In George Orwell’s most famous book 1984, the rulers of Oceania have imposed a new, hyper-controlled language on the population. The language is called Newspeak, and it’s not only the language they use to communicate with each other, but the language they think in.
Newspeak was designed to restrict the reasoning and limit the imaginations of the citizens of Oceania, rendering them incapable of exploring certain concepts and ensuring their self-preserving support for The State.
It’s crucial to note that their inability to consider these concepts is not due only to lacking names for them, but also the movements of logic beneath the thoughts that they are capable of that block them reaching these forbidden concepts as a natural consequence of any critical thinking.
This is a pretty accurate encapsulation of what I mean when I talk about languages of thinking. It’s less about the words and symbols we use to think in, and more about the function and direction of our thinking in general.
Some years ago, I decided to confront any potential contradictions in my own thinking in order to overcome them. At first, I got hung up on the kinds of words I was using to define my concepts, and that didn’t lead to much further insight or resolution at all. In fact, it just made an even bigger mess of things. It was when I went beyond the words and started tapping into what I meant by these words that I was able to get some of the real work done.
I was quite confident in my position that humanity would do well to acknowledge whatever it takes in order to bridge arbitrary division and come together as a unified species. And personally, I could easily speak words of unity, however, the language of my thinking was completely at odds with that. At the time, I was incredibly ideologically-oriented, identity-oriented and with a real romanticised view of belief in general.
But what I was failing to recognise is that, for every ideology, there’s an opposition. It’s a fairly simple and widespread insight, but I hadn’t applied it. This ideological framework instantly draws an “us and them” mode of interpretation. Whether I wanted it to or not didn’t matter — it’s weaved into the very language of ideological thinking.
So it didn’t matter how much I would bang on about unity or how sincere I felt I was being at the time; I was sowing division just as much as ever.
Not only that, but, for most of my life, I’d been conditioned by belief- and opinion-oriented thinking. This, on top of developing an extremely debate-driven attitude and ego, where the common tendency is to battle with opinions to score points and try to come out on top rather than to unite in a quest for truth with my fellow people, could never give rise to any kind of unity.
Aside from the tribalism inherent in my language of thinking, I also struggled with believing my own thoughts, as if thinking was some kind of shortcut to truth. One thought defined by another, validated by another, upheld by another, and so the cycle went. If I could reason it, it must have been so. All it took to define my concepts was certain movements of air-tight logic.
Similarly, there are many people out there who are sick and tired of living divided and splintered, both within themselves and amongst each other, but who constantly seem to slip into the same cycles of separatist, tribal thinking and behaviour. I suspect this is due to ideological and belief-oriented languages of thinking that most of us have been raised into and conditioned by since birth, and that a conscious upgrade to the language of our thinking is necessary in order to bring us together.
It will not do just to change the words that we use, to try to appear more understanding, empathetic, compassionate, insightful, whatever the case may be. There are many out there today who speak these words in order to conceal the division they sow and in an attempt to put across a certain image of themselves in the minds of others.
They want to be seen as something they are largely incapable of being so long as they do not overcome these conflicting languages of thinking. I know this because I was this for far too many years.
The same could be said for society at large. Patchwork political concepts such as tolerance and equality will not do to bring people together, as the language of thinking they inhabit still lead to tendencies of reducing people to their perceived group identities, highlighting the surface-level differences between us and keeping them at the forefront of our focus.
Beyond that, I stay highly sceptical of the assumption that ideology of any kind is a suitable foundation on which to base civilisation, as it will always intrinsically create its own division, its own opposition, its own enemies and its own ideological extremists. This will not give rise to unity, although many belief systems and ideological concepts will masquerade as being adequate to do just that.
More on this to come.
