Dreher adds that,
Under the dictatorship of Big Brother, the Party understands that by changing language - Newspeak is the Party's word for the jargon it imposes on society - it controls the categories in which people think. "Freedom" is slavery, "truth" is falsehood, and so forth.I thought of this when I read the latest effort of the left to change the language. Just as we must refer to those who promote abortion as being pro-choice rather than pro-abortion, and refer to those who advocate racism against whites as anti-racists, and refer to those who adopt fascist tactics in our streets as anti-fascists, and call those who practice political and religious intolerance, tolerant, so, too, must we now refer to Mother's Day as "Birthing Person's Day."
It's surreal.
Dreher describes Orwell's word Doublethink as "holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them." This, he says, is how people learn to submit their minds to the Party's ideology:
The citizen is conditioned to believe whatever the state tells them. If the Party insists that 2 + 2 = 5 then despite all your senses telling you that that's false you had to acknowledge that it was true because the Party said so.Writes Orwell, "Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense."
Hannah Arendt notes in her masterpiece study of Nazism and Stalinist communism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, that, "The ideal subjects for totalitarian rule ... [are] people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false...no longer exist."
There seem to be a lot of those kind of folks in contemporary America.
Dreher adds that in America the rising cultural dictatorship is softer and more subtle than in Nineteen Eighty-Four or the twentieth century tyrannies Arendt studies. Under what Dreher calls "soft totalitarianism,"
...the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in Doublethink every day. Men have periods, The woman standing in front of you is to be called 'he.' Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally...."Dreher could've added the patent falsehoods, belief in which is de rigueur in much of America today, that the country is systemically, ineradicably and irredeemably racist, that black people have more to fear from white cops than they do from their own neighbors and that racism is uniquely endemic to the white race.
None of these beliefs can be empirically substantiated, they're all to be believed solely because those with "moral authority," the "oppressed" (like Lebron James and Ibram X. Kendi), say so.
As weird as it would've seemed to an American just ten years ago, we appear today to be spiraling toward an Orwellian dystopia in which the basic freedoms we've always cherished, the accomplishments of Western science and literature, and the idea of rewarding merit and excellence must all be done away with. They're all manifestations of white supremacy and systemic racism and need to be rooted out and torn down.
In order to accomplish this we must also dispense with manifestations of white privilege like truth, logic and objective facts. Thus, we are a people beset on every side by lies, distortions and sloppy thinking. Hopefully, the vast bulk of Americans will soon be roused from our complacent slumber, demand truth, reject the lies and scorn the liars, but if not there may be some very hard times ahead.
If you have never done so, I encourage you to read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's been said with only slight exaggeration that the only thing he gets wrong in this prophetic work is the date in the title.