Words As A Tool For Tyranny
The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of 'F.… You', so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response—Noam Chomsky
When Noam Chomsky called for interning dissenters to the vaccine mandates, was he merely gullible this time? Were government officials telling the truth? Or did he find it a convenient way to rid society of deplorables who responded with an "F…. You" to edicts they knew were wrong, though they may have lacked words articulating why?
For the next health/climate/military crisis, how do we ensure we follow our inner compass when bombarded by intellectuals, experts, and celebrities telling us to march along for the good of the whole? How do we avoid being, in the parlance of Neo-Marxist commentator Professor James Lindsay, mystified with calls to disorient us towards deadly rocks like the calls of the sirens?
I think the first step is to recognize that words are a tool. Words may express truths, but like other tools, the outcomes they create are based on the one wielding them.
Man: The Animal that has Words (material drawn from Tom Wolf's profound and funny book The Kingdom of Speech)
For much of the twentieth century, linguists followed Chomsky's belief that language was anatomical. Somewhere hidden within the body was a language organ created by a chance mutation. So, like your heart or spleen, it developed along an evolutionary path. And just like every human heart beats in the same predictable rhythm, every newborn has a language organ with a pre-installed predictable universal grammar.
Challengers to Chomsky's language organ and universal grammar hypothesis were few, presumably fearing the arrows his rhetorical bow could launch. Like a superhero movie, the theory was undone, not by a famous academic, but by David Everett, a missionary turned linguist/anthropologist living with the Piraha tribe, a geographically isolated people in the Amazon basin.
Before living with the Piraha, Everett trained in linguistics at the SIL Institute, a faith-based organization. You may remember Everett's book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes," which became a bestseller. It is a two-for-one book detailing both his family's experience with the Piraha people and the development of linguistic theories that created the firestorm.
Everett realized the Piraha possessed a language so simplistic that it lacked a grammar structure for future or past events and only a word for "other day" and none for numbers. This meant they were always living in the present - a feat many of us spend inordinate time and money trying to achieve. So, as jets flew thousands of miles above their heads with passengers contemplating planned future events, the Piraha planned each day in a continual present as their ancestors had for thousands of years.
While some academics shoot arrows of Euro-centrism at Everett, they are misplaced. He has spoken of his great respect for their way of living. For him, the Piraha people and other people like them do not have a sense of inadequacy in living as they do; it is those with other languages who seem intent on creating it.
It is worth stressing that the work of a man with a very big language was undone by people with a very small language. The Piraha accomplished this feat by doing nothing more than existing. Through them, Everett not only shattered the universal grammar theory, but he also "un-evolutionzed" that a language organ was hidden within our bodies, put there by random chance. It was culture that created Speech's ability to describe past events (history), current events, and future events (planning), not a pre-existing template within the body.
This meant Speech was a tool created by humans for their use, and what a powerful tool it is. As Tom Wolf writes, "Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool for communication. It also gave man the ability to create other tools, including the abstract world in which we live."
By now, you are surely bewildered as to why the distinction between - tool versus anatomy - is relevant to the tyranny of the past four years. I, too, struggle with the distinction, but I know intuitively the difference is significant. If we go back to the heart analogy, it is a real organ producing a real heartbeat. Both the cause and effect can be physically observed. Speech has been elevated beyond a tool to something with physical properties like a heart.
A quote from 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle reflects this elevation: 'In books lies the soul of the whole past time: the articulate audible voice of the past.' This is nonsense. The soul of history existed well before our ancestors were sketching pictures on cave walls much less writing with abstractions. Chomsky himself notes that there is always something behind words.
That something is a truth eliciting the F&*% Y$@ that something is wrong when tyranny is present. While Chomsky uses a vulgar description, philosopher, mathematician, and logician Ludwig Wittgenstein states it in a more genteel fashion: [T]here are aspects of human existence that are so deeply personal or profoundly intuitive that they transcend the boundaries of linguistic expression.
In other words, sometimes, there are no words to describe what the human condition knows to be true. This is why you may have recoiled at lockdown and vax commands when others told you it was the 'moral' thing to do. You may not have had words to understand your why, but some aspects of your human existence did. It is also why you recoil at demands that we accept someone can change biological reality or historical events by mere words. It is wrong even if you do not have the words to express it.
This is not to say the words have no effect. They surely do. During the past four years of madness, it was not a mute brute locking you in your home or deplatforming your views. It was those who possessed a mastery of the language tool that, in turn, bestowed upon them a belief of an inherent right to rule.
As Tom Wolf noted, language is a veritable nuclear bomb, and it was a bomb unleashed upon us, the fallout of which we are still trying to clean up. See these people for what they are. Chomsky and intellectuals may believe they are better than you, but his pet theory was unraveled by a people who had no words for numbers or colors.
Shamefully, before the lockdowns, I gave little thought to the beauty of the Constitution. I took for granted the freedom of Speech. I believed that though the ACLU had thorns, those thorns helped protect the beautiful rose that was free Speech.
Then, the lockdowns and mandates burst forth. The rose petals fell, and we were left with the remnants of a beauty that once was. But do not despair. New growth has emerged where the average sane person understands the importance of protecting our freedoms. We need to stay steadfast that our humanity lives in truth and the freedoms expressed in the Constitution, the most important being Free Speech, recognize this.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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