Truth is the foundation of all morals, and the meaning of truth is obscured in direct proportion to the elasticity allowed in defining the meaning of words within a language. For 1,500 years the source of truth for much of Western civilization has been the Bible. The meaning of words such as truth, freedom, good and evil were relatively inelastic within the Christian worldview. Their meanings were based on absolutes called by various names: permanent things, universals, first principles, eternal truths, and norms. [Johnson, p. 392.] These absolutes were revealed to man by God through His creation and His revelation to the ancient Hebrews and first century Christians.
Socialism requires an elastic language. For humanists, truth is defined in terms of cultural relativism which requires a suspension of judgment since all belief systems contain some truth within while no one belief system has all the truth. Therefore, all social constructions are culturally relative as they are shaped by class, gender, and ethnicity. Thus, there can be no universal truths because all viewpoints, lifestyles, and beliefs are equally valid. As a result, no man or group can claim to be infallible with regard to truth and virtue. Rather, truth is produced by the free give and take of competing claims and opinions—i.e., truth can be manufactured. [Johnson, pp. 392-393.]
Words are the means by which order is achieved in society. The dominant worldview of the members of a society determines the elasticity allowed in defining the meaning of words within the language and ultimately the meaning of truth and the freedom of the individual. The principal worldviews contending for dominance in Western civilization are Christianity and humanism. Christianity leads to truth and freedom. Humanism leads to relativism and socialism whose ultimate end is totalitarianism. Three modern prophets from the mid-twentieth century foresaw the effects of an elastic language with regard to the meaning of words.
George Orwell (1903-1950)
Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984 paints a graphic and unsettling picture of life under a vast, insidious socialistic regime called Ingsoc (acronym for English Socialism) that covers a large part of the globe. (See previous article: The New Ministry of Truth 2014.”) Control of the population is guided by Ingsoc’s Inner Party and its leader, Big Brother, and the Ministry of Truth. The ministry of Truth controls the news media, entertainment, the arts, and publishing and is responsible for propaganda and revision of the historical record to conform them to the government-approved version of events.
The regime invented Newspeak in which speech and writing use words in a way that changes their meaning, especially to persuade people to think a certain way or diminish the range of thought. [Merriam-Webster]
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to 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…This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give an example, the word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds. It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or intellectually free” since political freedom and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts… [Orwell, pp. 299-300.]
Once immersed in Newspeak, it becomes relatively easy to doublethink which is the acceptance of two contradictory ideas or beliefs at the same time.
F. A. Hayek (1899-1992)
In his Road to Serfdom, Hayek has much to say about the language of socialism which he considers synonymous with totalitarianism. Whether it is the socialism of extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state or socialism through the nationalization of the means of production and central planning, Hayek rightly believed that the outcome is essentially the same for both systems—totalitarianism. [Hayek, pp. 54-55.] And it is socialism’s perversion of the language (words and their meaning) that is of particular concern. Once the sources of all information are under the control of a totalitarian regime, it has the power to mold the minds of the people. The minds of the people will then be indoctrinated with the precepts of the regime and no others will be tolerated. The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda are destructive to the one of the essential foundation of all morals, that is, “…the sense of and respect for truth.” [Hayek, pp. 171-172.]
Hayek described the means whereby language is perverted by socialism’s propaganda.
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before…And the most efficient technique to the end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed. The worst sufferer in this respect is, of course, the word “liberty.” It is a world used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. [Hayek, p. 174.]
The quest for equality in socialistic society becomes an officially enforced inequality. Enforced inequality is labeled the new freedom or “collective freedom” which is not the freedom of the individual “…but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases.” [Hayek, pp. 174-175.]
Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963)
Weaver wrote of the power of the word in Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver accepted the ancient belief that there was “…a divine element present in language. The feeling that to have power of language is to have control over things is deeply imbedded in the human mind.” Weaver believed that the heightened interest in semantics is the most notable development of our time with regard to the study of language. Semanticists question how the fixities of language can account for a changing reality through time. They desire that words not represent truth but a range of perceptions and reflect the circumstances of the user. [Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, pp. 150-151.]
In our world of progressive education, scientism, and mass media, the semanticists have captured the linguistic high ground through redefinition of key concepts. Regarding the consequences thereof, Weaver cut to the heart of the matter in a 1952 essay.
Just as soon as men begin to point out that the word is one entity and the object it represents is another, there set in a temptation to do one thing with the word and another different thing with the object it is supposed to represent; and here begins that relativism which by now is visibly affecting those institutions which depend for their very existence upon our ability to use language as a permanent binder. [Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, pp. 195-196.]
The prophecies of Orwell, Hayek, and Weaver were published between 1944 and 1950. The fulfillment of their prophecies with regard to the perversion of the meaning of words is abundantly evident in twenty-first century America. The ascending humanistic worldview requires that society be organized upon socialistic principles. During the last half of the twentieth century, the redefinition of the meanings of certain words has become the feedstock of socialism’s propaganda machine: multiculturalism, diversity, freedom, tolerance, good, evil, right, wrong, justice, freedom, and equality to name just a few. The new meanings are being used to mold the thinking of society in support of a humanistic worldview and its socialistic agenda.
The enemy of truth and morality is relativism. Relativism is the child of the false and destructive worldview of humanism that is tied to time and therefore temporal. Humanism and other false religions may ascend and dominate for a time, but the seeds of destruction lie in their own falseness. Truth is eternal and therefore a permanent binder that transcends time. Truth rests in the unadulterated word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” [John 1:1, 14a, 17. RSV] In response to Pontius Pilate’s question regarding Jesus’ kingship, Jesus answered, “You say that I am a King. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” [John 18:37. RSV]
Truth is reality, and it is the nature of man to seek and know truth. To know God is to know truth.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods-Humanism and Christianity-The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 392-393.
George Orwell, 1984, (New York: Signet Classics, 1949, 1950), pp. 299-300.
Merriam-Webster, “newspeak,” w-m.com. http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/ newspeak (accessed March 3, 2014).
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom – Text and Documents, Ed. Bruce Caldwell, (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1944, 2007), pp. 54-55, 171-172, 174-175.
Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1948, 1984), pp. 150-151.
Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, Eds. George M. Curtis, III and James J. Thompson, Jr., (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 195-196.
