Dear M,
Some people say using your mind makes you “reasonable”; but most people, I think, use their minds to chase things they want. This would explain the arguments that go nowhere; the evidence that gets buried; the mistakes that are never retracted; the discussions that turn into loose words and slander; the armies of pundits and “experts” overwhelming us with talking points we can't verify, or many times even remember — but which we agree with. The women who say “but why are you yelling” when you’re winning and you're not yelling.
In the public sphere we're less likely to be idealists and scientists than to be plaintiffs or defendants. We pick a path in life and then put our brains into chasing it, and then try to justify it. Our cultures, our tastes, our levels of wealth* and intelligence lead us one way or another. Some of us are right and others are wrong. Some of us are honest and others are frauds. All of us are personally invested.
This might explain why so many good words have been ruined lately. Words are only tools, after all — and if they were made up by our ancestors they can be deranged by our grandchildren. A new ruling class with a new plan for society means new ways of thinking about things and new ways to talk about them. New words are almost impossible to make popular so we take old and popular words and twist them. Listed below are several words I miss which have completely new (and many times opposite) meanings, and tell us a lot about the people who run things.
Love, as used by the media-owning class, now means an almost total disregard for sexual ethics, an abandonment of one’s borders, and a locking-up of healthy people to protect the obese. Hate, the corollary offspring of love — the seeing an enemy and knowing what he’s done or could do to you or your loved ones, and wanting to break him down, or at the very least put him in his place — now means affirming gender roles, having basic beauty standards, and not teaching pre-schoolers about anal. If you’re white, it means being proud of your ancestors. If you fall into any of these categories, you’re what they call a "bigot,” which is supposed to mean somebody who can’t handle different opinions, but today means someone who doesn't agree with leftist opinions. An almost comical reversal, which nobody appreciates less than H.R. In fact it's H.R.’s job to not appreciate it.
Other words I miss are unity, justice, and patriot. Unity, a word which once meant a grass-roots spiritual bond between people — a sense that we were going somewhere together, and we liked where we were going, and even if it meant we were going to die we would at least go down together, now means half the country gets locked out of business and social media if they contradict the narrative; that one party has control of all the institutions; and that the needs and fears of the majority take a backseat to an unholy patchwork of foreigners, failures, and deviants. “Diversity” simply means “not white.” By the new rules of unity there can be no natural unity. There are oppressed people and oppressors, and the oppressed are united by a never-ending stream of frivolous grievances — which are termed “justice.”
Justice has always been slippery, and gets defined by each locality its own way**. But there were always general rules, and now justice means what it never meant: a total disregard of evidence; a jumping to conclusions based on race or sex or gender; a movement against law and order in general; a classing of criminals as saints, and cops as criminals. When a cop shoots a black criminal it's “white supremacy.” When a criminal kills a kid it's just “statistics.” One of them is a cosmic injustice, and the other one, I guess, is like the weather.
“Patriot” has gotten the same treatment as “nationalist,” which is to stand both on their heads. A nationalist, a person who loves his ethnicity, and sees in his countrymen a kind of familial resemblance, who wants them to have their own identity, with their own particular way of life, and for them to be successful and have a home of their own, where they can be themselves and flourish without anybody stepping on them, is now defined as somebody who hates other ethnicities and nations: who stands by his country right or wrong; who has no sense of ethics other than his own tribe’s well-being, and who thinks of other tribes as less worthy, and maybe even less human, than his own. In a sane world, this would apply to people who jump to conclusions in a racial controversy, but the terms here are never applied equally. The left-wing applies them for themselves and against us — always.
A patriot used to mean a man who stood up for the good of his country, and when the Left is describing itself, a patriot is a person who corrects it when it’s gone off-course. But now it most usually means a man who stands against the good of his country. When a right-winger is a patriot he’s a secessionist. He sides neither with the majority nor with the institutions of his country, but with himself and a few other violent malcontents. A total contrast to the Founding Fathers, he represents an uneducated yahoo minority, is oftentimes willing to commit acts of arson and terrorism, and is always a racist — even if he’s a black Cuban like Enrique Tarrio, and he’s only defending law-abiding citizens from violent white anarchists. There's no longer a one-word term for a man who loves his country and fights for it.
What of privilege? It used to mean a minority doing something the rest of us couldn't. This could be corrected by getting rid of the privileges. Now it means most of us enjoy a life which the minority can't — something which happens in every healthy society, and can only be corrected by granting actual privileges to the minority. I’ll add here that “minority” doesn’t mean what it used to, either. It used to mean somebody who lacked power, and because they lacked power they were abused. But if you cross a so-called minority today and they pull the minority card, you've already lost — the argument and possibly your job. A hallmark symbol of power.
I used to love each one of these words, but now they leave a bad taste in my mouth; and even when they’re used rightly I have a hard time using them politically. But who am I to complain? God rarely (if ever) sends us unmixed goods or evils. Before we could twist words around so badly we never knew who was with us or against us so easily. Now a bad use of the word “hate” is like sagging pants on an ex-con, or green hair on a fat lady: we not only know who stands where, but who to trust, and for what. And for that, at least, we should thank Him.
Yours,
-J
*Why do really bad ideas go so far in politics? Simply put, whenever we fail we can always pillage some part of society to pay for it; and this pillaging gives us the impression we never failed. And you can always make more lies to explain why your first plan fell through. “Not enough funding” is always at the top of the list. Pillaging more is always a proposed solution.
Thus the private man is bound more to reality than the public man. The private man can only fail so much before he’s ruined. The public man can always cash in on the private man; and if few enough of the private men drown, or if their stories can get buried, or if they can believe they drowned for some other made-up reason, the public, or at least a good chunk of it, will always think it’s on the right track.
**What exactly is justice, anyway? Michael J Sandel wrote a book about it, and from what he can tell, it’s comprised not of one, but of several factors, each of which varies in importance from issue to issue, and especially from culture to culture. The first of these factors is the public welfare. The second of these is whether it makes us "good people.” The third is whether it maximizes freedom.
Sandel uses several examples, the first of which was price gouging after Hurricane Katrina. Is it better to let vultures charge crazy prices when everybody's house is torn up? What if the prices attract more roofers, and the army of roofers fixes the whole community? Here you have a classic case of public welfare versus the public virtue.
Sandel says ancient societies were more worried about virtue***, and with good reason. The welfare of society is more hearts than it is houses. You destroy a society’s love and respect for one another, and maybe you will have a roof. But where will you get screwed next? You pay for that roof with both dollars and faith.
The modern society judges things other than hearts, though. It asks, how will people be able to live happily, if they can’t decide what to do with their own money? And who’s going to decide for them? In the large conglomeration of societies we know as the U.S., there are lots of perspectives about what makes you a “good person” on a particular issue. Which of these minorities gets to decide for the majority — especially about what they value most in an emergency? And if 51% believes in one way, can they just force it on the rest of us?
I don't say there’s a one-size-fits-all answer for most of these questions; but health lies somewhere in the balance, and people who go too far in any solution lead us too far into another problem.
***Were ancient societies more worried about hearts than public welfare? To Sandel's insistence on Aristotle I ask, what about King Cyrus?
In Xenophon's Cyropedia, Cyrus was asked to judge a case of law during his school years. Cyrus says,
There were two boys, a big boy and a little boy, and the big boy's coat was small and the small boy's coat was huge. So the big boy stripped the little boy and gave him his own small coat, while he put on the big one himself. Now in giving judgment I decided that it was better for both parties that each should have the coat that fit him best. But I never got any further in my sentence, because the teacher beat me, and said that the verdict would have been good if I'd been appointed to say what fitted and what didn't, but I'd been called in to decide who the coat belonged to — and the point to consider was who had a right to it. Was he who took a thing by violence to keep it, or he who'd had it made and bought it for himself? And my teacher taught me that what's lawful is just and what flies in the face of the law is based on violence; and therefore, he said, the judge must always see that his verdict tallies with the law.
The foundation of real liberty — in tyrannical Persia!