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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"that the context I was assuming was the belief that controlling language allows one to control thoughts of real people. My reaction isn't that it should or shouldn't, just that it obviously doesn't."

Is the government subjecting people to enhanced interrogation or torture?

Are they placing them in detention or prison?

Are people undocumented immigrants or illegals?

Is someone a <respectful term> or "just a <derrogatory term>"?

Is someone a freedom fighter, a terrorist, or a traitor?

To the Nazis, were Jewish people human or subhuman?

Can a given historical event be called a genocide?

To me it's pretty clear the words used to describe people and their actions influences how these people and actions are viewed and understood.

This is one reason why propaganda is so effective, and why violence often follows the dehumanization of certain groups of people, in which word choice tends to play an important role.

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Any examples you can give demonstrate different thoughts that people can still have, because the attempt to control has failed.

If there is an example of successful thought control through language, how is anyone going to be able to think of it, by definition?

I don't believe that some thoughts are impossible for users of certain words, but do believe their thoughts are influenced by the words they use and hear used all around them, and some thoughts are less likely in such people.

For instance, in Nazis who truly believed that Jewish people were subhuman, empathetic thoughts towards Jewish people were less likely.

Also, I don't agree that attempts at control have failed. I think they have often succeeded.

This is confusing me greatly for a fairly brief comment.

- "Thoughts are not influenced by words" would be a silly claim, and I disavow it.

- I am disoriented by your throwing out "some thoughts are impossible for users of certain words", not knowing who and where you think that was claimed. That's not the only way one could try to control thoughts with words. The method people seem to try a lot is to eliminate words to prevent thoughts, which seems like kind of the opposite.

- On what basis do you presume you have good insight into the psychology of Nazis? I mean really, that's awfully glib.

- Your last two sentences don't seem mutually exclusive, but having them together seems to imply they should be, which means I don't know what you are trying to say. Can you give an example of successful control at any rate?

Making some thoughts impossible by controlling language was a point in George Orwell's 1984.

It was referenced back up at the top. And 1984 has been part of my mental landscape for maybe a quarter century, so my opinion that reality is different has been calcified gradually over time.

It may not be possible to control but it's certainly possible to subconsciously influence, which is as good or better.

Advertisement works, even though it's not thought control.

Yes, his. Calling torture enhanced interrogation helped people to accept torturing for years. The in group continues accepting it and continues torturing.

Nazi were quite successful in turning Germany the way they wanted, in making soldiers hate and in making them comit atrocities. That was succesfull language manipulation. They lost war for unrelated reasons.

It's a cliche! If it was successful thought control, then we couldn't have a discussion about it. Nobody would know what you were referring to.

In the end, people will get old, and forget history, and die off, and the feedback loop will go around and around and what people believe will evolve. But nobody will have successfully controlled what people think.

I totally agree that everybody is trying to influence everyone else's thoughts through language. That's what words are for. Nobody could reasonably disagree with that, and I never intended to.

> If it was successful thought control, then we couldn't have a discussion about it. Nobody would know what you were referring to.

I wonder if you believe that this kind of absolute, unsubtle thought control is what Ursula Le Guin was talking about with the brush example, or what the parent post was talking about. Or even what Orwell was talking about.

To me it seems that's what the discussion boils down to. I agree that words cannot 'control' thoughts fully, but I also agree that Ursula Le Guin didn't argue this at all but rather that the /way/ we use words has an effect on how we think about these concepts, and as such can be used for manipulation. There are plenty of studies that show that saying the same thing in different wording can drastically change how people feel about these things.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is really popular in the full 'thought-control' kind of way, and I do believe that that is not well supported.

There's been some doubt created about what Le Guin was talking about. I don't have the context handy.

What Orwell was talking about, what he thought or feared possible, I disagree with, and, well, you can compare our society to 1984. There is a tremendous amount of propaganda, and it has an effect, but don't you agree that as warped as the mental space we collectively inhabit may be, that it's not under control of a specific entity? Even in, say, the Soviet Union, it wasn't under control. Maybe some day when totalitarians can program brains...

> but don't you agree that as warped as the mental space we collectively inhabit may be, that it's not under control of a specific entity?

Yes, I agree that the case of a single entity being able to use words to place thoughts directly in minds like a TV version of hypnosis or etch them out of minds as if with electroshock therapy is not an accurate description of... anything.

It's not what anyone means when they talk about words shaping thought, an idea which you disparaged so vituperatively - which would be understandable if anyone meant by it what you seem to be implying they mean. They can mean a number of things, whether it's a coach or leader influencing the attitudes of their followers, a person seeking to direct their own train of thought, a movement using language to dehumanize a minority group, an advertiser affecting how the public views a product, or a propagandist or politician attempting to move the Overton Window. Or many other things, more or less subtle.

No, successful control does not mean you will never ever get out of power nor it means forever secrecy. It means you achieve what you wanted. Enhanced interrogation is sll going on.

And in nazi example, successful controll of how Jews are seen does not imply that foreign non-Jewish armies will never beat you. That would be ridiculous standard.

Nazi succesfull framed Jews as evil and Jews got exterminated. They succesfully framed slavs as inferior and succesfully framed themselves as needing more living space which led to expansive war and population displacement.

That foreign armies conguered them does not imply that messaging aimed at Germans was not succesfull.

It's not just that they were conquered, but then they were defined as uniquely evil for all time, but then the struggle to maintain that and include or exclude others as similar never ends. Godwin's law wouldn't be a thing if anyone controlled language even in this specific area. People wouldn't to this day casually compare people and groups to Nazis if there was such a thing as controlling people through language.

Given your statement that "enhanced interrogation" is still going on, that means from my framing that calling it torture failed to stop it, hence attempts to control it through language failed. You're saying that language allows it to happen, but I would say the correct framing is that doing it and the desire of people to rationalize it allows it to happen. The euphemism being an effect rather than a cause.

That sounds illogical to me. You define "controlling through something" in a way that makes it impossible.

Yes, nazi lost wwii, no it does not prove their control of langue failed.

No, there being two opposing sides trying to control langue and one of them not winning does not prove control through langue does not work.

Frankly, there are very illogical argument.

Today enhanced interrogation just means torture to me. Which quickly happens to any such phrase, they may start as spin but quickly turn into a euphemism and eventually gain all the negative connotations as the original.

> To me it's pretty clear the words used to describe people and their actions influences how these people and actions are viewed and understood.

It can have unintended consequences, however. For me, hearing the phrase “undocumented immigrants” just irritates me and actually distracts me from the point the utterer is trying to make. It's like a word pretzel designed to get around saying “illegal”.

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