Originally Posted by goodonyamate
The easiest way to deal with this **** is to not talk to anyone. Ever.
This is
precisely the intent, to get you to self-censor
EVERYTHING, and thus to modify your own thinking leading to control of you, by you. ie the Thought Police. Language, or control of language is central to this aim.
If you haven't already read Orwell's 1984 (freely available for download
HERE). It's a relatively short, easy read, but the most potent of warnings given the horrors Orwell had witnessed in the 1930's with Soviet socialism (who he initially supported), the Fascists and the Spanish Civil war.
Reading 1984 can either be seen as a warning against, or an instruction manual on how to implement a totalitarian system. He anticipated almost everything that is the insanity of political correctness, in 1948 whilst dying of Tuberculosis.
1984, page 65. Apologies for the extended quote, but I think it is necessary.
‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising
his voice to overcome the noise.
‘Slowly,’ said Syme. ‘I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of
Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk
of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other,
and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without
shouting.
‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said.
‘We’re getting the language into its final shape—the shape
it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When
we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it
all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is
inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying
words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re
cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition
won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete
before the year 2050.’
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple
of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s
passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his
eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost
dreamy.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course
the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there
are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t
only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all,
what justification is there for a word which is simply the
opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite
in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like
‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’
will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite,
which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version
of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string
of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all
the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’
if you want something stronger still. Of course
we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak
there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion
of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—
in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that,
Winston? It was B.B.’s [Big Brother] idea originally, of course,’ he added
as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at
the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately
detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’
he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still
thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that
you write in ‘The Times’ occasionally. They’re good enough,
but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick
to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of
meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of
words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in
the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically
he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit
off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it
briefly, and went on:
‘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. Every concept that can ever
be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its
meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings
rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition,
we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be
continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer
and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a
little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse
for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question
of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t
be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete
when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and
Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.
‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the
year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will
be alive who could understand such a conversation as we
are having now?’
If you have made it this far, he also wrote about the language of politics
George Orwell Politics and the English Language