AdenBADN
2 min readApr 1, 2023

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I can attempt at summarising it.

So, in Orwell's 1984, the State has imposed a controlled language called "Newspeak" over its citizens. Not only is this the language that they speak, but this is the language they "think in."

This language prevents them from exploring certain concepts and sways their attention, focus and biases towards supporting/upholding certain concepts.

As for me, the language of my thinking while growing up was incredibly belief-oriented. My view of the world was restricted to what I believed, and, because I was unaware of simple insights like "the map is not the territory" and that truth transcends thinking, etc., I was under the false assumption that what I was thinking "was truth."

My thinking at the time concerned itself with how to classify things, rather than how things functioned. So I was always saying to myself "A is B", and this doesn't require feedback from nature or anything else in the world around me. I could "prove" my thinking with yet more thinking.

Now, wrap this up with the tendency to be harshly self-critical along with being a generally 'dark' or negative thinker, throw an extreme focus on "identity" in there, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Whatever I can say about the language of my thinking, some things were certain: my thinking was geared towards self-preservation, for example. This means that it never stopped, that I never stopped thinking, and in turn, I would reduce everything - all of my experiences, every event, every conversation I had, every interaction with the world around me - I would reduce it all to what I thought about it, how I classified it.

Before long, I had to realise that I was interacting not with the world itself, but my own thoughts about it.

Like the old stoic proverb holds "people are mostly tormented by the ways they think of things, rather than by the things themselves." This was 100% true for me.

There were consequences of this. When I started to become conscious of language in the context of speech, I found myself unable to effectively communicate with people because I couldn't listen. I was too busy up in my head interpreting.

On the flip-side of that, I also found myself having difficulties talking. While I spoke, I was also busy up in my head wondering if I was being understood. If I got the sense that I wasn't, I would try to modify my expressions. Basically editing what I was saying while I was saying it. This resulted in something of a stutter. Not exactly a stutter, but just a chopped up, blabbering way of talking. Riddled with anxiety based on my own interpretations of things.

Perhaps this will do for a "summary" ... I didn't realise I'd end up typing so much about it.

There is a great deal more to this and I actually write about it in serious detail in some pieces I will be posting here soon. If it interests you at all, I hope you manage to catch them.

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AdenBADN

Believe and Disbelieve Nothing. Philosophy. Technology. Unity. A futurist living in the present t.me/adenbadn / adenbadn@pm.me / buymeabeer.com/AdenBADN