Motus Mentis

I’ve referred on several occasions to the old Chinese story about “calling a deer a horse”, which describes the scheming courtier Zhao Gao’s stratagem (this was way back in the third century BC) for testing the loyalty of potential political allies by seeing what lies they would assent to. I first read about this over at Spandrell’s place some years ago, but in China it’s familiar to all. (They’ve had lots of opportunities, in living memory, to see it being done to themselves.)

I’m fond, also, of quoting Theodore Dalrymple’s observation about the importance of obvious falsehoods in the enforcement of totalitarian subordination; indeed I did so just last week, in a post about the “female” swimmer “Lia” Thomas (who is no more a woman than a deer is a horse, or chalk is cheese):

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Well, as they say, “great minds think alike”. (They also say “fools seldom differ”, but we’ll leave that aside.) Commenting on the SCOTUS confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which the nominee declined to answer the question “what is a woman?”, John Derbyshire has also been reminded of the story of Zhao Gao. You can read Derb’s post here.

This general breakdown of the meaning of words (which, as the title of this post reminds us, is said in the Old Testament to have been imposed as a punishment upon mankind for hubristic audacity, a thing we hardly seem innocent of today) brings to mind another item from ancient China: the remarks of Confucius (551-479 BC) on the importance of what he called “the rectification of names”:

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

– Analects of Confucius, Book XIII

When words as plain and essential as “woman”, which anchor our most basic concepts about the world and our place in it, are uprooted from the bedrock of reality, then “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. Once nothing is objectively and self-evidently true, only then does it become possible for those who have power over us to impose any belief at all, no matter how fantastic, simply as a matter of will. And that, it should by now be obvious to all, is precisely the idea here.