Everywhere one looks today you see signs of the opposition between ‘conservatives’ and so-called ‘liberals.’ Sometimes conservatives are designated ‘far-right,’ and liberals ‘left-wing.’ Both terms appear to be self-explanatory, unless one keeps in mind that concepts do evolve historically. The term, ‘amateur,’ for example, used to have a very positive or affirmative meaning, namely someone who does something (like painting, or playing the piano) well, because they love doing it (‘amateur’ derives from the Latin for ‘love’), but today its meaning is pejorative, contrasting with the term, ‘professional,’ which means more or less what ‘amateur’ used to mean; namely, that it applies to someone who excels at what they do.
Similarly, the term, ‘liberal’ has arguably undergone a semantic shift in recent times – one that places it at a considerable remove from its original historical meaning. I have in mind the noun, with reference to a person; not the adjective, which means broadly ‘being open to new, non-traditional ideas,’ and ‘supporting social and political change.’ The Britannica Dictionary suggests that the noun means ‘a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change.’ What did it mean when the concept of ‘liberal’ first made its appearance?
It made its first appearance in the 14th century, when the term was employed as early as 1375 to describe the ‘liberal arts’ – a course of education intended for free-born individuals in medieval universities. Around that time, ‘liberal’ derived from the Latin liber, which meant ‘free,’ and denoted intellectual pursuits befitting a free person, as opposed to someone who rendered servile or mechanical labour.
Accordingly, its etymological roots show that ‘liberal’ originally conveyed ideas of freedom, nobility, and generosity. The 18th-century Enlightenmentsignalleda turning point, when ‘liberal’ began to assume its modern, affirmative connotations of support for individual rights, tolerance, and freedom from prejudice.
In the late 19th century agreement largely appeared among liberals that political governmental power has the capacity to promote as well as protect the liberty of individuals. Accordingly, modern liberalism views the main obligation of government as consisting in the removal of obstacles preventing individuals from living freely and from actualising their full potential. There has been disagreement among liberals on the question, whether government should promote individual freedom rather than merely protect it. Today, however, events of particularly the last six years have made it difficult, if not impossible, to discern these characteristics in what, or who, presents itself – disingenuously, as it turns out – as ‘liberalism’ and ‘liberal,’ as I shall show below.
First one should note that, what one might call the paradox of liberalism is clearly stated by Kenneth Minogue in Britannica online. He writes that it is the:
…political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the American Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best ‘a necessary evil.’ Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against the individual. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power.
Given the disruptive events that have rocked the world since Covid in 2020 – but arguably since the 2008 financial crisis – the problem, as stated by Minogue, above, has been complexified beyond recognition, where ‘complexification’ denotes something more than ‘complication.’ A motor car’s internal combustion machine may be described as ‘complicated,’ given its many moving parts and functions, but ‘complexity’ is of a different order.
For example, when one thinks of language, or a human being, both are characterised by complexity; not only are both language and the human subject recognisable by innumerable actions and interactions at various levels, but crucially, both language and individuals are, unlike a car’s machine, ‘open’ to its environment in the sense that it changes in relation to the way the latter affects them, and vice versa. In other words, they also affect their ‘environment’ by the emergence of new words in the linguistic landscape, and by individuals having a political, social, and cultural effect in society as well as the natural environment. Moreover, human beings are ‘complex’ in themselves – human ‘identity’ is not closed off and monolithic, but is subject to both change and stability, paradoxical as it may seem.
What does this have to do with the problem of ‘liberalism,’ then? One might say that ‘liberalism’ as a human phenomenon – one that is subject to both relative change and stability – has morphed into something that both testifies to what was mentioned earlier; namely the promotion and/or protection of individuals’ liberty, on the one hand, and undermines these time-honoured characteristics. How so?
On the one hand the stable meaning of the term is encountered in what was clarified above about its historical sense in terms of freedom, and so on. On the other hand, the changed meaning is found in the way the term has morphed in recent years, which is a far cry from its traditional sense. The stable, customary meaning (which has not gone away) may, however, be normatively applied to the changed meaning, which will show how far it has strayed from its ‘original’ or relatively stable sense.
Until recently, I had not come across anyone questioning the meaning of ‘liberal,’ until I listened to Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin’s interview with Alex Jones, where the Russian reminds us that ‘We are dealing with a new kind of totalitarianism – A liberal totalitarianism!’ It sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it, especially in light of the initial elaboration on the meaning of ‘liberal,’ above? At the same time, it displays the complexity of the term insofar as the events alluded to above have shown in no uncertain terms that those who still – incongruously – claim the epithet ‘liberal’ for themselves today, have increasingly shown, through their words and deeds, that they are, in fact, totalitarian neo-fascists. Can they be both?
Sure, but only if one falls for their Orwellian coup of imposing ‘doublethink’ (more on this below), which arbitrarily changes the meaning of the term through their actions and sayings, just like in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), where he writes: ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ Needless to point out, this (in-)famous declaration by a fictional literary character encapsulates the belief in the possibility of absolute control over language, thus challenging the conventional understanding of shared meaning. This is what the ostensible ‘liberals’ of today have done, with an astonishing degree of success, one might add. In so doing, they used and abused the text that was intended to prevent this from happening in social reality – George Orwell’s 1984, which they have used as a playbook instead.
Given the virtually Orwellian change in the meaning of the term, ‘liberal,’ parallel to what George Orwell (in 1984) depicted as changing meanings of words from what they used to mean in ‘Oldspeak’ to ‘Newspeak,’ it is worth reminding oneself of the meaning of these two countervailing concepts – and other, related ones – in that prophetic book.
Those who are familiar with the novel will recall that Oldspeak refers to the naturally developed, richly nuanced and – importantly – uncontrolled, form of the English language as it was used before the advent of the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s fictional (but today, strangely familiar) ‘Oceania.’ Oldspeak is characterised by an enormous vocabulary and corpus, complex syntax, and hence, the ability to express subtly differentiated shades of meaning, including contradictions, ambiguities, and divergent perspectives.
In contrast, Newspeak is deliberately designed to eliminate such liberating complexity – liberating, given the linguistic freedom it provides to English speakers to articulate the meaning of important events and, significantly, of diverse interpretations of such events. Understandably, this entails reducing the English vocabulary, removing or occluding antonyms and synonyms, and brutally confining language to only what is necessary for expressing Party-approved ideas.
The development of Newspeak therefore has the explicit goal to restrict the range (and even the very possibility) of thought, particularly modes of thinking which are unorthodox or (heaven forbid!) rebellious, such as ‘thoughtcrime,’ the occurrence of which is consistently sought out by the dreaded ‘Thought Police.’ It follows that such ideas become impossible to conceive, let alone express, in light of the intimate bond between language and thinking – as Martin Heidegger reminded us, ‘Language is the house of Being.’ Clearly, Newspeak is not a house which accommodates ‘Being.’
This close connection between language and thought explains the emphasis that Orwell placed on ‘thoughtcrime’ in 1984. This denotes the act of having any thought that challenges or opposes the ideology of the ruling Party, Ingsoc, and particularly of its enigmatic leader, Big Brother. In the novel it is described – in the protagonist’s (Winston’s) reflections on his own thoughts, as the ‘essential crime that contained all others in itself,’ which implies that even the mere contemplation of resistance or dissent, without speaking or acting upon it, constitutes a punishable offence.
This is closely related to ‘doublethink’ (referred to earlier) – the ability to entertain or ‘hold’ two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept both as true. The convenience that this entails is that it allows the Party to change history and policy without contradiction. Needless to emphasise, this reflects Orwell’s warning – in 1949 already, when 1984 was first published – about the dangers of surveillance, unrestrained state power, and the erosion of free thought and free speech. Does this seem familiar?
In his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the Czech writer, Milan Kundera, memorably and humorously recounted how the communist party in Czechoslovakia employed similar practices to erase those historical events which might cause citizens to start questioning their totalitarian rule. In South Africa, where I live, the ANC government is guilty of similar tactics, such as changing the historical names of towns, in which the history of the country is inscribed, arbitrarily, so that citizens may believe their lies, claiming that present economic woes are ultimately the fault of the ‘colonisers’ who came to the country in the 17th century, and not of their own gross incompetence and mismanagement.
Do these concepts bequeathed to us by Orwell in 1984 – ‘thoughtcrime,’ ‘doublethink,’ ‘Oldspeak,’ and ‘Newspeak’ – not seem oddly familiar? Recall that Oldspeak represents the full expressive power of language, free thinking, and distinctive individuality (qualities that the Party seeks to destroy through Newspeak), and that thoughtcrime denotes the mere thought of resistance and opposition, entailed by feelings of resentment and hatred towards the regime, for example.
They should appear familiar, because the so-called ‘liberals’ of today have copied the Party of Orwell’s Oceania in their effort to institutionalise their very own brand of thoughtcrime, doublethink, and Newspeak. In the process they have unavoidably let the mask slip, revealing their true colours as totalitarians in disguise – at least to those who have not been thoroughly anaesthetised by their linguistic strategy (among others).
Take, for instance, the arrest, in early 2025, of three officials from the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania, who were indicted for allegedly conspiring to add individuals illegally to voter rolls, in this way manipulating their elections. While both parties – Democratic and Republican – supposedly espouse ‘democratic’ values, the fraudulent activities of these three individuals go against the grain of such values, arguably constituting an instance of paying lip service to traditional Oldspeak principles, while acting in a manner that implicitly corresponds to a doublethink, Newspeak dictum of the type: ‘to win elections, everything is permitted.’
This saying bears an ironic, but not unexpected, resemblance to the nihilistic belief of Ivan Karamazov, one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s eponymous Brothers Karamazov that (as reported by various characters), if ‘God is dead, everything is permitted.’ This is the novel’s philosophical core, and arguably also at the basis of the nihilistic shenanigans on the part of today’s putative ‘liberals.’
The irony is compounded by the fact that, when Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008, he boasted to a crowd of Democratic supporters in Ohio that the latter need not be worried about the outcome of the 2009 election, because ‘Democrats control the election voting machines.’ In the article linked above, Baxter Dmitry sums up this hypocrisy as follows, revealing the ‘doublethink’ at work here, as well as the tension between Oldspeak (or Oldthink) and Newspeak (Newthink) underpinning such a blatantly disingenuous admission:
Pointing out the hypocrisy of the left never seems to make a dent or have any impact whatsoever on them. Why? Because, they have no shame…they have no shame because they have no moral compass, They have no moral compass because they live according to the rule of ‘the ends justifies the means.’ This precept infests every fiber of their ideology, from elections, to open borders, to climate change, abortion, you name it.
As Joe Biden said: ‘The struggle’s no longer just who gets to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote.’ According to Biden, it’s not the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes.
Then there is the doublethink claim, by Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, that to require voter identification is ‘another way to simply try to suppress the vote,’ despite the arguably obvious motive behind this requirement, namely the integrity and security of the voting process. Although the familiar principle of ‘checks and balances’ are applied, primarily, in constitutional governments such as the US, and despite the television host reminding Schiff that in a recent Pew poll, 83% of adults supported the requirement of producing a photo I.D. to vote, the senator stuck to his assertion. Ergo, this belongs, again, in the domain of doublethink and Newspeak, which promotes a novel conception of ‘democratic’ practices, in contrast with Oldspeak democracy, where voters at polling stations are routinely expected to identify themselves as being legitimate citizens of the country concerned, and may therefore vote.
Small wonder that Representative Randy Fine, calling Schiff’s bluff, has said outright in Congress that: ‘There is only one reason why Democrats are opposed to voter ID requirements,’…‘They want to cheat.’
In Keir Starmer’s Britain and the European Union the introduction of doublethink and Newspeak practices is even more conspicuous. From the first article linked above it is apparent that Starmer’s policy approach to linguistic usage would itself fall into the category of imposing Newspeak on British citizens. As may be gathered from the second piece, the European Union, in turn, has been charged with the creation of Orwellian ‘ministries of truth’ that will ensure wrong thoughts (or ‘thoughtcrime’) – linguistically expressed – are inadmissible, in an effort to root out so-called ‘disinformation’ (read ‘Oldspeak’) online. In a paradoxical twist of history, George Orwell himself has been subjected to the very linguistic practices that he so mercilessly satirised in 1984.
Furthermore, in the Britain of today there has been a particularly brutal crackdown on ‘thoughtcrime,’ such as when a woman was arrested for silently praying outside an abortion clinic (although she was later vindicated after laying a complaint and a claim against the police).
From the above it should be clear that, today, we are witnessing the polar opposite of a ‘liberal’ approach to virtually everything under the sun (and probably including the sun), ironically even George Orwell, who was a champion of liberty and liberal values, although he was no ‘liberal,’ but a ‘democratic socialist,’ as he claimed to have ‘understood’ the term. Unfortunately, people who are immersed in the ‘echo chamber’ of current ‘liberal’ ideology, seem to be unable to perceive the shift that has occurred from its ‘original’ meaning – as clarified earlier – and its present incarnation in linguistic and political practices.
One might say that, in order to ‘see’ this fundamental change to a diametrically opposite meaning, a shift which Ludwig Wittgenstein called ‘aspect-perception’ in his Philosophical Investigations, and illustrated by means of the so-called the ‘duck-rabbit’ picture, is imperative. This is less a matter of a perceptual, visual shift than a psychic one, though – a switch has to occur in the psyche to see a duck where a rabbit was seen before. Similarly, people who have been thoroughly penetrated by the faux liberal ideology in terms of thoughtcrime, Newspeak, and doublethink would have to extricate themselves from it by shifting psychic-perceptual orientation from seeing a rabbit to seeing a duck. A difficult switch, because it requires a red pill instead of a blue one. They should let Brownstone be their Morpheus (from The Matrix), offering them the red pill, and accept it, if they dare. It takes courage…
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