I often think of both when confronted by the likes of Trudeau and his policies, who, I am sure, wouuld love to have a ministry of love to adjust those of us who see through his feckless uselessness.
Don't quit your day job, retard. Is that... teaching kids to play guitar?