In his short 2017 handbook on resisting the fall and dealing with it when it comes, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, history professor Timothy Snider writes about language, how we use it and how to help keep minds from being trapped by language tricks that tyrants and demagogues routinely deploy to deceive, distract, divide and manipulate nations and groups of people.
Philology: the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages
This is from lesson 9, Be kind to our language. Snyder writes:
Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey the thing everyone is saying. .... Read books.Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, turned his philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler's language rejected legitimate opposition. The people always meant some people and not others (the president uses the word in this way), encounters were always struggles (the president says winning) and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was defamation of the leader (or, as the president puts it, libel).The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is looking at a picture. we take this collective trance to be normal. we have slowly fallen into it.More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens. the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought.Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires having more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading.What to read? Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others. .... One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you or your friends or children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again.Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell (1946), The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947), The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951), .... Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014).
What is Snyder saying?
My read is that Snyder says authors like George Orwell, Ray Bradbury and others noticed a narrowing or 'degradation' of both language and knowledge or point of view generally (always?) accompanied the rise of 20th century demagogues and dictators. This makes a lot of sense. Framing issues in different ways often requires different words or phrasing, e.g., estate tax vs death tax, illegal immigrant vs undocumented worker (or, illegal employer). Exposure to multiple frames of an issue tends to free the mind to see different points of view. That tends to humanize and legitimize different points of view and the people who espouse them.
Snyder's suggestion regarding the Harry Potter book is to reframe the book and read it as a fight between demagoguery and tyranny vs. truth and distributed power, roughly democracy or at least governance with less violence and coercion.[1]
As discussed here before, framing issues in politics is a very powerful tool of persuasion. A specific frame tends to trap minds into seeing and thinking about issues as the speaker wants the audience to see and think. Politicians are expert at playing the frame game. Smart politicians know that if they "step into an opponent's frame" by engaging directly with the opposing frame, they usually lose the persuasion game (explained in the post the link goes to).
When considering listening to Fox News or engaging with fascist GOP and other toxic politics sites such as Town Hall or Breitbart, Snyder's point becomes clear. Those sources are very disciplined. They all use the same frames and same limited language. They repeat their propaganda points using the same language over and over and over. The minds of people who are siloed into this world of demagoguery and lies tend to be trapped because they are not exposed to other competing frames, facts or reasoning. For those people, there is only one world view and political opposition is illegitimate. Or as Christian nationalists see it, there is only their world view frame and all else is against God.
Question: People tend to not read books about politics and the science about human biology and behaviors that drive politics. It is boring for most people. Is Snyder's suggestion to read books too diffuse (or 'academic') to be helpful to most people who are unaware of his reasoning and the underlying biology and history?
Footnote:
1. In my opinion and based on my political morals, truth and distributed power or democracy vs. demagoguery and tyranny mostly boils down to the endless fight of good against evil.
That belief is based on most people's self-professed belief in democracy, even in tyrannies. For example, the original North Korean dictator named the country Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948. It still goes by that name, despite it not being anywhere close to a real democracy in the sense of average people having any power via voting or any other mechanism. The country is better named Dictatorlandia or something akin to that.
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