Scan barcode
A review by lpm100
Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds by Michael Knowles
5.0
Book Review
Speechless
5/5 stars
"The best conservative defense would have been/ should be a good offense."
*******
Of the book:
15 chapters +conclusion
236 pps of prose
x̄=15 pages/chapter
Excellent/witty glossary
This book (a 250 page meditation on the destructive consequences of word inflation) is simultaneously extremely profound and extremely trivial.
Even as alarming as the events are that Knowles describes (which, for the record, are various verbal contortions by Redux Marxists in order to try to redefine reality/ cause destruction of Western Civilization).... They aren't new.
Nor are they unique to the United States/Western society.
In reality, if you have some country/civilization somewhere that is too stable/comfortable, it will start to self-destruct. (First example of this that I ever read of was 2,300 years ago, during the 15-year long Qhin dynasty. But, it's far from the first.)
This timeless syllogism has been captured in recent years as something like: hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. (Wash, rinse, repeat.)
∆∆∆TWO POSSIBILITIES:
1. Are these Western pathologies something that could be recognized and fought one at a time?
It would be as if a patient could be kept alive forever if a physician could just fix every single ailment one at a time.
In this world, if you just jailed/executed enough "Jesse Jacksons" / "Noam Chomskys," the bleeding could be stanched and the society could live forever.
2. Or do we just resign ourselves to the fact that the overwhelming majority of life forms / societies will not survive. (The best treated patients ultimately die anyway.)
Western Civilization tearing itself apart from the inside out becomes just one more predicted/predictable example. (The life forms that exist today are a small fraction of the total that have ever existed; the Romans / Ottomans/Habsburgs miscalculated and are no longer with us, even as big as they once were.)
In this world, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "prosaic whining" (p.111) is not a causative agent of destruction any more than one single snowflake is the causative agent of an avalanche; they are both things that cause destruction in a system that was ALREADY in an initial state where it was ready to self-destruct.
*******
There are a number of these particular exposited banalities that have resonances to things that have been happening at least for several thousand years of recorded history.
1. One more example of Men of Words efforts at creating a society in which they have exalted status. (Similar things have happened in India, with Brahmins above all else. In China with Confucian scholar officials above all else. In Tibet, with monk priests above all else. Those societies were stable-but-stagnant for thousands of years.)
2. One more example of a society where the leading Men of Words live in a floating echo chamber that eventually runs aground on the rocks of reality? (The sovereign of the Qing Dynasty, Qianlong, had decided that all nations of the world were subjects of the Chinese sovereign and that he could talk / sneer that reality into existence. And of course, he had a Chattering Class that was willing to repeat the party line. As later conquests by Japanese and Germans and many others would show..... that just wasn't the case. )
3. Eric Hoffer: "Thus imperceptibly the Man of Words undermines established institutions, discredits those in power, weakens prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and sets the stage for the rise of a mass movement" (And then what? Some number of tens of millions of people die and life keeps on going. People bounced back from Communism/ the Great Leap Forward/ WWI-II/ the Cambodian Killing Fields.)
4. At the exact moment that the church was neutered, different religions (Marxism/ Communism/Socialism/Environmentalism) took its place with their own eschatological visions.
The religious impulse, it seems is inescapable and keeps auto-resurrecting in different guises.
5. Some idiot intellectual/academic denigrates the Degraded Present in order to keep people hungering for the Ideal Future that ONLY his mass movement will provide is far from new. (People who claim to speak on behalf of black people don't actually know any black people. After the Cuban revolution, the only people on the island that had new cars were the Castros and certain government officials.)
6. Some intellectuals throw away some number of millions of lives experimenting on the world that they will build. (The Terror after the French Revolution and several tens of millions dead in the Great Leap Forward. A full quarter of Cambodia killed.)
*******
Chapter summaries:
1. Political correctness is a war of words; Radicals understand this better than conservatives.
2. The ultimate point of redefining language is POWER and CONTROL; Vague calls for free speech are not enough.
3. Old guard radicals (Sanders) and new ones (BLM) are two different things; the former wants to work within Democratic institutions and the latter wants to subvert them.
4. Fights against the leftists must be proactive and not reactive. The best defense is a good offense.
5. Clarification of the misused word "fascism" and the euphemism treadmill; taboo words mean what they do except when they don't (again, in the context of censoring conservatives versus liberals).
6. Old hat that "speech is action and therefore (conservative) words are violence"; it seems like progressives discover a new Law of History every week so that any cause they have is cloaked as "scientific." (Marx was an earlier figure, but the discussion here focuses on Herbert Marcuse. Likely because no one has actually ever read Marx.)
7. "The political is personal," and vice versa; in the mind of liberals, they are locked in a Manichean struggle for their very existence (think: Hutus and Tutsis) and have the right to act accordingly.
8. Men of Words somewhere infect some people with a grievance (that they never knew that they had) which can only be rectified by the guidance/leadership of the same Men of Words.
9. University campuses as a reaction space for the This Stupidity, as well as kangaroo courts for Grievance Studies Salem Witch Trials. (Various false rape / racism accusations are documented.)
10. Verbal contortion can / is used to create things like Roe v. Wade.
11. Through a slow and insidious process left-wing people have traded one set of taboos for another. In this world, monogamy becomes a vice and mounting / being mounted by every single possible person becomes a virtue. Stonewall riots were nothing like what they are now imagined to have been.
12. War on Christmas.
13. Selected (good) thoughts on Transgenderism. Gnosticism and Materialism are two diametrically opposite views of the world, but leftists use both of them at different times in their quest for destruction. Marxism is Materialist, but gnostic Deconstructionism / "gender identity" is the latest culture war. Exposition of Dr. John Money, the sexual abuser and "Desmond Is Amazing," the abused child.
14. "Science" becomes a synonym for "social justice." Just for Covid: Lockdowns were "scientifically true" until the moment that they would have prevented BLM rioters from stealing. Somehow, white supremacy was also a health issue at that time. Incessant flip flopping on whether masks work or not. "Global cooling" one decade. "Global warming" the next. "Climate change" the next. "Catastrophe" the next.
15. Social media is not an honest broker in these culture wars. (He gives an example of the Donald Trump deplatforming.) Twitter. Facebook. Google. Apple. Shopify.
Somehow the genocide-supporting/ Holocaust denying president of Iran is not a problem, though.
Conclusion. Recapitulation of the names of some of the major Poisonous Intellectual Figures. He suggests that conservatives must also develop their own class of men of words as a defense.
*******
Ultimately, it is what it is: some societies are stagnant but long lived, through the force of tradition; some are experimental and open to new (not necessarily fruitful or smart)
ideas and tear themselves apart.
So, the author has told us what we already know which is that the United States is undoubtedly the latter. (It seems like that Karl Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance" didn't reach the right ears.)
As an aside: I will mention that the First Chinese Emperor knew very well how damaging a bunch of professional talkers can be.
His response was effective, if not too subtle: he just buried half of them alive and dared the other half to say something. (No surprise that they lined up right on the side of the state. And the Chinese state is still with us, trudging along thousands of years after its inception.)
There was never any such thing as the Chinese Academy, and all learned men were Confucian scholar officials.
Meanwhile, there is a such thing as the Western academy / academic freedom / tenure.
And that creates a space for a lot of extremely stupid ideas to thrive and spill out into the real world in a destructive way.
So, China will be with us 500 years later because they bet against the capacity of men to govern themselves for long periods of time.
A large part of the western world will no longer be with us 500 years from now.
And so the fortune is told again: Societies/life forms miscalculate, and then they are no longer here.
It didn't need to be this way, but it is.
US taxpayers might as well enjoy the destruction, because they're paying for it and abetting it.
Verdict: I don't think I'm going to read this again, because it is simultaneously infuriating but also not really that surprising.
Not, at least, to a student of history.
New vocabulary:
hylomorphic
fetor
Overton window
parietals
eutopia≠utopia
masking and mumming
Albigensianism
Areopagitica
Excellent quote (p.151): "To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown; the tried to the untried; fact to mystery; the actual to the possible; the limited to the unbounded; the near to the distant; the sufficient to the super abundant; the convenient to the perfect."
Speechless
5/5 stars
"The best conservative defense would have been/ should be a good offense."
*******
Of the book:
15 chapters +conclusion
236 pps of prose
x̄=15 pages/chapter
Excellent/witty glossary
This book (a 250 page meditation on the destructive consequences of word inflation) is simultaneously extremely profound and extremely trivial.
Even as alarming as the events are that Knowles describes (which, for the record, are various verbal contortions by Redux Marxists in order to try to redefine reality/ cause destruction of Western Civilization).... They aren't new.
Nor are they unique to the United States/Western society.
In reality, if you have some country/civilization somewhere that is too stable/comfortable, it will start to self-destruct. (First example of this that I ever read of was 2,300 years ago, during the 15-year long Qhin dynasty. But, it's far from the first.)
This timeless syllogism has been captured in recent years as something like: hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. (Wash, rinse, repeat.)
∆∆∆TWO POSSIBILITIES:
1. Are these Western pathologies something that could be recognized and fought one at a time?
It would be as if a patient could be kept alive forever if a physician could just fix every single ailment one at a time.
In this world, if you just jailed/executed enough "Jesse Jacksons" / "Noam Chomskys," the bleeding could be stanched and the society could live forever.
2. Or do we just resign ourselves to the fact that the overwhelming majority of life forms / societies will not survive. (The best treated patients ultimately die anyway.)
Western Civilization tearing itself apart from the inside out becomes just one more predicted/predictable example. (The life forms that exist today are a small fraction of the total that have ever existed; the Romans / Ottomans/Habsburgs miscalculated and are no longer with us, even as big as they once were.)
In this world, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "prosaic whining" (p.111) is not a causative agent of destruction any more than one single snowflake is the causative agent of an avalanche; they are both things that cause destruction in a system that was ALREADY in an initial state where it was ready to self-destruct.
*******
There are a number of these particular exposited banalities that have resonances to things that have been happening at least for several thousand years of recorded history.
1. One more example of Men of Words efforts at creating a society in which they have exalted status. (Similar things have happened in India, with Brahmins above all else. In China with Confucian scholar officials above all else. In Tibet, with monk priests above all else. Those societies were stable-but-stagnant for thousands of years.)
2. One more example of a society where the leading Men of Words live in a floating echo chamber that eventually runs aground on the rocks of reality? (The sovereign of the Qing Dynasty, Qianlong, had decided that all nations of the world were subjects of the Chinese sovereign and that he could talk / sneer that reality into existence. And of course, he had a Chattering Class that was willing to repeat the party line. As later conquests by Japanese and Germans and many others would show..... that just wasn't the case. )
3. Eric Hoffer: "Thus imperceptibly the Man of Words undermines established institutions, discredits those in power, weakens prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and sets the stage for the rise of a mass movement" (And then what? Some number of tens of millions of people die and life keeps on going. People bounced back from Communism/ the Great Leap Forward/ WWI-II/ the Cambodian Killing Fields.)
4. At the exact moment that the church was neutered, different religions (Marxism/ Communism/Socialism/Environmentalism) took its place with their own eschatological visions.
The religious impulse, it seems is inescapable and keeps auto-resurrecting in different guises.
5. Some idiot intellectual/academic denigrates the Degraded Present in order to keep people hungering for the Ideal Future that ONLY his mass movement will provide is far from new. (People who claim to speak on behalf of black people don't actually know any black people. After the Cuban revolution, the only people on the island that had new cars were the Castros and certain government officials.)
6. Some intellectuals throw away some number of millions of lives experimenting on the world that they will build. (The Terror after the French Revolution and several tens of millions dead in the Great Leap Forward. A full quarter of Cambodia killed.)
*******
Chapter summaries:
1. Political correctness is a war of words; Radicals understand this better than conservatives.
2. The ultimate point of redefining language is POWER and CONTROL; Vague calls for free speech are not enough.
3. Old guard radicals (Sanders) and new ones (BLM) are two different things; the former wants to work within Democratic institutions and the latter wants to subvert them.
4. Fights against the leftists must be proactive and not reactive. The best defense is a good offense.
5. Clarification of the misused word "fascism" and the euphemism treadmill; taboo words mean what they do except when they don't (again, in the context of censoring conservatives versus liberals).
6. Old hat that "speech is action and therefore (conservative) words are violence"; it seems like progressives discover a new Law of History every week so that any cause they have is cloaked as "scientific." (Marx was an earlier figure, but the discussion here focuses on Herbert Marcuse. Likely because no one has actually ever read Marx.)
7. "The political is personal," and vice versa; in the mind of liberals, they are locked in a Manichean struggle for their very existence (think: Hutus and Tutsis) and have the right to act accordingly.
8. Men of Words somewhere infect some people with a grievance (that they never knew that they had) which can only be rectified by the guidance/leadership of the same Men of Words.
9. University campuses as a reaction space for the This Stupidity, as well as kangaroo courts for Grievance Studies Salem Witch Trials. (Various false rape / racism accusations are documented.)
10. Verbal contortion can / is used to create things like Roe v. Wade.
11. Through a slow and insidious process left-wing people have traded one set of taboos for another. In this world, monogamy becomes a vice and mounting / being mounted by every single possible person becomes a virtue. Stonewall riots were nothing like what they are now imagined to have been.
12. War on Christmas.
13. Selected (good) thoughts on Transgenderism. Gnosticism and Materialism are two diametrically opposite views of the world, but leftists use both of them at different times in their quest for destruction. Marxism is Materialist, but gnostic Deconstructionism / "gender identity" is the latest culture war. Exposition of Dr. John Money, the sexual abuser and "Desmond Is Amazing," the abused child.
14. "Science" becomes a synonym for "social justice." Just for Covid: Lockdowns were "scientifically true" until the moment that they would have prevented BLM rioters from stealing. Somehow, white supremacy was also a health issue at that time. Incessant flip flopping on whether masks work or not. "Global cooling" one decade. "Global warming" the next. "Climate change" the next. "Catastrophe" the next.
15. Social media is not an honest broker in these culture wars. (He gives an example of the Donald Trump deplatforming.) Twitter. Facebook. Google. Apple. Shopify.
Somehow the genocide-supporting/ Holocaust denying president of Iran is not a problem, though.
Conclusion. Recapitulation of the names of some of the major Poisonous Intellectual Figures. He suggests that conservatives must also develop their own class of men of words as a defense.
*******
Ultimately, it is what it is: some societies are stagnant but long lived, through the force of tradition; some are experimental and open to new (not necessarily fruitful or smart)
ideas and tear themselves apart.
So, the author has told us what we already know which is that the United States is undoubtedly the latter. (It seems like that Karl Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance" didn't reach the right ears.)
As an aside: I will mention that the First Chinese Emperor knew very well how damaging a bunch of professional talkers can be.
His response was effective, if not too subtle: he just buried half of them alive and dared the other half to say something. (No surprise that they lined up right on the side of the state. And the Chinese state is still with us, trudging along thousands of years after its inception.)
There was never any such thing as the Chinese Academy, and all learned men were Confucian scholar officials.
Meanwhile, there is a such thing as the Western academy / academic freedom / tenure.
And that creates a space for a lot of extremely stupid ideas to thrive and spill out into the real world in a destructive way.
So, China will be with us 500 years later because they bet against the capacity of men to govern themselves for long periods of time.
A large part of the western world will no longer be with us 500 years from now.
And so the fortune is told again: Societies/life forms miscalculate, and then they are no longer here.
It didn't need to be this way, but it is.
US taxpayers might as well enjoy the destruction, because they're paying for it and abetting it.
Verdict: I don't think I'm going to read this again, because it is simultaneously infuriating but also not really that surprising.
Not, at least, to a student of history.
New vocabulary:
hylomorphic
fetor
Overton window
parietals
eutopia≠utopia
masking and mumming
Albigensianism
Areopagitica
Excellent quote (p.151): "To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown; the tried to the untried; fact to mystery; the actual to the possible; the limited to the unbounded; the near to the distant; the sufficient to the super abundant; the convenient to the perfect."