416 Changing Definitions

[Martin Hash]

[C-Mag]

+1

Here at MHF we take this knowledge for granted, but it's a good reality pill for the wider audience.

[Speaker to Animals]

This short essay breaks down how this happens and why they do it:



Essentially, sophistry is about control and manipulation. It's about stealing people's agency to make their own decisions by obfuscating the truth so that they don't make decisions based on reality.

[Fife]

Good one Martin. The modern academy and media take their playbook straight out of Orwell.

If it's been a while, I recommend to everyone the Appendix to 1984, which is titled "The Principles of Newspeak." Orwell was, in his own way, trying to give the story a happier ending, and a more definitive cautionary effect, IMNSHO.

I don't see that we have been effectively cautioned very much for almost 70 years.

If anyone wants to discuss the appendix, I'd love the chance.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app


P.S.: "Nazi" is not an acronym, it is an abbreviation of Nationalsozialist, but also (primarily?) a derogatory hypocorism, meaning something like "hick" or "redneck." I understand that party members would never use the term before and during the war. NSDAP is an acronym, however.