Inherited from a totalitarian past

The life of reason is a heritage and exists only through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so much as to understand one another.

George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913)

Language is part of our heritage – obviously. Political language is too, it doesn’t disappear as political systems evolve. Political language evolves too, but in a connected age it did not necessarily evolve from our democratic heritage. It’s a problem we don’t discuss in the public arena, the political underbelly, the question of where our current political language came from, how it evolved from evils of the past to blight our political lives today.

Today we see what are effectively evolved totalitarian language games from the era of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, from the era of the Little Red Book, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, from Baader-Meinhof and the madness of jackboot politics. However vile, those political language games didn’t die when the main characters died or even when their regimes died.

Now we are left wondering how corrupt the roots of our current political language games are and if they could evolve into something even worse. Unfortunately there is something morally corrupt about democratic politics to begin with. It does not attract many honest, tough-minded and professionally competent people. Almost none we might say without being unduly cynical.

We see political moral corruption all the time, but the pressure not to see it is enormously powerful, enormously wealthy and if challenged, increasingly vindictive. Play our language games they insist – we refuse to recognise any other. Very much like waving the Little Red Book.

Take climate change for example, one of the more obvious issues when we mull over the corruption of democratic political language. There is something disgusting about adults playing political language games with children. Lying to them about their climate because this is how the game is played at the highest level. Doubt or deviation are punished socially, professionally and politically.

Political language games have corrupted the language of altruism and charity, the language of progress, science, technology, economics, social life, family life and even human biology. Political language has almost become too corrupt to conduct civilised political discourse across political divides, a form of corruption clearly and unambiguously inherited from a totalitarian past.