“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words,” wrote science-fiction author Philip K. Dick in 1978. “If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”
These words come from “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” Dick’s landmark essay concerning, among other things, the nature of reality and its relationship to the words we use to describe it. Dick, and before him, George Orwell, explain that while reality is a thing to be experienced, that experience may change according to the way it is verbalized to others. This offers parties interested in mass manipulation and control a deviously promising opportunity. If the experience of surface-level, unadulterated reality is likely to compromise their agenda, whatever it may be, they can simply alter that reality by altering its dictionary definitions.
The meanings of the words and phrases “woke,” “black lives matter,” “critical race theory,” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” have all been altered in pursuit of such manipulative ends. The perpetrators are typically members of the Republican Party who feel threatened, understandably, by large-scale movements in defiance of anti-black racism.
The abovementioned terms are all regularly used to expose and fight against the growing scope of systemic racism in the United States. They have been deliberately co-opted, bastardized, and demonized by systemic racism’s greatest benefactors (read: racist and/or blissfully ignorant white Americans) in an attempt to keep social awareness to a minimum. This nefarious goal is usually disguised as a defense of American history, national pride, or even white lives, none of which are in any way under attack. Don’t be misled—the only purpose of their redefinition campaign is to keep the dark truth of American racial inequality from coming to light.
The first recourse for people aware of these deliberate misrepresentations is often to approach the issue from a commonsense perspective. They think it should be obvious that there’s nothing heretical in the belief that black lives matter and nothing remotely problematic about the quest for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Indeed it should and indeed there isn’t, but a lack of common sense isn’t the central issue here—the factors responsible for that lack are. We must turn our focus to the greater, more dangerous forces at play, being the evils of white supremacy, historical revisionism, and anti-intellectualism. You can’t approach a fully indoctrinated individual while ranting about “common sense,” for you two wouldn’t be able to agree on the term’s definition.
With all of this in mind, it’s no wonder why so few of us are able to see eye-to-eye in today’s America. Collective progress and concord are reliant, foremost, on a community’s ability to understand its members. In America, we fail to even speak the same language. One man’s tearful testimony is another’s treasonous tirade. Nothing of substance can be built under such conditions. We’re nothing more than the confused, frustrated architects of the Tower of Babel, begging in futility to be heard.
Featured image/photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash.