In 2017 America, the left has created a dystopia where the whole world is genderless, fat, and self-important. Nobody watches the Olympics anymore, instead we have a new international game called “Intersectionality” where you tally up the number of victim points you have, and the winner receives top-tier jobs offers, New York Times op-eds, placement at top universities, and more lenient grading, because tough grading is racist (unless you’re a straight, white male).
At colleges, the students are the professors, and minority students can attack and harass the people who were hired to teach them, and to who their student loan debt finances their salary.
If only they didn’t think that books were racist, they might open one . . . Like, perhaps, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1953 masterpiece “Philosophical Investigations”. In that book, Wittgenstein discusses the nature of language. The meaning a person attaches to a word when they use it can be extremely difficult to understand if both individuals do not have shared values and cultural outlooks. So, if I ask you where your family is from, you would most likely say something like, “Well, my mother’s family were settlers, and my father came here from Europe in the 1950s”, where a person on the left would be offended by the “micro-aggression” of the question itself.
While the question was obviously asked in English by an English speaker to another English speaker because the two people have different cultures, groups, and religions (or lack thereof) that they ascribe to, it makes it difficult for the two English speakers to communicate – this is a “personal language”. Personal languages inhibit language’s inherent role in society and make it impossible to have a dialogue, this is why we see the lack of a communication and political polarization in our society right now.
Personal languages are based on sensations and feelings that only one person could know on their own but would have a hard time translating for someone else. An example of this would be the feeling you get every time your gas light comes on, nobody else can know how you feel. The left employs personal languages in a way that ostracizes anybody that they are trying to talk to, or, as it often goes, shout down, because they are speaking with their personal feelings and their personal sensations, something no one but them can understand.
The question we should be asking ourselves is: Why is the left doing this? What is their end goal?
They want to shut down opposing speech. They know that if everyone is aware of what they are doing, they would not be supportive of it because it is counterintuitive to building an agreeable society. At the same time, they are so finicky about what is “okay” to say that they alienate their own people in the process. This leads to infighting and people walking on eggshells as they try and do their best to understand the person speaking. This is also the plight of the Alt-Right.
Both groups have restricted language’s reach in order to create a dogma. That dogma will lead to the collapse of society if we cannot agree on the way that we should communicate and if we cannot agree on the definitions of the words that we are using.
What does this do for discourse on a political level? It makes it entirely impossible to get anything done through discourse.
Where I see a man and call that man a man, a leftist sees a man and asks for their preferred pronoun; they are using accepted English language structures, changing the denotations, and creating a breakdown in communication in the process – one that defies logic or science.
Where does their language fail primarily? It fails in conversation.
If language’s job is to make communication easier, why is it failing us with the left? They refuse to address the primary problems found in their form of language definition, which is based on feelings, and by skirting this issue, they are skirting discourse, creating a societal divide, and aiding in the death of the English language.
Ultimately, what we’re witnessing is a collapse in the communicative realm of society. No longer can anyone simply talk to another person about something without having to preface it with a laundry list of qualifiers to make sure that you’re not racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, arachnophobic, cynophobic, anthropopophobic, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobic, the list goes on.
When JFK said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” he set the standard for modern American values; unfortunately, in today’s climate the left acts in an opposing manner to Kennedy’s altruistic notion. Everything is about the government rectifying people’s problems and people begging for handouts, from the NFL protests to the pussy-hat brigade to the Black Lives Matter coalition, within the liberal camp, nothing will ever get done if they cannot learn to communicate properly. The left needs to dump their language of divisiveness and start speaking American.
