Stop the insanity, please

Am I insane to think that one of the key foundations of any civilization is the ability to communicate clearly? A shared language and history matter.

Politics, science, economics, family life, education…they all rest on our ability to find common ground in communication. Without language, all we can do is point and grunt.

Precision in language is especially important in things like science and law. And the current assault on our language is particularly troubling and acute in both these areas. What you can say and how you can say things are being circumscribed, and the very meaning of terms we all used to understand are being altered beyond recognition. Suspect descriptions are being censored (in many cases you can’t describe the race of a fleeing suspect), terms such as male and female are now unacceptable, and the very meaning of certain words with clear definitions in law are being redefined into uselessness.

Pregnant boyfriend? That is nonsensical. It makes as much sense as describing the 2020 George Floyd riots as “mostly peaceful” as people get beaten and buildings burn down.

And that is the point, of course.

What has made this an effective tactic of the Left is that they can count on the average person to dip into their store of knowledge and latch onto a word with a traditional meaning such as “peaceful,” and expect that you will think their use of the term means what their use means. At worst, they leave you confused, and at best you come to accept their version of reality. And if you resist, they have the means to punish you.

A revaluation of all values, a new meaning for all words, with the benefit of the values attached to the old words still attached to the now empty vessel, at least for a while.

Many of us have not bought into this revaluation and redefinition, but before you scoff: it’s pretty clear that the MSM and the people who define and build much of the cultural infrastructure do. Hence a media outlet uses the term “pregnant boyfriend.” They keep repeating this and a lot of people blandly accept it.

This can create profound changes, even if many people resist.

We saw something similar happen in the 20th century with architecture. Until the 19th century, the “language” of architecture changed over time, but there was a consistent attempt in each era to make buildings beautiful. Then in the 1920s and 30s architecture became very politicized and dominated by socialists who wanted to change the built world into something reflecting their ideology. You got Bauhaus, brutalism, and all sorts of ideological movements driving the language of architecture, and what was considered “beautiful” by the elite became very ugly indeed.

Real modernism began with the Bauhaus after WWI, and the world has been uglier ever since. It may be an exaggeration to say that Art Deco was the last time any beautiful architecture has been produced, but not much of one. The influence of Modernism is finally waning a bit, but its socialist ugliness changed the language of architecture forever. And not for the better.

So much beauty was destroyed to be replaced with utterly inhuman dreck.

What was the purpose of this? pic.twitter.com/hCTaIqtVZP

— Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) July 21, 2023

The language of architecture changed, fundamentally, from one focused on communicating with everyday people to one focused on elites talking to elites in a language only they understood.

As with the shift of our common discourse to the newspeak of alphabet ideologists, much of the public revolted. And it made not one damn bit of difference. Few people embraced the Modernist movement, but it reshaped our cities nonetheless.

Look at the tallest buildings ever built in the US until the Freedom Tower. Both the World Trade Center buildings and the Willis Tower were intended to be expressions of the greatest achievements of humanity from the point of view of the elite who designed and paid for them, and both are hideous.

The World Trade Center buildings were literally just tall boxes, and the Willis Tower is literally just a bunch of tall boxes smashed together. What made them distinctive, even iconic, was their height. Otherwise, they could have been drawn by a 5-year-old.

Britain built some of the worst public housing in the world, and unlike in the US a larger fraction of the population was forced to live in them post-WWII. Still, many of the elite still love them.

That was intentional. “Form follows function.” Their purpose was to be tall boxes that house people, so they designed and built tall boxes that housed people. That’s it. Engineering marvels, but they are ugly as sin. This monstrosity in Minneapolis was put on the National Register of Historic Places, believe it or not. It is mostly public housing, and even uglier in person. People hate it, the elite loves it because, I believe, it dehumanizes us. It is populated with mostly refugees from East Africa and is proudly the most “diverse” part of our city, as well as crime-ridden.

Cedar-Riverside, by the way, was supposed to be the core of a new utopian urban Minneapolis. Needless to say, the utopia never arrived.

The human and the humane were stripped from the language of architecture, as is happening in our language of politics, culture, law, and even how we describe each other. Hence a school can inform parents that they will henceforth refer to individuals as “people who produce sperm” and “people who produce eggs.”

People are being dehumanized, and that is the point. For all the talk of individuality and compassion, respecting people, and embracing difference, it all boils down to this: you produce eggs or sperm.

We need a common language and a language that humanizes us. Modernism was about stripping the unique humanity in order to build a new socialist society populated by new socialist men who do what they are told and function as cogs in a machine. It was done in the name of liberation, but the effect was exactly the opposite. Any humanizing ornament–even any vestige of the natural world–was stripped away.

The same is true of the changes to our spoken language. We are being stripped of the shared meanings and our humanity by tyrants who think they can impose a new order more to their liking on those who haven’t the power to object. We live in a world where misgendering a criminal or a victim is a greater crime than whatever was done. One where protesters can chant in the Tennessee capitol after the hideous mass shooting by a trans terrorist that there weren’t 6 victims, but 7–including the mass murderer who was killed by the police.

These moron activists were holding up 7 fingers claiming there were 7 victims in the Nashville school shooting. pic.twitter.com/VSMEQzrp6c

— MEME THE LEFT (@memetheleft) March 31, 2023

We have more control over how we use the English language than we did over what the elite chose to build because architecture only gets built with vast sums of money. And as you have seen, when people can control what gets built with their own money–as homes–the rot never got very far.

English is, in a way, a home over which we have some control. Don’t let the ideological modernists ruin it as they did our city centers.