Doublespeak: How Language Becomes a Weapon
My teenage son is at a loose end. His part-time construction job dried up, and now he needs something new to fit around college hours. After fruitlessly scouring the internet for hours, I naïvely suggested he visit the local jobcentre, expecting help. How foolish. Jobcentres, it seems, don’t primarily advertise jobs and connect people with employment anymore. Instead, their main function is connecting people with benefits. And there, in a simple misalignment of words and actions, lies everything wrong with the way our country uses language — it is a case study in doublespeak.
There's nothing new about language being twisted for ulterior motives. For centuries, language has been manipulated to disguise uncomfortable truths. Take, for example, ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ — a euphemism for torture. ‘Restructuring’ sounds a lot better than ‘layoffs’, ‘irregular immigration’ confers much less guilt upon the government than ‘illegal immigration’ and ‘economically disadvantaged’ certainly softens the harsh reality of dirt poor. Even the term ‘pre-owned’ makes something second-hand sound superior.
‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’, wrote Shakespeare in Macbeth, encapsulating the essence of deception and the inversion of truth. Warnings about the distortion of reality through language have long been a literary motif from Orwell’s 1984 to Huxley’s Brave New World. But seeing these literary manipulations come to life in the world today is something else entirely.
When my son encountered the job centre’s reality, I couldn't help but think of Orwell’s Ministries. The Ministry of Truth, responsible for lies, and the Ministry of Love, which enforces oppression, seem absurd when described. But is it really so different from an institution meant to help people find work, but instead keeps them tied to a system of benefits? Orwell’s Newspeak was created to restrict thought: ‘The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc but to make all other modes of thought impossible.’ By narrowing language, regimes don’t just control what people say — they limit what they can even think.
We may not have Newspeak, but doublespeak is alive and well.
Doublespeak is language that pretends to be clear but is unclear. It makes good seem bad and bad seem good. It foists responsibility from the responsible to the blameless. It conceals any blame at all. It is a clever way to lie.
It’s eerie how close our world is to an Orwellian or Huxleyan dystopia. Many people are swept up in doublespeak, even adopting it. Look at how transgender ideology was embraced, and has almost become a quasi-religion. (If not that, let’s settle for a cult.) ‘Sex is assigned at birth’, ‘gender identity is a spectrum’, ‘trans women are women’ are all examples of ‘loading the language’ as brainwashing expert Robert Jay Lifton would put it. Those who disagree are not just ‘opposed’; they are branded as bigots, heretics, or worse. Orwell’s observation about political language rings true: ‘Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ This is precisely what happens when language is used to obscure reality.