On the hijacking, overwriting, and redefinitions of words
"Mine is the thought of him who is lost in his own country, of the alien in his own nation, of the solitary among the kinfolk and friends."
Your thought is the thought of gossip and false pleasure. Mine is the thought of him who is lost in his own country, of the alien in his own nation, of the solitary among the kinfolk and friends. You have your thought and I have mine. — Khalil Gibran, excerpt from “Your thought and mine.”
What more could be written on this subject? Really the answer is probably not much that hasn’t been formally described by once in a generation giants like George Orwell. His book “1984” explains the mechanisms by which this process occurs—the hijacking, overwriting, and redefinition of words. This essay is an attempt to highlight how this process is applied in our daily lives and how part of exiting the longhouse means exiting the longhouse of your own mind, a mental model that is erected subconsciously, keeping you confined in restricted modes of thought in ways that might surprise you.
Surprises abound, the coronavirus—COVID-19—hangs like some evil smog over our civilization. Its origins suspicious but plausibly unknown, its acceleration of the chains of control, its deadly outcomes from both the virus and also the vaccine (still experimental mRNA technology that heralds the future of vaccine technology), and these events showcasing the pinnacle of technocratic managerial power. People talked about digital IDs and any number of vaccine related hoaxes, all driven by the fear of being controlled, chained, and subsequently harmed by the system. Yet there was one chain many people missed; a chain on people’s minds.
It’s a small thing, but it had outsized effects.
You see, in the before times, if someone wore a mask, if someone avoided people, if someone hid at their house like a hermit? You’d call them antisocial. You haven’t heard that word in a while have you? That’s because it was replaced by “social distancing” which put a positive spin on this behavior. You’re not antisocial, no, you’re socially distant, and that’s different somehow. This normalization of antisocial behavior has far reaching negative effects, particularly on children, that will not be further explored in this essay because it’s obvious that kids need face time (for proof, see Parker and Asher’s 1993 study).
Face time: that means actual face to face contact with other kids, as opposed to the overwritten definition, which is to connect online via FaceTime. Even the terminology "to connect” is an inversion. We used to be connected our land, our family, and our towns. If you wanted to feel a connection perhaps you were searching for love. However, now, people connect to their smart phone. There’s one a lot of people know about: smart phones—or should we say dumb phones. Clearly, not every attempt at redefinition escapes the public’s consciousness.
Adept readers will have noted that these redefinitions are typically associated with chains of control, and this next example is a word I am willing to bet every reader of this essay has adopted in the new way completely unconsciously: engagement. Before social media and modernity, engagement meant a unique, intimate, loving relationship shared between a man and a woman. After social media, “engagement” meant a common, antagonistic relationship among potentially millions of people. It’s antagonistic because bickering is what keeps people “engaged” to the threads and the reactions. The perfect Twitter post is a single sentence that’s so absurd and controversial and topsy-turvy that it essentially generates a stack overflow of responses or “engagement.” This redefinition of engagement is one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees-the-polar-opposite of its original meaning, yet most readers of this essay have subconsciously accepted the new meaning.
In “Infinite Jest,” David Foster Wallace describes love birds in bed twittering sweet-nothings and cuddling. How many are now cuddling with their phone in bed while Twittering away their lives, engaged to people who don’t even really know they exist while disengaged from their real life? Who thought to take the word twitter away from the writers and place it instead into corporate ownership, where one twitters with the world instead of with their lover?
These are simulated words for a simulated life.
The want for money and admiration certainly drives this disengagement from real life. Again, the general rule is that hijacking occurs most often around chains of control. One of the major chains of control is financial, and because of this there is inversion and mysticism surrounding forms of money (such as gold have magical value as a reserve). In 1936, the “Money Myth Exploded” was published by Louis Even, and clearly explains how money is created through the fictional narrative of five castaways. In this story, these men were violently forced out of the longhouse, having to work hard to survive lost, shipwrecked on an island, building true wealth by the sweat of their brow. These men didn’t have much, but they kept the fruits of their labor.
As their economy grew, they found it difficult to trade without money, but suddenly a banker showed up with a locked and sealed treasure chest of gold. As these traveling bankers do, the banker setup a financial system and subsequently extracted interest, and before long, all the true wealth of the island belonged to the banker. To hide this process as it unfolded, the banker created strife in the country through control of the press, with two political factions duking it out over absurd and often nonsensical issues. Eventually, the islanders become aware of the ruse, and, even worse, they discovered that there was no gold at all in the chest. Empty!
“The following day, Oliver, the banker, received a letter signed by the five:
Sir, you have needlessly driven us into debt and exploited us. We no longer need you to run our money system. From here on, we will have all the money we need, with no gold, no debt, and no thieves. We are establishing, at once, the system of Social Credit on the island. The national dividend will replace the national debt.” —excerpt from “The money myth exploded” by Louis Even (1936)
And surely now you see not only a lesson on surviving outside the longhouse, but also the hijacking and subsequent inversion of the term “social credit.” Social credit—for a century—meant nationalized banking, but now, in modernity, it means the total-one-hundred-eighty-degree-polar-opposite: the ability for banks and services to cut YOU off instead of YOU cutting THEM off. This was an incredible inversion aided by the public’s lack of interest in reading (their lack of interest in fact of anything that isn’t entertainment). One could try to make this kind of essay into entertainment, but in doing so it would become part of the longhouse, and in so doing would devolve into a new, personal, and lesser chain.
There are so many things that chain us to the longhouse, subjected to its whims of the day. Mortgages are well known as a chain of control, since a long-term financial commitment is forged to pay the mortgage debt. Yet, this particular chain isn’t really available to everybody anymore, at least not like it used to be. Surely, some chains are comfy and golden and therefore demanded by the public, after all, the very best chains are the ones the public actively longs for. So, again, a word had to change: equity. In the before times, equity was uniformly known as one’s share of ownership in a house and property that someone had earned based on character and contribution to the community. Now equity means the one-hundred-degree-polar-opposite which is to give via particular identity the unearned access to jobs, careers, opportunities, and thus property.
The concept of identity has transformed a myriad of words and symbols.
Stars are celebrities firstly, and stellar celestial objects secondly. This has a huge effect on the mind as people turn their attention away from the sky for information and instead towards the entertainers. To see the rings of Saturn, to contemplate the mysteries of the universe and the stars, and, if the conditions are right, to see ancient sea beds on Mars; to listen to complex, classical music instead of single-key-change modern pop (see “The death of the key change” by Chris Dalla Riva)—this is how you expand your mind.
Another example is the word woman, the meaning of which has changed drastically (and in record time) in recent years. When a woman can have a penis, yes, the meaning of the word has been completely inverted. As readers are probably aware, these changes are not restricted to words because symbols change too. Consider the symbol of the rainbow—it’s widely known to have been appropriated by a political sexual identity lobby.
This is not intended to sound pretentious or overly dramatic, but every time a word is lost, it’s like losing a piece of a pristine, majestic, and enormous work of magic that makes up the English language. It’s okay for language to change, don’t get caught in that trap where you become rigid about ever changing or inventing new words. The problem is when words are inverted, diluted, and reconfigured for an alien agenda. These changes inevitably lay the groundwork for vast networks of alienated citizens, often beginning with words in a simple subliminal manner of hip, new usage that eventually is forced onto everybody.
To summarize, there are lesser chains and there are major chains used by the controlitariate. One of the major chains is financial, while the other major chains of course are physical, theocratic, and physiological, although this fourth major chain is still being forged by Elon Musk with the brain chip being a kind of Tolkienian ring of power—in fact, an extension of the mobile phone. Truly escaping all of these chains would allow for a total escape from the longhouse, but then you have to build true wealth like the five shipwrecked castaways who were quickly bamboozled. The radical level of risk and courage required to attempt this keeps most away, and those who attempt generally end up in a form of pseudo-rebellion that inevitably backfires. This is the reality of the situation and the danger of wandering too far out of the pig pen. Regarding the lesser chains, what new words will be inverted to establish new rooms to house the new modes of thought in the longhouse of the mind?
Though quaint, McRaven was right when he told young men to make their bed, and from there, clean up the diet, and then address the vices. In parallel, address the other lesser chains that are techno-physiological, having to do with the words and concepts relating to the technocratic trappings. Engage more with family and community and disengage with technology. No, this isn’t the radical action demanded by more courageous men, but it’s a start and you can reclaim your dignity because if you cannot escape from these lesser chains, you will not escape from the longhouse.
References
“1984” by George Orwell (1949)
“The money myth exploded” by Louis Even (1936)
“Make your bed: little things that can change your life…and maybe the world” by Admiral William H. McRaven (2017)
Parker, J. G., & Asher, S. R. (1993). Friendship and friendship quality in middle childhood: Links with peer group acceptance and feelings of loneliness and social dissatisfaction. Developmental Psychology, 29(4), 611–621.
“The death of the key change” by Chris Dalla Riva, Nov 09, 2022, https://tedium.co/2022/11/09/the-death-of-the-key-change/
“Digital Madness: How social media is driving our mental health crisis—and how to restore our sanity” by Nicholas Kardaras (2022)
Note: Art made by assist with Dall-E, all text and editing by “paul moosefoot” with no computer assistance.