A quick look through any random sample of academic will show you that most of the apparatus is dominated by arcane, jargon-filled research which through so many words say so little. At the base of university propaganda and media campaigns lays our brutalized, defiled language, covered in the blood of those who dared to use it for revelation.
Through academic articles, revolutionary mantras, and news articles they corrupt the primary method through which humans make sense of the world. On the surface, this is most easily seen through the use of made-up pronouns, the singular they/them, gender-neutral adjectives like Latinx, and the constant reshaping of definitions to fit whichever narrative is employed at the time. A little bit below the surface we see a greater abuse; the conceptualization of non-concepts such as “hate speech”, “toxic masculinity”, and the –isms, which have become favorite tools of modern academics, “misinformation” experts, and “scholars of radicalism” (they read part a WWII book once).
Yet I think there lies something much darker and malicious further down. To abuse language is to abuse power, or as Josef Pieper said, it is to dominate. To begin this journey down below the surface we will start with Pieper.
Why Were the Sophists so Offensive?
Pieper begins by searching for what it was about the sophists that was so offensive to Plato. It wasn’t that they exchanged money for wisdom, or that they pursued a certain type of annoying perfectionism, although these are contributing factors. No, what Plato had against the sophists was that they corrupted the word, the language, or as Pieper says “the specific threat, for Plato, comes from the sophists’ way of cultivating the word with exceptional awareness of linguistic nuances and utmost formal intelligence, from their way of pushing and perfecting the employment of verbal constructions to crafty limits, thereby – and precisely in this – corrupting the means and dignity of the very same words.”
The purpose of the word is to be the medium that sustains the common existence of the human spirit; words are the means by which we convey reality to someone. When the word changes so does existential interaction. To communicate is to convey the truth of reality, for what else could we possibly talk about? Well, we could lie. To lie is to withhold reality and to prevent the other from participating in reality and thus we corrupt the word’s relationship to reality.
Plato is chiefly concerned about the sophisticated language of the sophists, who Plato admits were generally quite handsome, which is dressed up in poetry but ultimately reveals nothing and in fact, is false in its essence. But in our day our concern is very different. There is nothing beautiful about the abuse of language we see today. Our pseudo-intellectual class deploys a very ugly and crude language due to their inability to create anything beautiful. And so they all unite in their mediocrity, agreeing to value the valueless, each in the pursuit of their own survival. And in this lays the reason to lie. Since there exists a class of people who are unable to reveal the truth, or whose existence would be altered the truth, they must turn to the lie to ensure their survival.
To lie is to pursue an ulterior motive, to turn language into an instrument of power. They no longer speak to reveal truth, but they seek flattery, as Pieper says, which is to get something from the addressed party. Jacques Ellul defines propaganda as precisely this: “a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.”
Consider this quote from Pieper:
“Where ever the main purpose of speech is flattery, there the word becomes corrupted, and necessarily so. And instead of genuine communication, there will exist something for which domination is too benign a term; more appropriately we should speak of tyranny, of despotism. On one side there will be sham authority, unsupported by any intellectual superiority, and on the other a state of dependency, which again is too benign a term. Bondage would be more correct. Yes, indeed; there is on the one side a psuedoauthority, not legitimized by any form of superiority, and on the other a state of mental bondage.”
Does this remind you of anything? The more language is corrupted, the more it divorces the dialectic from reality, and the more it becomes prone to the reign of petty tyranny. Wherever there are powerful institutions, they will use the word as their weapon. Fundamentally, the “abuse of power is connected with the sophistic abuse of the word”.
Through the manipulation of the word the public is reduced to a state where – unless they lurk in niche internet circles – they are not only unable to find the truth but unable also to search for it. And so they become embedded within a pseudoreality where language is unable to communicate reality to them.
Like most of us, Pieper laments the irony and tragedy that academia - the space created in the midst of society to explicitly protect against special interests and agendas in the pursuit of discussion without restriction - has become the primary rhetorical hall monitor. A truly free space needs not only a guarantee from the outside, Pieper says, but also that freedom be defended within its domain. It must stand in opposition against every ideological agitation, blind emotionality, against empty slogans, against autocratic terminology with no room for dialogue, against revolutionary jargon, and so on. To provide this refuge is the purpose of higher learning institutions, to be a place for “free interpersonal communication anchored in the truth of reality.”
But now our institutions of higher learning are anything but this. In fact, they are the exact opposite; they are where free interpersonal communication goes to die. The fact that this has accelerated during the global period of liberalism, the political ideology which purports to sanctify free interpersonal communication, is not a coincidence.
The rise of language as a means of flattery, that is to extract action from others, and thus the subversion of language as a means to reality, did not accelerate independently. From Kant to Hegel, to Mill, different philosophies have articulated a teleological approach to history. If humanity is to “progress” then it stands to follow that all things should be done in the pursuit of progress, and so all action must pursue some tangible end. Even the academic must pursue a tangible end. And thus philosophy and politics must become a science. They no longer seek to tell others about reality but to prescribe action.
Prescribing action would have been fine, even desirable, if the action they prescribed was intended to compel men to greatness. This was the main purpose of the study of history according to Nietzsche; one studies the great men of the past to learn how to act greatly. But our contemporary scholars, mediocre in nature, don’t inspire but drag the rest of the world down to their mediocrity.
This teleological perspective; that all things must be done for an end, finds its origins, not in Kant or Hegel, but within what Kant and Hegel themselves find their origins, namely, in what Jacques Ellul called technique. In the preface to the American edition of The Technological Society Ellul defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” Ellul intends technique to be understood as human consciousness; this consciousness directs the material aspects of technique. Technique is more appropriately understood as a societal nous. Although human participation and adherence are necessary to technique, technique is ultimately autonomous; technique's own internal necessities are determinative.
This societal nous is the logic of the hivemind, a logic of economic efficiency within all things. It’s this, I believe, that Nietzsche means when he calls modern scholarship a scientific factory, where the factory worker sees his job as compiling a corpus of encyclopedic knowledge, and thus “the stolid mediocrity becomes ever more mediocre, science becomes ever more practical economically.” And like Nietzsche, we must say to these mediocrities “Do you want to destroy science as quickly as possible, just as you destroy hens, which you artificially compel to lay eggs too quickly.”
This same compulsion in the pursuit of efficiency to compel hens to lay eggs and to poison our food is the reason why the modern man, in the pursuit of an end, corrupts our language because he is no longer able to use language to expose a truth. Instead, they use language as a means of suffocating all which does not serve the end; all which seeks to elevate life, enlighten man, and show him the path of glory.
Misinformation Expert
I’ve remained in the realm of theory until now but all good communication, as we’ve discussed, should reveal truth. Motivated by an efficiency of economics which include division of labor and working in rows and tiers for the achievement of ends, the universities divided themselves into departments and chairs. Within these departments, the accreditation process was formulated into a rigid system of credits and created a rigid structure for dissertations. This rigid system made academic accreditation accessible to anyone who could memorize enough and compile into a reasonable order. These words no longer needed to be a means of revealing reality (erklärung), but only to fit within the narrow necessities of dissertation criteria.
The purpose of the scholar was no longer to reveal but to transform the world into “interesting factoids” and bits of data. To reveal is only within the talents of the genuinely strong, which are strengthened further by their revelations. When mediocrities find that they are unable to reveal, and yet demand we respect them as they stand in shoes several sizes too big, they necessarily must turn to using their words as tools for the herd to suffocate those who can reveal; to drag them down to their level of mediocrity. For true revelations would always expose the mediocracy as an illegitimate occupying force.
And so comes in the misinformation expert, the radicalization scholar, the chief tech reporter, the fact checker, the critical philosopher (they don’t really love wisdom), and countless other nodes of the hive mind. They create charts and graphs depicting the popularity of certain words, “the rise of hate speech” or “micro-aggressions”. They don’t do this as an intellectual endeavor, because there’s really nothing artistic about these charts, and all intelligence must necessary come from art, but to depict that there may be men who seek something new. There is always an implication, often explicit, that these graphs and studies are to serve a purpose, to drive an action; to excite the eunuchs about the current thing.
They take our languages, the means by which Shakespeare, Goethe, and Homer brought vitality to life, and use it to strangle the throats of prophets. They craft words and phrases like “hate speech”, “radicalization”, “human rights” – words with no meanings, empty vassals to be manipulated as necessity requires – to drag us down to their level, to set limits to permissible behavior at the disadvantage of revelation, to suffocate man and render him immobile, in order to prevent would-be great men from venturing off on adventure.
Great men are created during periods of high culture where they have access to the necessary tools to be great, among which is a great language. As long as the language remains in the hands of the technicians it puts out the embers from which a phoenix could arise.