“Change the words, to destroy the words, to recreate them again,” Adam warns. “It’s the Hegelian dialectic, Marxist dialectic, even now. It’s woke dialectic that they’re using now. But they’re changing words to give them no meaning. They’re problematizing them, as James Lindsay likes to say, so that they can recodify them in their own image.”
Editor’s Note: Join HotAir VIP today and use promo code SKEPTICS to receive 25% off your membership!
Welcome back to my VIP video series “The Amiable Skeptics,” featuring my friend Adam Baldwin! Adam is well-known for his long and storied Hollywood career, starting with My Bodyguard, and especially for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Firefly, its film sequel Serenity, Chuck, and The Last Ship.
In today’s replay of our second episode this week, we pick up the conversation in this week’s episode where we left off last week. How does the Left and the Beltway elite use and abuse language to protect their access to power and authority? David’s VIP column today addresses more of the direct threats of censorship that are beginning to emerge from today’s global elite as a means of maintaining their grip on power by otherizing their opposition.
Adam and I delve more deeply into the linguistic nihilism championed by the Left, a process that George Orwell warned would take place in his seminal novel 1984. Orwell envisaged the kind of industrial and cyclical re-invention of language that would not just boost tyranny but also separate and compartmentalize populations so that they had no way of effectively challenging the elites.
Bruno Waterfield wrote about Orwell’s relevance to today’s environment for Spiked a couple of weeks ago:
Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.
He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.
And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.
They are indeed. Enjoy the conversation, and as always, we appreciate your part of the conversation in the comments!
