Three months ago Lindsay and I were asked if we’d be willing to speak in Sunday services in our local church congregation. It wasn’t a big deal. Such an ask is expected in the LDS culture when you move into a new area. It’s a good way to familiarize the congregation with new faces.
Topics are usually associated with talks given by LDS church leaders – either talks given from recent church conferences or historically significant talks given from years previous.
It was a week later when, Brother Willis, the individual who had previously asked us to speak, approached me with our assigned topics. Lindsay’s topic came from a talk given from the most recent church conference titled “Drawing Closer to the Savior.” A perfectly non-specific subject. Which means she’d be using a previous talk.
Then Brother Willis informed me that I was to speak on “The Virtue of Kindness.” And at that point I started to laugh…and before I could stop myself… I blurted out… “Are you serious?” To which Brother Willis paused for a moment…then, slightly confused, asked…Oh…is that a problem?
Because, for a moment, I literally thought he was joking. I’d forgotten that this was not an individual that knew me – at all. This was just a guy happy to find someone willing to fill in a speaking slot and probably figured kindness would be the speaking equivalent of a lofted softball for a willing volunteer.
And who could blame him. Cause, honestly, what type of person considers kindness a difficult subject.
So in the moment, I told Brother Willis I was willing to speak on the topic. The associated talk given by Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin from a 2002 LDS conference.
But,…I was torn. If not evident, I take gospel discussion pretty seriously. And the term “kindness” as it’s thrown around in our culture’s rhetoric, has been a particular point of irritation to me for several years.
I shared my speaking dilemma with several people who know my mind on the issue, and the general response was laughter first…and then…oh man…you’re screwed.
One person did ask, before I’d even started writing, for a transcript of the talk. I thought he was joking. But after giving the talk I realized he was not. Nor were other people out of the congregation who asked for the same after the talk had been given.
Because this is not an issue that is merely of my own manufacturing. This is something that people are truly struggling with. People who love God, who love their fellowman. People who, above all, want to be productive in their gospel practice as it concerns themselves and as it concerns others.
Compassionate people who understand that what often is passed for kindness in the world today is often nothing more than conveniently enabling delusion in another merely to avoid the discomfort of having to engage in difficult but productive conversations themselves. And that, in some cases, becoming more and more frequent, that kindness is now being used as the term to justify the manipulation of the mentally ill, this being especially evident as a practice of many major corporations.
All of this said, I decided I would speak on kindness. That I was either the worst person to speak on the topic, or the person most suited for it. That I would either light my own funeral pyre, or ignite a desperately needed discussion on what kindness means when spoken by the mouth of God.
This, and the following few episodes, are that talk as I would have liked to have given it had the time been available to me.
I should also mention, the congregation, save a few individuals, we’re not familiar with my mental health history with major depression until just before I spoke. Lindsay gave her address to the same audience just prior to my comments on kindness. Her talk, which is in a slightly amended form on theBruzd.com blog page titled Shining Light into the Darkness, told of our families experience with my battle with treatment resistant depression. It was in this newly introduced understanding of my personal history that the congregation then had the opportunity to hear me offer my conclusions on the virtue of kindness.
All warfare is based on deception.
- Sun Tzu – The Art of War.
Semantics – : the historical and psychological study of the meanings of words. To also include the study of changes in the meaning of words over time.
The sower soweth the word.
- Mark 4:14
The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field:
But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.
- Mathew 13: 24-25
In the early 1950s a new word began to crop up.
DOUBLESPEAK
What is doublespeak?
It’s the use of language that is deliberately constructed to disguise or distort the actual meaning of a given statement. Common devices used for doublespeak would be intentional ambiguity or the use of euphemisms.
- Definition Source: Wiktionary
Someone hearing this definition for the first time might understandably ask – “… isn’t that just …Lying?
And to this I would have to say YES….and NO. And that’s actually the trick of doublespeak. The answer is actually somewhere in between. This is where doublespeak operates. In subjective subtlety.
A few obvious examples:
Doublespeak occurs everywhere. Often in occupational spaces. As a pediatric dentist I use it everyday.
The piece of equipment I most often use…It’s NOT a drill. It’s a…HANDPIECE.
When kids ask me…Dr B….? Are you gonna give me a SHOT….!!!?
And my response is commonly something like….
Whaaaat? ….a shot. I don’t uh, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
And then I turn to the mom and say…Uhhh, we’re gonna give your child an injection. Okay?
The terms I’ve given may seem just jargon. And that is correct. The terms used are occupation specific. Words that refine communication in a technically complex discipline. But there is a SLIGHT difference between jargon and doublespeak.
So I should clarify. The word “injection” IS jargon when used in profession related discussions between dental workers. It is a technical term of the trade useful for effective communication.
However, a dentist using “INJECTION” in place of “SHOT” when staring into the mouth of a five year old does so with the intent to subtly influence the child’s emotions. It’s this subtle, but intentional, swaying of a listener’s emotions that constitutes doublespeak.
I mentioned that the term doublespeak DID NOT EXIST UNTIL the 1950’s. Its emergence was timely.
The first half of the 40s was spent embroiled in war; the second half?…spent trying to understand how it could have been prevented. The why, the what, the how of facism. Why did it take hold, what caused it to flourish, how did such horrible desires infect so many people.
In the mid to late forties…the footage, the documents, the first hand accounts began to tell how totalitarianism had infected the industrial nations of Germany, Japan, Italy and Spain…However, it would be decades before the mountain of information left by their regimes could be effectively coalesced into works for public education.
And so, the task of bringing to light the psychological methods of Nazi totalitarianism fell to a work of fiction – George Orwell’s 1984.
1984 is a dystopian novel set in, what was then, a not too distant future. In this fictional future, Great Britain had fallen under the control of a totalitarian mega-state called Oceania. By describing the day to day life of its main character – Orwell effectively introduces the reader to the many genuine methods by which real totalitarian states had secured control and maintained power over the 1st half of the 20th century . The fictional Oceania created by Orwell was patterned after Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, Orwell having first hand experience with the tactics of both of these regimes during his military service in the Spanish Civil War.
1984 described many manipulative methods by which control can be maintained over an intelligent people.
Two SPECIFIC methods portrayed in 1984 distinctly stood out to the 1950’s reader. These were practices the reader would have found similar to practices undertaken by Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
The terms Orwell assigned to the two particular methods were
Newspeak
andp
Doublethink
With these terms, Orwell described two slightly different mechanisms of social control. Both mechanisms leveraged the human desire to be socially accepted – TO BELONG. By using that desire alongside 1. state-sponsored social pressures and 2. the states manipulative management of basic human needs, providing food water and shelter to citizens compliant with the party. Using those tactics those in power subtly but effectively accomplished the unthinkable:
Unthinkable #1 – The people in power changed words… better stated, they changed the meanings of words.
Book 1 Chapter 5
- “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.”
Unthinkable #2 – Those in power repressed critical thinking among their citizens,
The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
and
Unthinkable 3
Those in power altered history…or what the public remembered as history.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
Readers of the 1950s recognized these tactics because of their similarity to what they’d seen in Fascist and Communist communities. Such as the mass educational system enacted by the Nazi’s known as the Jungvolk for children and Hitler Youth for teenagers. It was this recognition, that these Orwellian tactics were real phenomena, that they were already in use in other countries, that led to the creation of a new word. A mash-up of Orwell’s two fictional terms of DOUBLETHINK and NEWSPEAK – DOUBLESPEAK
It is well known that communists love to give names to important institutions of society that imply exactly the virtue they desire their citizens to THINK the institution encompasses, a practice in authoritarian irony. For example, from its inception in 1912 and through today, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Russia has carried the same name. PRAVDA – translation? – TRUTH. An appropriate name for your source of state sponsored information.
Another example is the word democracy in its meaning over time in the United States. From the outset of the nation’s establishment, the founding fathers were adamant that the country was to be a Constitutional Republic – NOT a democracy. James Madison comprehensively explains in the Federalist Papers that the anticipated growth and expansion of the United States would result in violence and destruction – as previous democracies had under the rule of the majority. Instead, a republic was founded where the people would elect representatives to govern, allowing growth without mobocracy. However, the term democracy came en vogue at the beginning of the 20th century. Socialists who wanted to distance themselves from the violence of the early Union of Soviet Socialist Republics looked for a new moniker. They began to use the word democracy, justifying its use by reasoning that a state that absorbs all of its resources within it borders, is a state where the resources belong to “all the people.” President Woodrow Wilson gave the term democracy a real boost when he commonly stated that the allied fight during World Ward I was to “make the world safe for democracy.” From there, the term democracy maneuvered itself into the diction of our societies and school books until today where most of society mistakenly identify the United States as a democracy, instead of the Constitutional Republic that she is.
But it’s the Nazis who lay claim to the most repugnant doublespeak term of all time. “The Final Solution” – the Nazi code name for a plan to exterminate all Jews within German grasp, what we know today as the Holocaust. The code name “Final Solution” helped those who planned and carried out the operation to talk of genocide as if it were as sensible as resolving a math problem.
After the publishing of 1984 the word doublespeak quickly became a real world term for the deliberate use of disguised or distorted language. The examples shared here (words from a dentist’s office to a concentration camp) show the spectrum of doublespeak’s application. Like all tools it has the potential for good and for evil. Most important is to understand that it exists, that it is used commonly, and that it has a proclivity towards manipulation.
The tactic of subtle speaking has long been in practice. Orwell merely shed a greater light on something as old as communication itself. Such tactics are evident in Genesis; used in the drama of the Garden of Eden.
When WE recount that story … WE easily identify the subtle persuasion used by the serpent.
Ye shall not surely die…[but] your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
- Genesis 3:4-5
Interesting…that Satan incited the fall from paradise by misrepresenting the characteristics of vegetation.
Many years later during his ministry on earth, Christ warned of a similar tactic used by the enemy. Agricultural warfare with a twist. Here is the parable of the wheat and tares.
24 … The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field:
25 But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.
26 But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.
27 So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?
28 He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?
29 But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.
30 Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.
Much of this parable I’ll leave unpacked – leaving my greater analysis out for a possible bonus episode. But there are four points relevant to what could be termed a warfare of words:
- There exists a conflict
- The householder is aware of the conflict and familiar with the enemy’s method of sabotage. “It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War
- The servants are naive to the conflict as well as to the method of sabotage.
- THE METHOD OF THE ENEMY. Imitation and Entanglement. Either way the goal is to entice those of the household into reacting hastily – just as the servants proposed. The greatest danger to the wheat IS NOT the presence of the tares. It is the instinct of the uneducated of the household. Such a tactic would achieve what is termed in warfare as “supreme excellence” – reducing your opponent in strength or resources without engaging in a fight. “To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The prevailing Christian interpretation of this parable is that the tare’s noxious nature lies in its similarity to wheat – an insidious imitation. To the untrained eye, a tare is indistinguishable from a stalk of wheat until a particular time of differentiation. To remove a tare before this time, even with good intentions, is an action just as likely to destroy a stalk of wheat as it is to get rid of a single weed.
It is to games of imitation of which the enemy finds us most vulnerable. And no more so than in the realm of words. For this reason I find it no coincidence that in scripture a seed is often used metaphorically to represent the word.
In particular, Words of virtue are especially effective targets to the enemy. It is his ability to first mimic, and then distort the meanings of words of virtue that make us most vulnerable to weeding out our own essential resources.
An especial virtue of vulnerability throughout all of history and one of express interest in current events: KINDNESS
This is the end of part 1 of the Complexity of Kindness
DOUBLESPEAK
A good doublespeak explanation article
Leave a Reply