Language as anesthetic

We Americans have a problem that affects all of us regardless of where we are on the political spectrum. That problem is that we are very susceptible to “branding.” This might be a company changing its name, it might be a popular catchphrase or slogan put out by a think tank or a political party.

When I say we’re susceptible, what I mean is that we tend to uncritically accept and adopt language changes nearly instantly. We do this before we think about why the language is changing. We don’t often interrogate whether the language “should” change, or whether it’s being changed to nudge us into accepting something we might not want to accept.

This tendency doesn’t do much to harm us when it’s merely us accepting a new brand name for a long-known product or service. For example, while I find it irritating that people instantly adopt a new company name (Dunkin’ Donuts is now just ‘Dunkin’, and people are even adopting the “DD” branding), that’s just aesthetic irritation on my part. I admit it: I chafe at people rushing to “sound up to date” and voluntarily, without pay, helping companies achieve their Branding Dreams (TM). But the new name isn’t actually doing anything serious or “harmful.” It just gives cranky old men like me something else to bitch about.

In politics the consequences are more serious. Politicians have long studied the marketing and branding of successful companies and have incorporated those tools into how they sell themselves as candidates. They use the same branding tricks.

One of the most powerful of those tools is simply changing language. Renaming things. Old wine in new bottles. It’s remarkable how effective renaming is, all by itself. It can shut off our rational thought processes without us noticing.

The very best explanation of this I’ve ever read is an essay by Barra Kerr called “Pronouns are Rohypnol.” It’s so superior as an explanation that I urge you to stop reading my post and read hers first before finishing this essay.

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In brief, Kerr shows that the trans project of getting us to “respect pronouns” is actually an act of psychological warfare. It literally (yes, literally; I’m not speaking in hyperbole) reprograms our perception of reality when we call a man “she” and when we call a woman “he.” When we agree to call a man “she” both to his face, and when we’re communicating with others, we are self-programming. What happens is that the normal emotions and thoughts called up by the concept “man” are no longer called up by our brains. Instead, we are actually primed to associate feminine things with this man—we start to lose awareness that he’s a man and thus physically dangerous to women in ways that women are not.

Please stay with me; this is important. Even if you reading this, right now, believe that you are immune to this, you are not. I promise you that you are not. I used to believe I was immune. That was incorrect. No human is immune. This is our psychological and neurological wiring. You cannot simply decide “not to be affected” by it. Barra Kerr’s article above walks you through an actual demonstration that will surprise you when you find what your brain is doing.

That’s the conscious, deliberate intention of the pronoun brigade. Despite what they claim, they have zero interest in “just being respected.” That’s the cover story. The real intention is to anesthetize your mind to reality so that you will accept your boundaries being broken. And most especially to dull your instincts and the normal associations that come up in your mind with the concept “man.” All the better to have you off your guard and not on the defensive when some girly-man “just wants to pee” next to you.

The words change our perception of reality. They are not “just form,” they are substance too.

Naturally we see this game played in politics most prominently. All politicians do it, but in our era, the Democrats are the master practitioners. Kamala Harris is doing it right now with her proposal to give “forgivable loans” to black men. NB: in the graphic below, you will see the phrase “black men and others.” Do not be fooled by the words “and others.” Harris only added this to her message yesterday when she got rightly clobbered for proposing an illegal, unconstitutional, racist money give away to blacks.

Her goal is to give—or to be perceived as giving even if the project is eventually thwarted—black men something other people can’t have in order to grab their vote.

But that’s not what I want to focus on (I’m not going to focus on anything else in that graphic, though much can be criticized). Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to the psychological game being played by the use of the term “forgivable loan.”

Say the phrase out loud to yourself several times. Think it through, paying attention to the content of the actual meaning of those words. You might predict where I’m going. There is no such thing as a “forgivable loan.” That is a contradiction, a literal linguistic and conceptual contradiction.

Some of you in government or policy circles may be queuing up to object. You might be about to say, “forgivable loan is too a real thing. My field uses it so that means it’s a valid term and you’re wrong.” Not quite. Even if your field indeed uses this term, it is not, I’m afraid, a “valid term” in the real world for the rest of us. It is still a contradiction, and if it has become agreed-upon patois in your professional field, your field has agreed to sign on to a dishonest language game.

I’m talking about the effect in the real world and this matters infinitely more than what some professional wonk has in his vocabulary.

“Forgivable loan” is a lie. There is no such thing as a “forgivable loan.” If it is “forgivable” (meaning: don’t have to pay it back), then it is not a loan (meaning: must be paid back). What is it? A “gift,” a “give-away.”

So why are they calling it a “forgivable loan?” To deceive you. Just as creepy men want to you think of them as she, and call them she, because it numbs your mind to the truth, so does Harris want your mind stuck on the concept of “loan.” If your mind can stay there, then you won’t get as upset at what she’s doing. If she came right out and said, “I intend to give away your tax dollars for free to 1 million black men simply because they are black men” more people would object more quickly and more vociferously.

That is what she’s proposing. Giving away tax dollars from you and me to black men specifically.

It’s racist. It’s communist. It’s also so blatantly unconstitutional that there is zero chance it would be allowed (until and unless the left finally does completely break the Supreme Court then all bets would be off).

Language changes are anesthetics. They’re usually the first tool used in a political project, analogous to the topical anesthetic the dentist rubs on your gums before injecting you with Novocain. “Pronouns” or “forgivable loan” are the numbing agent on the cotton swab that gets you ready to accept actual trauma to your tissue through the injection of a steel needle.

The concept of the “euphemism treadmill” is operating here, too. First proposed by linguist Steven Pinker, the term describes the ever-changing names we give to concepts that don’t change, but that we find unpleasant. It may seem to you that adopting a new term for an unpleasant thing actually does “reduce stigma,” or “make help more accessible,” or “leads to treating people more kindly.” This is not true, it’s never been true, and it will never be true.

A walk through what the euphemism treadmill did to the concept of mental retardation illustrates. Consider the word “retarded” that used to be the only acceptable word for people with severe intellectual disabilities. That’s important. Take a moment to fully remember that the word “retarded” was, yes really, considered the polite word. If you’re 45 or older you remember this.

People today get VERY offended at the word “retarded.” Why? It’s not obvious; you have to think it through. The answer is not that the word itself is rude. There is nothing about the arrangement of the letters r-e-t-a-r-d-e-d itself that’s “offensive.” So, it can’t be that that makes people angry.

Indeed, “retarded” was itself a new, polite euphemism for people who used to be called “morons,” “idiots,” or “imbeciles.” Whoa—hold up. Those old words like “moron?” Nope, there’s nothing about the arrangement of the letters m-o-r-o-n that’s “offensive” either. If you’re tempted to say, “Oh, of course, it was rude to call them morons,” then you haven’t yet grasped the euphemism treadmill. “Moron” simply replaced older terms that had “become offensive.”

Key point: none of these words, any of them, old or new, are “inherently offensive.”

You can see how “retarded” was in actual fact a gentle, non-judgmental word when you contemplate its actual definition. It merely means “delayed” or “late.” A car whose distributor is tuned so that the spark is “retarded” is just a car whose firing spark comes “later” during each engine revolution than it would otherwise. I can write of a badly damaged, washed out country road that “retarded” my progress to the next town.

I’m afraid it gets worse. “Retarded” was not merely a gentle replacement for “moron,” it was a substantive lie. Almost all of the people formerly described as retarded were not “late” or “delayed.” They did not merely take two years to learn what a normal kid could learn in one year. They did not eventually catch up with normal kids. Why? Because they weren’t “late” or “delayed.” They were constitutionally incapable of developing past a certain point because their IQs were very low. They really truly were permanently intellectually disabled.

My late aunt Connie, God rest her soul, was profoundly mentally retarded, probably in part from fetal alcohol syndrome. Though she lived to 40, her mental abilities never progressed past the point of a disturbed and unusual four year-old. Connie was a wonderful, loving person. Of all the people dear to me who have died, I miss her most. But she was not “delayed,” she was damaged.

We do not like to tell the truth.

So, what is it, actually, that makes us mad or upset or scandalized about the word “retarded?” It’s nothing to do with the word itself. It’s nothing to do with the arrangement of the letters. It’s nothing to do with the phonemes of the word.

It’s nothing to do with the word at all. Our “offense” comes from observing other people using a word that has been declared by society to be out of fashion. That’s literally, truly, 100 percent and nothing else, where the “offense” comes from. Our sense of indignation is purely a reaction to seeing other people refuse to use terminology that society currently deems “what nice and proper people do to distinguish themselves from not nice and improper people.”

It’s arbitrary. It’s tribal and small. It has nothing at all to do with actual tender feelings toward whatever group is described by the word.

Most of us, most of the time, are not aware of how we are unwittingly caught up and swept along with these language games. Our brains turn off, but we don’t know they’ve turned off (there’s that anesthetic again).

Try to stay aware of this. Your mind and your vote may be hijacked if you don’t.

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Bonus: picture of the world’s sweetest cat, Mina, asking for one of the 26 head kisses required before she allows me to take up an activity. Shared with you in hopes of melting your heart and disposing you to pay cash money to subscribe to this blog and weekly show.

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