Quashed

There was a time when shadow ministers were expected to know what they were talking about. The shadow women and equalities minister, for instance, would be expected to know basic things like the definition of the word “woman”. Not any more, however: the current office-holder, Anneliese Dodds, couldn’t give a straight answer to the question a couple of weeks ago. Now her predecessor in the post, Charlotte Nichols, has raised the stakes even higher. Wading into the debate about men’s participation in women’s sport, the MP for Warrington North has used Twitter to blast anyone who refuses to accept that a six-foot-one male swimmer is a woman.

Clearly this is worth explaining, but it isn’t easy. Or rather it is easy but most explanations make assumptions about mental processes we infer but cannot observe. Intentional lying for some kind of social or political gain could be an example. Political spite could be another. Stupidity or cowardice two more.

There is obviously something suspicious in the ease with which we discover in a set of ideas precisely those properties needed to account for the behavior which expresses them. We evidently construct the ideas at will from the behavior to be explained.

B.F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior (1957)

It may be simpler to explain what we see on the surface rather than a multiplicity of ideas about what goes on inside the woke skull. On the surface, woke folk are not necessarily lying in the normal sense of the word. They are not saying something they know to be untrue, but playing a game which disallows certain aspects of language. Part of their ability to describe reality is quashed. 

In which case, most woke folk are not saying one thing and thinking another. Maybe some are, but on the surface they are consistently woke and for practical purposes this is what matters - the surface. It's where the damage is done.

Awkward people have a disposition to use language which makes contact with the real world. Others have this same disposition but it is weaker and more easily quashed by social pressures. Something we commonly observe in numerous social situations. Reality can be quashed within language games.

We are social beings disposed to form worthwhile allegiances and with that comes imitation, especially the imitation of language games. We have such dispositions even at the cost of quashed realities because once a reality is socially quashed there is no social cost. On the contrary, there can be a social benefit to quashed realities in any language game.

The woke folk referred to above are playing a language game we call gender politics. It is not necessary to define what is going on inside their skulls. It is simpler to observe how the game is played, because that tells us that an aspect of reality is being quashed by their fashionable language game. There are aspects of human reproduction which woke folk cannot express. Simple observation tells us so.

We already know this but tend to ignore it, yet it is the main danger posed by political discourse. The woke nonsense quoted above is a reflection of how dangerous and powerful language games can be. They can extinguish reality for so long that eventually it has to be learned again.