The above quote can be found in Dick’s 1978 book, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, a collection of his essays and speeches. In these texts, Dick explores various philosophical themes, including the power of language and its ability to shape perceptions and understandings of reality. Language is a potent tool for shaping the world around us by shaping our minds and thus our conduct and motives. Here the author of The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history where the brutal regimes of Axis Powers prevailed in World War II and occupy the United States, makes explicit the significance of words as not only means for expressing thoughts but also as powerful instruments for organizing and controlling society.
Winning the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963, The Man in the High Castle is considered one of Dick’s most famous and critically acclaimed works. The plot revolves around a book titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, written by the enigmatic Man in the High Castle. This book within the book presents a counterfactual history in which the Allies won World War II, raising questions about the nature of reality and the power of narratives in shaping perception. The reader will recall that George Orwell, in his last work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, also uses the literary device of a book within a book, namely The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, written by Emmanuel Goldstein, supposed leader of a resistance movement against the oppressive totalitarian regime of Big Brother. “The Book” is an underground manifesto that reveals the inner workings of the Party (the deep state), its manipulation of history, and its oppressive control over the citizens.
The methods of mind control that Dick and Orwell detail in The Man in the High Castle and Nineteen Eighty-Four respectively are today the methods of the postmodernism project to change popular consciousness. We are now several decades into the process to fundamentally alter the way we perceive reality. The United States republic and European governments have been captured by an transnational elite with totalitarian ambition, and the premise of critical theory, that bureaucratic collectivist control over populations necessitates and provides the machinery for thought control, for a Big Brother, has become the guiding framework for actions and strategies, a blueprint for the New Fascism—the structures for which, what Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Inc. calls “inverted totalitarianism,” or “managed democracy,” have already been substantially erected and embedded in Western society.
By reducing definitions to power projection, to the manipulation of reality, proponents of this view and their functionaries mean to delegitimize the primary purpose of words, which is to describe and convey reality with accuracy, integrity, and precision (language’s evolutionary function), and repurpose words for exclusive use as tools for fabricating reality. When words cease to be regarded as a reliable means of describing and conveying truth, those who control the means of idea production can more readily rationalize their aims and desires by blurring the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Any of you who have more recently attended college and taken any humanities and social sciences courses, which is often required by the regime of “general education,” will have learned that what is and its nature (the ontological) is determined by how we think about such things (the epistemological). It is very likely that you will have been told that the former is the result of the latter and, further, that we must not allow the masses to get their hairy little paws on the machinery of meaning production. That you did not rebel against authoritarian directive is because preparation for obedience to the technocrats who control the apparatus begins in our secondary and sometimes even primary public educational system.
Dick explored this theme in several works. A dissertation on Dick’s work is not possible here (there are many out there), but I will touch on one more, The Simulacra, published in 1964, which exemplifies the central issue under examination in the present essay, as it exposes the concept of “American democracy noir,” a future totalitarian United States, portraying a situation where the political establishment manipulates information to control the population. As I sit here watching Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and others testifying on censorship and free speech before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government (you can watch it here), The Simulacra strikes me as the work of prophecy; but for the Republicans in the House raising awareness of the ways in which the corporate state is elaborating the system of thought control, we would be all the way there—and we will be if people don’t take to heart the warnings of such visionaries as Dick and Orwell.
A simulacrum is a copy or representation of something that lacks the reality or substance of the original. It is a duplicate or imitation that may look or appear like the real thing but lacks any authenticity or genuine essence. The concept of simulacra is often associated with the idea of reproductions or simulations that have detached themselves from the reality they were meant to represent (see the work of Jean Baudrillard, which inspired the 1999 movie The Matrix). In the dystopian world of Dick’s novel, the simulacrum reigns supreme, distorting people’s perception of what is real. The matrix symbolizes power and control, creating illusory realms where commercialism dominates, imbuing the world with artificial meaning. Even the President of the United States is an android, masquerading as a human in the public eye. Citizens uncritically consume media broadcasts, becoming android-like themselves. Paradoxically, the androids themselves exhibit the sense of humanity that escaping the world. Dick’s portrayal of the future situation serves not to prove that “robots are just like us,” Kim Stanley Robinson argues in his Novels of Philip K. Dick (1984), but rather to convey the somber truth that “we are just like the robots.”
Orwell explores the theme of language manipulation and its impact on society in several of his works, both fiction and nonfiction. In Animal Farm (1945), he used allegory to satirize historical events, including the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union, which marked the establishment of a totalitarian regime that suppressed dissent and corrupted revolutionary ideals. In his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell analyzed how political and bureaucratic language intentionally obfuscates the truth and manipulates public opinion through ambiguity and vagueness. Finally, his last work, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), serves as a powerful indictment of totalitarianism. George Orwell’s works provide insightful critiques of power abuse, propaganda, and totalitarianism. In Animal Farm, he warns about the dangers of the ruling class manipulating language and information to maintain dominance, emphasizing the importance of vigilance in preserving freedom and truth. In his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ruling party of Oceania, led by Big Brother, employs Newspeak, a constructed language designed to control and limit freedom of thought, further illustrating the party’s grip on power. (See my essays Linguistic Programming: A Tool of Tyrants; Accountability Culture is Cancel Culture.)
In his 1946 essay, Orwell focuses on the need for clear and honest language in political discourse by exposing words that obscure meaning. There is no better example of this dynamic in our time and the need to expose it for what it is than gender ideology, also known as queer theory. Gender ideologues have introduced a slew of new terms and concepts (“cisgender,” “deadnaming,” “genderqueer,” “gender expression,” “non-binary,” “transgender”), as well as smears (“Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist,” or “TERF,” “transphobia”), changed the meaning of existing terms and concepts (gender identity, misgendering, man, woman), socialized language designed to confuse and mislead (e.g., the phrase “the assignment of gender at birth,” in place of determination or observation), euphemistic language (e.g., “gender affirming care,” i.e., hormonal and surgical interventions that make patients dependent, sick, and sterile), and scientific impossibilities, such as the very idea of changing sex or transitioning gender.
Orwell refers to the euphemistic, imprecise, and obscurantist language used to conceal or confuse the reality of things as “operators or verbal false limbs” and “pretentious diction.” An example of this is something I noted recently in my essay Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms, where I show the gender and sex have been for centuries synonyms in science, both the natural and the social sciences, describing the two—and only two and unchangeable—categories of the gender binary. Ideologues changed the definition of gender to differentiate it from sex in order to rationalize the practice of men portraying themselves as women to gain access to women’s spaces and status. These ideologue are now calling into question the very idea of sex, portraying science itself as an ideology in the hands of the powerful, whom they falsely attribute to other (popular) forces outside the establishment they represent.
Deceptive communication allows politicians and those in power to deliberately use euphemistic and imprecise language, which is functionally disinformation, to conceal the true nature of their actions or policies. By employing language that lacks clarity and precision, they can obscure their real intentions, making it harder for the public to understand the implications of their decisions fully. By using emotionally charged words or phrases, words and phrases that sound appealing (“diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion”), they can sway public opinion in their favor without disclosing their actual goals (which in the case of the rhetoric of diversity equity, and inclusion is the disruption of solitary, redistribution of wealth upwards, and the exclusion of speech that threatens power).
Elites avoid accountability when political language is coded or vague; it becomes challenging to hold politicians accountable for their actions and promises when the public is trained to drastic shifts in the Overton Window. They can make grandiose statements, use mindless slogans, and deploy glittering generalities without committing to specific policies, allowing them to backtrack or shift their positions when needed. Elites discourage critical thinking by encouraging and even requiring the use of vague and meaningless language. Such language makes it difficult for people to think deeply about complex issues and hinders genuine understanding of the topics being discussed.
By manipulating language to conceal reality, politicians undermine democratic values such as transparency and accountability. Open and clear communication is essential for a healthy democratic society, and when language is used to deceive or confuse, it erodes trust in institutions and creates an environment where misinformation thrives. It is moreover an exercise in mass gaslighting. Each of you are made to feel all alone in the world, and your interpretation of the world, whether based on deep knowledge or common sense, is treated as mad because you are alone—because you believe you’re alone. This is why censorship and disinformation have become so critical in the perpetuation of postmodernist project. The elite dread the acquisition of mutual knowledge and the popular politics that organize around a shared and accurate grasp of reality and the structures of power. This is why Freedom and Reason exists. Thanks for reading my blog.
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