Lies and Language

What Happens When Words Don't Mean What They Mean?

I’ve always thought it was weird how often words get changed out. As a kid, it was common to call something or someone retarded when annoying or stupid would have worked just as well. In 2023 using the “r word” in public is quasi-blasphemous and, at the very least, might earn one some dirty looks or a lecture from a concerned citizen. Things change, and that’s more often than not a good thing.

Historically, the development of spoken language has been more of a bottom up process than a top down one, with variations popping up in different communities in different parts of the world. As with the romance languages, what started as Vulgar Latin transformed into different dialects and ultimately different languages as people scattered across Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD (or should I say CE?). That type of change is to be expected and has a natural place in the world.

There is, however, another kind of change in language I’m a bit more skeptical about. What I’m talking about is the kind that claims to be compassionate and representative but where the practical reality is closer to when you were a kid playing with your neighbor who likes to make up new self-serving rules anytime you’re close to enjoying yourself. The result is a world where average people move further from their neighbors and co-workers out of fear of saying the wrong thing and being labeled a bigot, a racist, or an “insert here”-phobe. In the name of progress we walk on eggshells and deny ourselves the playful banter that makes work bearable and relationships flourish. What’s worse, in one of those rare private conversations where people are more honest, it’s common to find that many don’t really believe a lot of the things they feel pressured to support publicly. Silence is violence or whatever.

When I first discovered Jordan Peterson around February of 2017, I like many other 20 somethings, was captivated by how logically he spoke about the world and truth and meaning and responsibility. For me it was a foregone conclusion that you need to tell the truth and aim at the good, but hearing it talked about in the context of willfully taking on suffering gave new light to the subject. It also became clear to me in the coming months and years that language, and how we use it, is vital when thinking about how to advance society (as well as keep it from devolving into tyranny). At the same time, I became increasingly aware of how I was noticing words in daily life being used “creatively” to either over or under-emphasize things based on the underlying worldview.

I’ve always hated the elitist tendency to use jargon to make yourself seem more intelligent or sophisticated. It’s one thing to use esoteric terms with someone else who’s in the industry and “speaks the same language” as you in order to communicate more quickly and effectively, but it’s another thing entirely to use fancy words to pontificate to the plebes. Nobody likes that guy in Good Will Hunting. 

Unfortunately, this proclivity is deeply human as we thrive on comparison, and what better way to prove I’m better than you than to use words that I know you don’t understand. Even more unfortunately, this practice has expanded in scope and scale as the culture in the US and the West more broadly has become more highly educated. Now you have adults acknowledging their privilege over drinks as a sort of status symbol much like asking where someone went to school functioned before. 

“Oh, Michael went to Virginia? What a great school. Stephen is finishing up his MBA at Yale this spring. We’re very proud.” 

You can almost picture the country club wives with their fake smiles while they polish off a bottle of chardonnay at brunch.  We’re always looking for easy ways to gauge how much respect to give the person we’re talking to. The terms of the game have just been swapped out. Person of Color instead of African American, Pro-Life or Pro-Choice, Partner instead of boyfriend or girlfriend, etc.

The wealthy and powerful have always had to invent new status games to keep themselves entertained, and when you are insulated from the harsh realities that accompany your opinions it’s easy to preach things that are patently absurd. A few years ago Rob Henderson, a PhD student at Cambridge, coined the phrase luxury beliefs to describe the phenomenon of elites holding opinions that are trendy and “progressive” but in practice wreak havoc on the lives of those not insulated by wealth and status. The kicker, is that many of these same people don’t actually act out their edgy opinions (except for maybe that one time…) What you get as a result is things like sexual promiscuity and non-monogamy proclaimed to be the way of the future by people who grew up with high status, monogamous parents and plan to be monogamous themselves in the future. The social costs of this fashionable hypocrisy should be obvious. But I believe the trickle down of this sort of action has been accelerated in recent years thanks to the internet and social media more specifically, and along with it harm to the poor normies. 

While terms like violence (used to describe opinions I disagree with), cultural appropriation (to describe white people dressing up as samurai for halloween), and microaggression (to psychically attribute bigoted meaning to a white person’s words or actions) can score you points in the DEI seminar, the same words can be used to justify actual violence in the streets. Furthermore, ideas of systemic racism, white privilege, and intersectionality are often used by those with low social status to justify their position in life and excuse themselves from making any progress to change their situation. If the game is rigged then what’s the point? Meanwhile, it’s often minorities who grew up privileged that benefit from policies meant to level the playing field, with a whole generation of private school attending POCs who now grow up as spokespeople for the racist, oppressive America they’ve never personally encountered. 

So what does all of this have to do with language and with lying? Everything. You see, in modern society we have gotten very good at abstraction and euphemism which allows us to get away with saying things that if thought about literally would make us squirm. No one likes to talk about death so we say that so and so “passed away”. The idea of killing a fetus and sucking it out of a pregnant woman is unbecoming so instead we talk about “terminating a pregnancy" or “having an abortion”. These linguistic tricks help protect us from the harsh realities we experience in our daily lives. But what happens when we drift to the point that words cease to represent the underlying reality for which they were created? 

That’s where the influence of the internet and modern progressivism has grossly overstepped and regular people are slowly waking up. A few months ago Mark Cuban, who I have long been a fan of, went on Twitter (X) to share his understanding of the meaning of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He demonstrated in his tweets a very common sense, Websters-type explanation of the terms that painted diversity as a positive thing that we should all strive for in what appeared to be an attempt to align himself with the good guys and provoke some discussion. What he failed to recognize, I imagine at least in part due to being a billionaire and living in a bubble, is that in 2024 these words, especially when grouped together, don’t mean anything close to their definitions. DEI (or DIE as some have renamed it) is instead a trojan horse for social justice theory and other ideological positions that have nothing to do with diversity, equity, or inclusion and everything to do with reshuffling the deck and overthrowing the hegemony.

What this battle looks like in real life is normal people, unaware and uninterested in institutional power or Judith Butler, slowly having their language and, therefore, their understanding changed to conform to a “higher” form of thinking. Meanwhile, those captured by the ideology play status games, calling out the privilege in others like elementary school hall monitors and waiting anxiously for the latest term or phrase they can use to proselytize.

Language, when used to advance society and seek the truth, is divinely beautiful as it was used to speak the world into being in Genesis. The spoken word is messianic and transformative as John 1:1 so poetically captures. But when language is used to manipulate the fabric of reality for some other end than to accurately describe life and the world, the consequences are catastrophic. And right now we’re on the highway to hell.