Loaded Words
“‘When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.
‘The question is,' said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master - that’s all.’” - Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
One of the biggest problems that we face with words is that they mean what we choose them to mean.
Take the word 'health' for example.
When Britain's National Health Service (NHS) started in 1948 you could see a General Practitioner (they were called doctors in those days) face to face by going to his surgery. You may have had to wait a bit while the doctor caught up but the doctor was always 'in'. If you felt too poorly to attend, your family doctor would make a home visit. (This is pretty much the way health care was delivered before the advent of the NHS, except you had to pay a few pennies a week at the Post Office for it.)
Now you have to explain your symptoms over the phone to a nurse practitioner or even a receptionist who decides if you're sick enough to merit a call back.
Britain's NHS became a sacred cow. You cannot criticise the NHS without bringing on a firestorm of rabid opprobrium. This is partly because the words Health and Service which have acquired a patina of virtue over the decades since 1948. Who could possibly object to that?
Other loaded words spring to mind: education, vaccine, democracy, fact, hard-right, science – words which are wheeled out to silence dissent. Are you now a science denier?
Big Words
“Words! Possessions of the beggar and the king
Write them; you can read them
Love them! Fear them!” - Anders Edenroth, The Real Group
The Nazis are now usually portrayed by our own credentialed classes as a bunch of jackbooted thugs. This stereotype is of course necessary to deflect ideas of the similarities between the Nazi leadership and our own. In fact, it's essential to all leaderships and bureaucracies to hide such similarities.
The historian Richard Evans pointed out in his book Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich that many leading figures in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (The National Socialist German Workers' Party - the Nazi Party) were actually highly cultured, rather like the Oxbridge or Ivy League types who gravitate to our own political elites.
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propagandist, had a PhD in Romantic Drama, the organiser of Hitler's stormtroopers, Ernst Röhm, was a Wagner superfan and accomplished pianist; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, loved the violin, and so on.
This is not to say that I'm a fan of the Nazis. Exactly the opposite!
Some were indeed jackbooted thugs but many ran the bureaucracy and administration where they were completely insulated from the atrocities sanctioned by their officious words.
Their credentialed classes were much more like our own than ours would care to admit.
Workplace Words
“The ideal subject for a totalitarian regime is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but someone for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.” - Hannah Arendt
The credentialed classes inhabit a landscape of words.
Words are indeed the 'possessions of the beggar and the king' but some never work with anything else. This is the reason the 'elites' have been melting down over a conversation between two old geezers: they're totally invested in the supremacy of words. Words which may be fact or fiction. The physical world is their blind spot.
These are people who call a plumber to change a tap washer or an electrician to replace a fuse.
Words are the tools the credentialed classes use to assert their prestige over each other and their authority over the rest of us.
It's not a surprise that we are led by the literate. The most accomplished are very skilled at rhetoric – winning over large crowds with silken sound bites, straw man arguments, imagined fears and a myriad of related competencies.
The middle ranks are effective at browbeating – cajoling those who may have studied less in their youth, feel less articulate and less sure of themselves when weaponised words begin to fly.
The 'storm troopers' are the silencers of opposition and dissent, the bullies who pile in en masse to overwhelm lone voices who dare to speak out.
We can easily see that leaderships and their associated credentialed classes must maintain their control over the narrative. Their futures depend on the authority it gives them.
It's why our banana bureaucracies only get bigger. More words means more power and more security for the insiders.
Words on the Web
“[propaganda's] task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favours the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.” - Adolph Hitler (1924)
With the rise of social media, the credentialed classes must have thought that all their birthdays had come at once. What an opportunity to shine - to create a priesthood around a silken narrative over a biddable, incoherent rabble.
And what horror when others who didn't share their world view turned out to be equally capable of erudition. Worse still, some of those damned contrarians had reasoned arguments and evidence! Have they no shame?
No wonder they're desperately trying to shut down dissenting opinion or misinformation as they've coined it.
The number one issue on the recent WEF meeting agenda was not war in Ukraine or food price inflation hurting the poor or even mass immigration. It was mis-, dis-, and mal- information. That which you and I might call dissenting opinion, frustration or anger.
Pejorative words like disinformation have just one intention: to shut down contrary opinion. How much more effective it is to raise the banner of disinformation, unqualified with any justification, than to engage with the arguments when you have a good chance of losing them.
No one had to tell the credentialed classes or the Davos elites that dissenting opinion would be the death of them. They sensed it as soon as the non-credentialed began to move in on their manor.
Plain Speaking in Panocracy
Panocracy won't do anything about plain speaking or the words of anonymous commenters with good or evil intent (and who can tell which is which?) in the world outside the administration.
It will insist only on full disclosure by the administration. Every agency, every bureaucrat, every operative is answerable for their actions. Continuous monitoring will expose any dishonourable behaviour. This is already becoming established practice in some jurisdictions where police are required to wear 'bodycams' but our panocracy will extend it throughout the administration.
We must learn how to use words for good rather than evil.