Newspeak, The Left’s Powerful Tool In Dominating The Culture War

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Georges Orwell, 1984, Part I, Chapter V.

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In his novel 1984, George Orwell introduces us to Newspeak: a reformation of the language consisting of lexical and syntactic simplification. 

The purpose of Newspeak is to make impossible the conceptualization of potentially subversive ideas. The alteration of the very structure of language, destroying words, would ultimately prevent individuals from formulating complex concepts and original thoughts i.e. thoughts deemed problematic.

On the road to creating the perfect post-revolutionary society in the name of progress, free speech is always perceived as reactionary. Most particularly, the individuals attempting to speak truths and facts over abstractions and ideologies are accused of being the cause for the doctrine’s failure or promoting hate speech. Consequently, nonconformist ideas need to be constrained and this takes the form of amending or simply banning imperfect words.

Indeed, words represent concepts, therefore, eliminating words would in turn eradicate the concept attached to that word. As an example, erasing the word freedom would remove the concept of freedom.

As described by Orwell, the obliteration of words is an effort to narrow the range of thought, to render “thoughtcrime” impossible. Without words and concepts to voice opposing views (e.g. problematic), individuals would naturally accept the orthodoxy of the ideology. The destruction of words, Newspeak, is consequently the ultimate form of mind control.

Following the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movements, multinational businesses, and institutions all strived to erase words regarded as being problematic. For instance, the cosmetic brand L’Oréal announced their intention to remove terms such as “white/whitening”, “fair/fairness”, and “light/lightening”, from their products.  A debate sprung in the computing community about potentially banning expressions deemed racist such as “master”, “slave”, “whitelist” and “blacklist”.

In addition to the suppression of words, Newspeak constantly redefines/reinvents languages to manipulate impressions, it modifies meanings and definitions into something completely different. As an example, the definition of woman once being “an adult female human being” was supplemented with “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth” (Cambridge Dictionary).

Newspeak also aims to assign words to concepts that are the opposite of the original signification. For instance, in Orwell’s tale, the Ministry of Peace rages War. Similarly, in the late ’40s the United States Department of War was renamed Department of Defense. Consequently, the concept of defense, resisting attack, was attached to an institution responsible for providing the military forces (i.e. doing war) and was annihilated by the association.

This brings us to doublethink, defined in the novel as the process of indoctrination by which the subject is supposed to simultaneously accept two contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention of their own memories or sense of reality. As an example, in 1984, the Ministry of love is torturing dissidents, thus making people believe two contrary truths at the same time: love is torture.

Doublethink is internalized due to peer pressure and a desire to fit in. For instance, thanks to the Newspeak linguistic trick, the concept of equality was attached to social justice. Consequently, in the virtue of morality, individuals were compelled to support social justice movements.

However, those social justice, diversity, and inclusion campaigns, while theoretically anti-racist, combine explicit racial prejudices by tying the concepts of “power” and “domination” to skin color. Those woke ideologies have elevated race as the supreme identity marker. In their philosophy, race explains everything, it determines everything, it should be magnified, celebrated, and sublimated for some or demonized, stigmatized, and a source of shame for others, disregarding any attempt at relativization (e.g. not all white are racists).

As such, a good example of doublethink occurred when Columbia University offered graduation ceremonies based on race and background. Orwell could have written that segregation is inclusion.

Newspeak is also designed and thought of as a tool to heal the wrongdoings of the past. This belief that eliminating discrimination, ergo social justice, can be achieved by regulating speech, gave birth to political correctness: semantic modifications, euphemisms replacing basic descriptive language to assign positive designations to words deemed offensives.

And so, the blinds became “visually impaired”, cripples became “physically challenged”, disabled became “differently abled” and gender-neutral pronouns have been added to the dictionary.

Political correctness originates from good intentions, the idea that language can cause harm. However, this form of Newspeak prescribes a set of tolerant attitudes by controlling the discourse with strict codes and rigid rules. Political correctness forces individuals to alter their speech on the ground of acceptance. It limits one’s ability to think and articulate concepts deemed oppressive by redressing terminologies identified as prejudicial. Political correctness is an endless search for a socially appropriate delicacy that has supplanted reason and logic.

Political correctness does not take into account intent or speaker but just demonizes words. It is an aggressive and puritanical culture of the generalized dumbing down and childish talk applied to adults. It is condescending, patronizing and strips the language of all nuances and ambiguity.

Political correctness is intolerance disguised as tolerance, a totalitarianism of good intention, a horizontal injunction from the postmodern authority imposed by so-called social convention. Worst, it is a weapon to publicly punish and shame dissidents who have failed the test of ideological purity by mastering the virtue signaling codes. Political correctness mandated language to such a ridiculous extent that it led to cancel culture, the censorship of books, movies and the death of free speech.

In conclusion, fundamentally, the propagation of an ideology occurs initially verbally. For instance, wokeism ensures its promotion with new words that embody the orthodoxy, a sort of “woke marketing” that convey the storytelling of the doctrine: intersectionality, systemic racism, white privilege….

In essence, wokeism, as other similar ideologies materialize first with words before acts. Those doctrines develop abstractions sounding like scholarly terms to reinforce their legitimacy, terms created without real proof of the concepts they represent (oppositely to a scientific approach in which the concept is demonstrated before the word is invented).

As illustrated by the American professor Walter Fisher, a good narration is easier to absorb than a deep analysis (narrative paradigm and rational world paradigm). The storytelling engages a lot more than facts and logic. Lenin himself advised: “Make them swallow the word, they will swallow the thing”.

And so, the language as well as being descriptive also ultimately reflects the polarization of the discourse. The example of wokeism, offers a simplistic and binary view of society: oppressors vs oppressed. Adopting the ideology Newspeak provides a sense of belonging, it gives the opportunity to present oneself as virtuous and therefore condemn others as amoral. Consequently, controlling the language is a core framework of the culture war.

As a result, the left, historically fighting for the fate of the working class, is nowadays more concerned with the use of gender-inclusive pronouns and political correctness than protecting the most vulnerable against the violence of the neoliberal system (delocalization, unemployment, social dumping, etc.).