by Don Hall

In 1984, George Orwell took a practice he saw in regular use and labeled it Newspeak and Doublethink. 

Newspeak was a fictional language created to limit free expression and maintain the Party orthodoxy. Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most of the rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. 

Doublethink is a process of indoctrination whereby the subject is expected to accept as true that which is clearly false, or to simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to one's own memories or sense of reality.

Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. 

The result of all three in combination foments confusion, anger, and ultimately conformity. Most humans simply do not have the energy to mentally combat these practices especially when peer pressure, a desire to be accepted, and a need for inclusion of a social hierarchy sets the stage. When reality won’t conform to our demands, we just change the language to retrofit reality and then hammer it home until the weak-minded follow suit.

This recipe has been most effectively used in marketing of consumer goods.

When jellybeans are marketed as gluten-free and chickens allowed a four foot area outside of a warehouse are marketed as free range, trust in almost anything advertised is eliminated.

Same Product with a Different Logo is “New & Improved”
Cherry-Picked Statistics are “Clinically Proven”
Nothing Poisonous in Here becomes “Detox Tea”
Drink This and Eat Nothing Else is “Weight Loss Shake.”

It’s all designed to use misleading language to sell you shit you don’t need. Marketing thrives on Newspeak and Doublespeak. Fad diets, fertility clinics, and therapists use Doublethink. Put together and most of us don’t have a prayer.

Social media has become both an instrument of this trifecta as well as a self-imposed bubble of discourse that silos thought into camps. Christ, even the term social media is an example of the subtle tailoring of language to advertise a false meaning. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. are the reverse of ‘social’ as is evidenced by the daily grind of completely anti-social behavior it encourages. Thus, like the Orwellian tropes of “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength”, Anti-Social is Social.

Free Market Capitalists Who Are Socially Left = Neo-Liberal
I Want White People to Have Guns = Second Amendment Advocate
Trickle Down Economics = Tax Breaks for the Wealthy

Racism used to mean the judging of people and discrimination due solely to the identifier of race. When talking about racism, I was taught to never judge someone by the color of their skin. Today the doublespeak posits skin color is the most important aspect of any human and that White is Racist. Which is a racist idea now spun to promote equality for black people. Equality is Power. No longer the old fashioned notion that Equality means that everyone is treated equally under the law or in society but that those who feel marginalized must have power in order to balance the playing field. 

Riots and Looting are now forms of Peaceful Protest. What?!

Writer Vicky Osterweil's book, In Defense of Looting, came out on Tuesday. In an interview on NPR, she says “Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about—that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.”

You mean stealing shit from a NIKE store without consequence gives someone a sense of freedom and pleasure? That snatch and grab is joyous and liberatory? How insightful. She qualifies this by stating “When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot. That’s the thing I’m defending. I’m not defending any situation in which property is stolen by force.”

Do you smell that horseshit through the digital screen?

Kendi states in his book How to Be Anti-Racist that “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist’.” What the fuck does that mean? One of his many conclusions is that any disparity in racial make-up is due exclusively to white supremacy without a moment to reflect on the fact that in America the most successful race in almost all categories are Asian. 

Asians, apparently, are white adjacent, yet another example of doublespeak in play.

Trump doublespeaks and distorts in far more obvious ways but it amounts to the same blind conformity among his acolytes. He spins the notion that he ushered in the greatest economic expansion in the history of the country and points to the DOW to prove his point. He claims to have done more for African Americans than any other president and shows us cherry-picked and wholly ineffectual half measures. He outright lies about voter fraud.

His base eats this up as readily as white people in their twenties without jobs and saddled with mountains of student loan debt from their gender studies degrees gobble up DiAngelo’s doublethink ideas on white fragility and a poor understanding of socialism.

If Orwell had seen this new reality, 1984 would’ve been unreadable because while Big Brother proposed that ‘War is Peace’ Angry Brother would be saying “No. War isn’t Peace. Peace is Power.” 

One of the oddest aspects of this Double-doublespeak competition is that both the Far Left Race Activists and Far Right White Supremicists have a lot in common, belief-wise. Both believe that race is the most important signifier of identity. Both believe in a segregation of races. Both believe that employment and benefits should be based in large part to the race of the citizen. And neither side like the Jews or Asians much.

At a time when there are so many things to be distressed about it is this strange and improbable Venn Diagram of ideological similarities that truly gets me down.

Michelle Obama intoned “When they go low, we go high” and we all nodded our collective heads while deciding that High is Low and adopted Trump’s bullying and juvenile namecalling as our own version of taking that high road.

White Silence is Violence.
Violence is Peaceful.
Words are Violence.
Victims are Survivors.
Survivors are Warriors.
Wage Slaves are Essential.
Billionaires are Job Creators.
Authoritarians are Anti-Fascist.
Revenge is “Holding People Accountable.”
Four Deaths in Benghazi are War Crimes.
200,000 Covid deaths are Acceptable.
Educate Yourself is Shut Up and Conform.
Be an Ally is Shut Up and Conform.
Law & Order is Shut Up and Conform.
Fake News is Shut Up and Conform.

If Shut Up and Conform is the end result of a disagreement in terminology or values, your ideas aren’t really worth considering.

Beware of doublespeak. It’s the language of extremists and those seeking nothing more than control or to sell you shit you don’t need.