Define Them Away
I have a problem – my car won’t work.
I decide to declare my car a work of art, permanently on display in my driveway.
I no longer have a problem because I have altered the point of my car.
The situation has not changed, but because I do not call it a problem it is not one anymore.
I have defined the problem out of existence.
It is absurd, of course, but it is no different from the approach government agencies and foundations and the media have been taking regarding so many issues of late.
Change the rules, eliminate the problem. Change the language, eliminate the problem.
Examples of this practice abound, from President Biden’s app-based amnesty at the border to the approach to crime reporting to government inflation statistics.
Often, this new definition is in and of itself the solution as it clouds meanings making rational thought and discussion of the problem nearly impossible.
As with 1984’s Newspeak, if you don’t have clear, concise, mutually agreed upon definitions of words you cannot create a rational positional argument. Newspeak accomplished this – rather elegantly – by eliminating words, reasoning that if something could not be said eventually it will not be able to be thought.
But the even NewerSpeak of today take a different approach by compounding and expanding and abstracting words and meanings and then making all definitions – new and old – contextual and fluid. If words do not mean the same to people having a conversation, then the conversation is stopped and, eventually, that elimination of actual dialogue will degrade one’s ability to even think rationally about the issue.
Of course there will exist permanent queasy dread, but if it cannot be expressed to others then it doesn’t really matter how you feel, now does it? because for the powers that be in society your ideas and thoughts and trepidations become no longer a problem – they have been defined away.
Take the border, for example. While Biden has recently claimed he is taking a tough stance on illegal immigration – he has not, by the way – previously his government had introduced an app that can be filled out just before crossing the border illegally. By filling out the form you automatically stop being an illegal crosser, you become an asylum applicant. Literally millions of people have been un-illegaled, un-problemed this way but, again, the situation remains the same.
California’s $20 per hour fast food restaurant minimum wage could also – if in backhanded way - fit this mold. It was decided – somehow by someone in Sacramento – that $20 was the livable wage for workers in that one industry. In other words, the issue was re-defined and the wage increases therefore justified. The 10,000 people who have lost their jobs due to the rule had, essentially, their jobs defined away.
Also from California comes a more direct un-definition involving the reality of crime. The hopefully-soon-to-be-amended Proposition 47 - passed by voters a decade ago and largely blamed for the state’s rampant theft problem - did not just raise how much you can steal, how many drugs you can have limits: it re-defined what is to be considered an actual crime.
At its core, the proposition made actions that society believes are criminal to no longer be crimes, but “quality of life” issues to – possibly but rarely – handled in a different way.
By changing the standards, crimes like shoplifting and public drug use and sidewalk naked screaming and revealing oneself were defined away and if the public thinks crime has been increasing it’s because it is counting things that are no longer crimes.
Again, the reality has not changed, in fact it has become much worse. But it is technically no longer seen as crime and if you perceive it as such you are incorrect.
While such changes are typically rolled out “softly,” some are not. In the midst of the pandemic response, for example, the definition of “gain of function” research was altered and it was done so to obfuscate the truth of the government’s involvement in the creation of the virus.
As to certain issues, the changing of definitions is bold and if you do not use the new terms you are signaling that you can be safely ignored.
Involved in the criminal justice system for felon, person with a uterus for woman, experiencing a state of being unhoused for vagrant are cut from this cloth and if you continue to use the old words and definitions you are a societal pariah (hence you can be ignored.)
On occasion, definitions do not matter. California’s Gavin Newsom is infamous for not quite understanding the torrent of words he ejects in order to not answer a question, for example. It is the noise, the tone, the delivery that matters, not what is said, and that approach can be very convenient.
Even the word for the driving force behind this phenomena has a purposefully slippery definition.
Woke has no set definition. Progressives do not want one now as the term has become largely pejorative and the movement itself is so nebulous that an outsider has difficulty creating a succinct definition.
This state of affairs allows progressives to deny they are “woke” but continue to act in that fashion.
Slip and slide definitions and words are, in fact, a key part to the woke movement. Like Humpty Dumpty before he fell, they use words as they wish:
“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.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
And being master is the key regarding definitions, as is having the ability to change them at a moments notice if it is advantageous. From the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s “racial equity plan:”
For the purposes of this plan, we will use the term BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color). We recognize that language is fluid and the intersectional justice movement is redefining terminology regularly.
Redefining words and problems and issues is a form of magic, imparting on those able to do so with enormous societal power.
But there is a growing backlash to the trend, or if not backlash then at least a growing realization as to what is happening.
The public now knows that cultural definitions are being intentionally altered by those who can do so and will benefit from doing so. It is this understanding that, in large part, is leading to the increasing disconnect between the public and the institutions that are meant to serve it. In fact, what many people refer to as “gaslighting”- being intentionally lied to to foster a psychological break from reality – is this very process in action.
The whipsaw changing of definitions in a very similar situation. Imagine you are speaking to someone about a chair and they refuse to use the word chair – you will conclude that that person is crazy.
Add ten more people to the conversation, all refusing to use the word chair, and you may start thinking it’s you who have the problem.
And once the public reaches that point – that it thinks that it is the one with the problem – there is almost no hope of turning back.
And that is the definition of a problem.