The manipulative vocabulary of the anointed

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People of dogmatic ideologies driven by partisan type thinking can be very dishonest and manipulative in their language. Like any ideology the modern Left thinks in terms of a myriad of basic assumptions peculiar to their beliefs and these assumptions are reflected in their words and language. The Left tends to view people who are failures as helpless victims of a bad system rather than being victims of their own foolish conduct. They tend to use language that tacitly relieves people of fault or blame for failure and assigns the fault to “society.” Instead of ascribing the true cause of a person’s failure as being due to any of many reasons such laziness, poor judgment, foolish conduct, etc. they use language that implies they are victims of the system. Thus the cause of the problems of people lies in society or some particular group in society and is in need of political or governmental action.

In Chapter 7 of Thomas Sowell’s book, The Vision of the Anointed, he speaks of the manipulative vocabulary of the Anointed.

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Personal Responsibility

Many of the words and phrases used in the media and among academics suggest that things just happen to people, rather than being caused by their own choices and behavior. Thus there is said to be an “epidemic” of teenage pregnancy, or of drug usage, as if these things were like the flu that people just caught by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a similar vein, Judge David Bazelon spoke of “forces that drive people to commit crimes.” In the economy as well, both parents are said to be “forced” to work, in order to “make ends meet,” even if the family owns luxury cars, a vacation home, designer clothes, and a swimming pool. Parents, of course, have every right to make whatever choices they wish, but suggesting that people had no choice is precisely what the vocabulary of the anointed does repeatedly, on the most disparate issues— which it reduces to nonissues with deterministic assertions.

People are often said to lack “access” to various jobs, educational institutions, or credit, when in fact they may not have behaved or performed in a way that would enable them to meet the same standards that others meet. “Access” is just one of a number of ex ante expressions — “opportunity,” “bias,” “glass ceiling,” for example — used to describe ex post results in such a way as to preempt the whole question as to why those results turned out the way they did. If a job ceiling is glass, for example, that says that it is invisible — that the assertion must be accepted without evidence. Implicit in much of this verbiage in the notion that the rules were rigged for or against some individual or group. But whether, or to what extent, this is true is precisely the issue that should be argued — not circumvented by verbal sleight-of-hand.

People who do not choose to spend their money on health insurance, but on other things, are not denied “access” to health care by “society”. On the contrary, they are often given medical treatment at other people’s expense, whether under specific social programs or in various other ways, such as using hospital emergency rooms for things that are not emergences at all, or which have become emergencies only because nothing was done until a medical problem grew too large to ignore. How often people have chosen to spend their money on things other than health insurance — especially when they are young and healthy — and how often they lack health insurance due to circumstances beyond their control is the crucial question that is sidestepped verbally by speaking of access. Millions of individuals from families with incomes of $50,000 and up lack health insurance — clearly not because they lack “access” but because they have chosen to spend their money on other things. Choice, like behavior and performance, is often circumvented by the vocabulary of the anointed.

Performance standards are often depicted as mere subjective barriers reflecting the biases of those who created them. Thus Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University charges “insincerity” to opponents of affirmative action who want everyone to compete by the same rules by saying that “the playing field is already tilted” in favor of the majority because “the skills that make for success are nurtured by institutions and cultural practices from which the disadvantaged minority has been “systematically excluded.” With the word “excluded” being used in very elastic senses today, it is hard to know how this statement differs from saying that people from different cultural backgrounds have the prerequisites for various activities to varying degrees. In a similar vein, former Harvard president Derek Bok said that to apply the same admissions standards to minority students as to everyone else would be to “exclude them from the university”. Among other things, this ignores the fact that blacks were receiving both college and postgraduate degrees from Harvard in the nineteenth century, when it was very unlikely that they were being admitted under lower standards. The more fundamental fallacy, however, is in using ex ante words like “exclude” to describe ex post results.

Widespread personification of “society” is another verbal tactic that evades issues of personal responsibility. Such use of the term “society” is a more sophisticated version of the notion that “the devil made me do it”. Like much of the rest of the special vocabulary of the anointed, it is used as a magic word to make choice, behavior, and performance vanish into thin air. With these three inconvenient complications out of the picture, results after the fact can then be equated with conditions before the fact. Success thus becomes “privilege” and failure “disadvantage” — by definition.

Even inanimate things like classics of literature are called “privileged’ writings, rather than writings which have achieved appreciation from many successive generations. Such concepts as achievement are precisely what the new vocabulary seeks to displace. By all-or-nothing reasoning, it is of course possible to show that not every individual or group has had the same favorable or unfavorable conditions. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how anything short of omniscience and omnipotence could have made such blanket equality possible. But that is still radically different from saying that outcomes ex post are simply consequences of circumstances ex ante. For, example voluminous evidence from countries around the world repeatedly shows particular groups beginning their lives destitute in a new country, taking low-level jobs disdained by the native population, and yet ultimately rising above the economic level of those around them.

The “overseas Chinese” have done this throughout Southeast Asia and in several Western Hemisphere nations. The history of the United States has seen this achievement repeated by a number of European immigrant groups and by the Japanese and the Cubans, among others. Such evidence is suggestive, rather than decisive. There is room for debate, but substantive debate is wholly different from verbal preemption, the weapon of choice among the anointed.

In the vision of the anointed, not only must other people be either intellectually or morally incapable of making the right decisions for themselves individually, the traditions they use to supplement their own thinking, and the systemic processes which coordinate their competing desires and complementary inputs — the marketplace, for example — must also be depicted as inadequate to the task, without the benign intervention of the anointed. Surrogate decision making is the common thread in the highly disparate crusades which have captured the imagination and sparked the fervor of the anointed at various times, whether this moral surrogacy was in the form of the eugenics movement, Keynesian economics, or environmentalism. All urgently require the superior wisdom of the anointed to be imposed on the benighted masses, in order to avert disaster.

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The vision of the anointed is one in which such ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from “society,” rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by “society”. Since no society has ever treated everyone fairly, there will always be real examples of what the anointed envision. The fatal step is to make those examples universal explanations of social ills — and to remain oblivious to evidence to the contrary.

Hopelessness

One of the inflated words that plays a key role in promoting the vision of the anointed and the social policies based on it is “hopelessness.” Unhappy social circumstances are almost automatically described in this way, with neither evidence nor a demand for evidence, nor even a sign of awareness that evidence might be relevant. Political rhetoric abounds with many empirically unverifiable assertions that “hopelessness” exists among the poor — or would, in the absence of government social programs. Media figure Hodding Carter III used such “hopelessness” as a justification for the “war on poverty” programs of the Johnson administration in which he served. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker likewise claimed that “Americans were given hope” by the Johnson administration programs.

In the absence of any evidence that such widespread hopelessness existed outside the vision of the anointed, it may be useful to look at history. Tens of millions of immigrants came to the United States, often beginning in destitution and rising up the socioeconomic ladder, in the process creating and celebrating “the American dream.” Far from being hopeless, such immigrants, with their enthusiastic letters back to their relatives and friends in Europe, kept more millions crossing the Atlantic in their wake. More recently, as already noted, both poverty and dependency were declining for years prior o the Johnson administration‘s “war on poverty.” Black income was rising, not only absolutely but relative to white income. In the five years prior to the Civil Liberties Act of 1964, blacks were rising into professional and other high-level positions at a rate greater than in th five years following passage of the Act. Nationwide, Scholastic Aptitude test scores were rising, venereal diseases were declining sharply, and the murder rate was at an all-time low. This was the “hopelessness” from which the anointed came to rescue us.

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18 Nov 2023