The Science of Social Engineering

 

"We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” – Edward Bernays

Socialengineeringisthe intentional use of propaganda and other manipulative techniques to influence public attitudes and behavior on a mass scale with the goal of arriving at whatever outcomes have been specified by the social engineers.

Because technocracy originally labeled itself as the “science of social engineering,” we should not be surprised that today’s technocrats and their allies are still practicing this dark skill for the purpose of achieving their own ends.

During the pandemic, the world has been overtaken by these social engineers, who seem to slither out of the woodwork. Their carefully constructed propaganda, spewed nonstop all day, every day, has convinced many millions of frightened people to wear face masks, practice social distancing, stay locked in their homes, shut down their businesses, close schools, and, finally, obediently submit to being injected with FDA-un approved, experimental mRNA shots.

How could this have happened? Has the world gone mad? Let’s examine.

In the 1930s, early technocrat dreams of social engineering were emerging. Foundational research had already been conducted by Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), a Russian neurologist and physiologist who was determined to unravel the cause of human behavior. His experiments on dogs’ drooling response to the sight of food enabled him to develop his well-known theory of classical conditioning. He found that a dog can be conditioned to salivate upon simply seeing a food dish, even if there’s no food in it. Another of Pavlov’s experiments resulted in dogs drooling whenever their dog-feeder walked into the room.

Does the theory of classical conditioning apply to humans, too? Of course, and it works like this: If a dad always dons a certain ball cap just before taking his child to the park to play, eventually the child will anticipate playtime whenever Dad wears the same cap, no matter what the setting or circumstance.

American psychologist and behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) came on the scene a bit later than Pavlov. Skinner promoted the idea that human nature is mostly a product of a person’s environment. But he also contended that human nature follows certain laws that, if discovered, could be used for the purpose of manipulation and control. In experiments using rats, he developed theories of positive and negative reinforcement, as well as outright punishment, to control behavior. Skinner’s theories about rodents jumped the track to humans when he realized that “the species of the organism has made surprisingly little difference.”[1] His 1948 book, Walden Two , described a utopia in which the free will of the human spirit or soul is rejected and systematic altering of environmental variables controls all human behavior.

Both Skinner and Pavlov held to a mechanistic[2] world view. They attempted to understand human behavior through a process of scientific study. Humans, they reasoned, are accidental beings that have progressed according to Darwin’s theories on the survival of the fittest. Their mechanistic philosophy fit perfectly with the mindset of early technocrats and ended up as a major theme of the Technocracy Study Course that was published in 1934.

The danger in this type of thinking is that it reduces humans to having no free will and no spirit or soul that will help them to make moral and ethical life choices. Instead, external conditions and stimuli are necessary to produce better behavior. Of course, technocrats reasoned that they could apply their “science of social engineering” to do just that.

Those early technocrats didn’t need to write long expositions about how to operate machines and factories or about how to build roads and cities. Taylorism[3] and systems theory[4] had already done that—and technocrats were steeped in both doctrines. What the technocrats couldn’t deal with, though, was human nature. They found people to be far less reliable than physical machines. Nevertheless, they were forced to depend upon unreliable, unpredictable humans in order to actually build the cities and roads and operate the machines and factories.

Can you see the technocrats’ dilemma?

Their only solution, as they saw it, was to recast humans in the image of machinery and manage them as such. In fact, people were the one big obstacle technocrats faced whenever they attempted to control anything and everything —which was all the time . Thus, it should be no surprise that when they dreamed up the definition of technocracy in 1937, their ability to control human behavior got top billing: “Technocracy is the science of social engineering.”[5]

We can see how the behavioral theories of both Pavlov and Skinner provided salvation to the early technocrats. For if humans can be controlled externally, like physical machines, and if that discipline can be recast as a “science,” then the “science of social engineering” is legitimately in the technocrats’ wheelhouse, isn’t it?

Yes, except for the simple fact that the science of engineering human behavior is not a real science. It’s a pseudoscience. People cannot be “engineered.” And even if they could be, the development of the principles of social engineering is a bastardization of the true scientific method that has always served authentic scientists so well, both in the past and in the present.

You may remember that at the end of Chapter 1 we called “scientism” a “speculative, metaphysical, upside-down worldview about the nature of the universe and man’s relation to it.” The fact that “upside-down” scientism plays such a huge role in technocracy reinforces the fact that social engineering is pseudoscientific—and should never be equated with the word “science.”

All efforts to create a utopia through social engineering (think Walden Two by Skinner) have failed miserably. Marxists, communists, and socialists have tried it and failed. So have fascists. Technocrats likewise have failed thus far and will fail in the end as well. However, in the meantime, society is damaged by the hubris of these self-selected social engineers, who practice a warped pseudoscience that will never work because it is . . . not scientific.

The eminent historian Richard G. Olson, author of Science and Scientism in the Nineteenth-Century Europe , notes in his Introduction the subtle shift in thinking that preceded the original technocrat movement:

I have persistently thought of those early thinkers who sought to bring insights, especially methodological insights, from the natural sciences into the human social domain as engaging in scientism – a term that I intended to indicate the transfer of ideas, practices, attitudes, and methodologies from the context of the study of the natural world (which was assumed to be independent of human needs and expectations) into the study of humans and their social institutions, without imposing any judgement on the legitimacy of such an appropriation .[6]

Scientism is still practiced by today’s technocrats, as attested to by the prominent presence of pseudoscience in every walk of life. Instead of improving society along the way, scientism invariably ends up making a bigger mess of everything it touches.

Turning back to the Technocracy Study Course , we can now see how the “science of social engineering” has influenced the technocrat mind—both then and now:

This gives us a clue to the most fundamental social control technique that exists. No other single item exerts more than a small percentage of the influence exerted by the immediate physical environment upon the activities of human beings. Leave the physical environment unaltered, or the industrial rates of operation unchanged, and any effort to alter the fundamental modes of behavior of human beings is doomed largely to failure; alter the immediate physical environment of human beings, and their modes of behavior change automatically.[7]

Ever since that study course was introduced in 1934, technocrats have been attempting to perfect reliable methods of social control. Below we will cite a few such methods.

Propaganda

The intellectual father of modern propaganda was Edward L. Bernays (1891–1995), nephew of Sigmund Freud. His seminal book, Propaganda , appeared in 1928, just in time for technocrats to integrate it into their science of social engineering toolkit. Bernays was always direct, as evidenced in the opening of his book’s Chapter I, Organizing Chaos:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.[8]

The last statement in his book was just as pointed:

Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.[9]

Productive ends? Order out of chaos? This is the stuff technocrat dreams are made of.

Everything between the first page and the last page of Propaganda served as a catalyst for what would become an immense industry designed to manipulate and control the masses. Today, the three intertwined but distinct parts of that industry are “public relations” (or publicity), “marketing,” and “advertising.” Their respective experts spin reality in various directions for the purpose of promoting products that fetch handsome profits. Without PR flacks and marketing gurus and ad copywriters, how would a brewer sell suds successfully? Who’d come up with the perfect scene: a pool party teeming with big-abs blokes and blondes in bikinis?

Bernays had a technocrat’s mind and was authoritatively described in those terms. An article in an MIT journal captured his persona perfectly:

Right up to the end of his life (Bernays died in 1995), he held fast to his belief that the masses needed leadership, and that leadership would come from an elite, technocratic few who would shape the masses’ reality and thus produce a better society.[10]

Propaganda became such an influential tool that academia adopted it and taught it in schools of journalism, social studies, political science, marketing, and other disciplines. Since Bernays’ seminal work, a bevy of books have been written examining every aspect of what makes propaganda, well, propaganda.

In 2020, I looked at several college textbooks that dealt with propaganda and was surprised to see remarkably similar lists of techniques in each. Below, I’ve summarized the most common propaganda techniques just to make a point of how the subject has become standardized:

Fear: The most powerful emotion, fear of loss or of physical harm, opens the mind to accept the solutions provided by the propagandist—solutions that would not otherwise have been accepted. The technique of fear has been the foundation of all pandemic-related propaganda.

The Bandwagon: A claim is made that, because everyone else is doing it, so should you. This assertion is often combined with other propaganda techniques. You’ll recognize this all-too-familiar bandwagon entreaty: “Everyone is taking the shot because it is safe and effective; you should take it, too.”

Card Stacking: This technique highlights all the “good” information and leaves out the “bad.” In other words, only the facts that support the propagandist’s agenda are presented, while everything else is intentionally suppressed. This blatant censorship is rampant in the mainstream media, social media, and search engines these days.

Plain Folks: The propagandist implies that he’s just an ordinary person like you, with the same dreams and desires, and therefore you should believe him.

The Testimonial: A person unrelated to a product testifies that the propaganda about the product is true and that you can trust his word. Often the ideal testifier is a likeable, credible celebrity. Other times the person giving the testimonial is a “nobody” who is chosen because he comes off as one of the “plain folks” described above.

Glittering Generalities: Propaganda is sometimes unquestioningly accepted simply because the sweeping statements it makes cannot be defined and often contain vague “virtue words.” Examples: “This anti-discrimination program will ensure equity for all” and “We will create millions of green jobs with this budget.”

Name-Calling/Deflection: Ad hominem attacks leveled by a propagandist can serve to deflect negative attention away from himself and toward someone else. For example, global warming scaremonger Al Gore once said threateningly, “Deniers deserved to be punished.” Today’s name-callers claim that America has a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and they target for ad hominem attacks whoever resists being jabbed.

Transfer: This technique transfers an organization’s prestige to the propagandist’s program or product—thus giving that program or product the same degree of prestige. This propaganda tactic takes advantage of an organization’s desire to maintain its reputation, to follow the crowd, to obey the rules, to acquiesce to authority. Look at what happened when public health officials and political leaders persuaded the pastors of many US churches to promote pandemic propaganda to their congregations. Of course, church members eagerly complied with whatever “protection measures” pastors urged them to take.

False Analogy: When two concepts are linked together despite having no actual cause-and-effect relationship, it is called a false analogy or false equivalence. Here’s an attempt to do just that: “People who question vaccines are anti-vaxxers. Mary does not want to take the COVID vaccine. Thus, Mary is an anti-vaxxer.”

Either/Or Fallacy: “Black-and-white” thinking offers only two choices, even though there might be other admissible answers. The either/or fallacy polarizes people and forces them to accept the outcome desired by the fallacy-promoter. Which of us wants to agree with “You are either for science or against it” when our understanding of “science” is antithetical to the propagandist’s?

Faulty Cause and Effect: This technique suggests that because A follows B, A must cause B. For example, (A) Joe supports gun ownership, and (B) murderers often use guns to kill people; therefore, Joe must be a murderer himself—or at least a fan of murderers.

Euphemisms: It isn’t uncommon for propagandists to use a word or phrase that pretends to communicate truth but in fact does the opposite. One rhetorical device they employ to that end is the euphemism, which “replaces accurate language that may be offensive with language that is more palatable, to instill a positive association,” as The Propwatch Project puts it. Thus, the propagandist’s euphemistic “alternative facts” really means “outright false or misleading claims.” Likewise, the propagandistic UN uses the euphemism “sustainable development” to hide its true technocratic intentions: “social engineering” of the masses.

Loaded Words: Related to name-calling, loaded words are what the propagandist uses to describe perfectly normal actions and completely ordinary circumstances. You may remember the egregious, extremist language the US government used when it labeled parents who rightfully protest at school board meetings “domestic terrorists” who commit “hate crimes.”

Scapegoat: Quite simply, the age-old scapegoat technique assigns blame to someone who is not a party to something. Two examples of scapegoating will suffice: (1) every presidential administration typically blames current economic woes on the previous administration; (2) after COVID vaccines were offered to the public, only the unvaccinated were blamed for the ongoing pandemic.

Logical Disconnect: The World Economic Forum is now famous for its ad campaign, “You will own nothing and be happy.” What a typical propagandist ploy, to say that happiness is the result of owning nothing, when everyone knows from experience that such a statement is totally illogical and untrue. A corollary to the WEF’s absurd claim might as well be: “Homeless people own nothing, therefore they must be happy.”[11]

At this point you might be thinking that whoever owns or influences the media would be smart to use these propaganda techniques in various combinations to achieve any conceivable end. You would be correct. The sad truth is, media owners and influencers are already employing this strategy. The sadder truth: It is the technocrats and their transhumanist twins who control Big Media—that is, all the legacy print media and television and radio stations plus all social media (think Facebook and Twitter and YouTube) in America.

Once we know the sources of propaganda and have examined the specific techniques, we can pinpoint the real objectives for promulgating the propaganda.

For instance, throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022, Big Media delivered a non-stop tsunami of propaganda urging everyone to get the COVID-19 mRNA injection to fight the virus. Before long it was discovered that the injections were ineffective and, in many cases, harmful. Turns out the goal of Big Pharma and the complicit captured agencies—in other words, their real objective—was not to prevent contagion but to introduce a new medical therapy. This therapy does something no vaccine ever did: It hacks the human immune system via genetic sequences that are engineered into the mRNA and in doing so ultimately edits the human genome. Not that the propagandists ever came out and said as much!

When we analyze the COVID “ vaccine” propaganda, it becomes clear that its source is the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, both of which are heavily influenced, if not dominated, by transhumanists and technocrats. It also becomes obvious that their promises have been at best disingenuous and at worst patently false. Many of its takers have suffered severely and become either permanently injured or a fatal statistic. The cause of their illness or death has been irrefutably determined to be one or more rounds of the COVID shot.

Is there a lesson we can take from this dangerous—often fatal—lie and apply it to our future run-ins with propaganda? Yes. Not just one lesson, but many lessons. One I propose we all heed is this: Whenever we detect propaganda at play, our knee-jerk reaction should always be to ask, “What is the product being sold to us by the propagandists?” and “What do those same propagandists say the product will do for us?” Invariably, the product is actually designed to do something far different from the propagandists’ plug—something far worse.

The Nudge

In 2008, Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago professor of behavioral economics, co-authored a book titled The Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. His “nudge theory” was quickly picked up by many governments, corporations, and non-governmental organizations, who began using it as an influential policy tool to manipulate the behavior of employees, customers, and citizens. Nine years later, Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on psychological biases in behavioral economics.[12]

Now let’s look—through the eyes of Henry Farrell, who teaches political science and international affairs at George Washington University—at the fallout from Thaler’s nudge theory, shall we? In a Vox article, Farrell provides a critical analysis of what has become known as “nudgeocracy,” or the practice of nudging. He writes:

Indeed, there are many circumstances under which nudges are a good idea. But the fad for nudgeocracy has hidden implications. Thaler and [co-author Cass] Sunstein describe the philosophy that underlies nudging as “libertarian paternalism” — libertarian because it lets people make the choices that they want to, paternalist because it provides them with a father’s guiding hand. Behind nudgeocracy lies the assumption that daddy knows best.

For Thaler and Sunstein, daddy is a “choice architect” — a skilled and intelligent technocrat who uses good data, good social science and his own intelligence to figure out what people would really want to do, if only they were as smart and well informed as the choice architect.”

Farrell concludes that nudging “amounts to a kind of technocracy, which assumes that experts will know which choices are in the interests of ordinary people better than those people know themselves. This may be true under some circumstances,” he continues, “but it will not be true all of the time, or even most of the time, if there are no good opportunities for those ordinary people to voice their preferences.”

Thaler and Sunstein apparently don’t believe that the “ordinary people” Farrell describes know how to “voice their preferences”—or that they even have the ability and the right to make their own choices. Hence:

Our goal, in short, is to help people make the choices that they would have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive ability, and complete self-control.

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.[13]

The nudging mechanism that controls people’s behavior is very subtle. As Thaler and Sunstein explain it, “nudge architects”—who fit my description of technocrats to a T—first determine what the most rational choice or decision should be in a given situation. Then they design a “nudge” to steer the target, without his conscious knowledge, to that outcome.

Fascinating, isn’t it, that Thaler and Sunstein believe they and their fellow practitioners always pay full attention, always possess complete information, always have unlimited cognitive ability and complete self-control. By contrast, they deem the rest of us perpetually deficient in attention, information, cognitive ability and self-control. Paternalism, indeed.

Similar to the standardized techniques of propaganda we listed above, nudging has developed its own behavior-influencing strategies—among them are social proof, numerical anchors, option restriction, and competition. It’s not necessary to know all the details of these nudging techniques, but it is important to recognize that nudging has become a highly developed discipline.

Much as I dislike referring to it, Google’s search engine provides a good example of nudging in action. When you type in a few letters to begin a new search, a tailored type-ahead list of choices is presented to you, offering one-click suggestions. Google’s nudge architects know you are much more likely to pick one of their completed suggestions than you are to type in your original search idea. What you may not realize is that Google very likely had already compiled information about your previous searches, preferences, purchases, etc. The autotype options it presents to you are nuanced by that data to trick you into selecting a certain destination of Google’s choosing. While your data can be used to sell you products, it can just as easily be used to nudge you to vote for certain political candidates.

In the hands of technocrats and their transhumanist twins, the practice of nudge theory has exploded since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020. Nudging has caused people to dutifully accept public health policies such as wearing masks, social distancing, working from home, and, ultimately, submitting to experimental mRNA-based injections. In other cases, where nudging alone didn’t get the job done, outright mandates were put in place to force compliance.

One journal reported on the effect of nudging in Great Britain during 2020–2022:

This politics of behavior has given rise to a new form of technocratic governance. Then prime minister David Cameron gave this technocracy its most explicit form when he helped set up the Nudge Unit in 2010. This was charged with the task of developing policies that could shape people’s thoughts, choices and actions. As far as the nudgers were concerned, subliminal psychological techniques were preferable to democratic debate and argument.[14]

The article goes on to say:

A government that substitutes its own preferences in place of people’s free will is clearly one which does not take freedom seriously. In effect, nudging allows experts to try to colonize people’s internal life and attempt to make their decisions for them .[15]

When the cunning, crafty art of nudging and the devious, deceptive art of propaganda are employed together to achieve specific outcomes, they represent the height of technocracy’s “science of social engineering.” This is not to say that there are no other tools available, but the combination of nudging and propagandizing is a solid one-two knockout punch.

What, then, is the role of newly popularized “mass formation”?

Mass Formation

How many times in the past three years have you heard the question, “Why are people so gullible?” They usually go on to describe a driver who is alone in the car with the windows rolled up and a face mask on—for protection from a virus the mask cannot possibly protect against.

One man who has attempted to answer that question is Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and one of the world’s leading experts on totalitarianism and mass formation.

Desmet published his much-anticipated book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism , in June 2022. In it, he lays out his theory of mass formation, a subject he had been interviewed about and had written articles about—bringing him much attention—over the previous twenty-four months. According to Desmet, “mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically.” He points out that today’s totalitarianism is led not by iconic dictators like Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler but by “dull bureaucrats and technocrats.”[16]

To his credit, Desmet accurately explains the “narrative of mechanistic science, in which man is reduced to a biological organism” and becomes an “insignificant by-product of mechanistic processes”[17] :

Man may not realize it, but his humanity does not really matter, it is nothing essential. His whole existence, his longing and his lust, his romantic lamentations and his most superficial needs, his joy and his sorrow, his doubt and his choices, his anger and unreasonableness, his pleasure and his suffering, his deepest aversion and his most lofty aesthetic appreciations, in short, the entire drama of his existence, can ultimately be reduced to elementary particles that interact according to the laws of mechanics.[18]

This is, of course, the essence of both technocracy and transhumanism.

Desmet believes there are four simultaneous conditions necessary for a group to form and fall into mass formation. All the individuals in that group must:

Experience a lack of social bonds and isolation 

See life as meaningless or senseless 

Have free-floating anxiety (be anxious but unable to pinpoint why) 

Have free-floating frustration and aggression [19] 

When these four conditions exist in an individual who is then presented with a narrative that identifies the object of his anxiety, frustration, and aggression, that individual is prone to falling into mass formation. Doing so enables him to regain both meaning in his life and social bonds with like-minded persons. This temporary psychological state satisfies him but is extremely dangerous, because he has forfeited his ability to think critically, independently.

Desmet’s theory of mass formation perfectly explains events like the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, where 909 followers were led by Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones to drink a poison-laced suicide concoction that sent them all to an instant and early death.

Where Desmet errs, however, is in his answer to the question he pointedly asks, “Should we consider mass formation the result of a conspiracy?” Desmet says no. Instead, he posits, authoritarian leaders are drawn into the mass formation themselves and they then solidify and perpetuate their condition. He further suggests:

As such, in a certain sense, conspiracy thinking — the thinking that reduces all world events to one big conspiracy — fulfills the same function as mass formation. As with mass formation, conspiracy theorizing fills humans with a kind of enthusiasm. The anxiety, anger, and discontent that are now associated with a few simple mental images transform a strongly negative state into a (symptomatic) positive one .[20]

Apparently Desmet has not considered: Who creates and distributes the narrative that causes the mass formation in the first place? Is it possible to use social engineering techniques to artificially create the four conditions that he says are necessary for spontaneous mass formation? Are the social engineers who actively set out to deceive and subjugate people more to blame than the victims whom they induce into the condition of mass formation?

As the co-author of two books on the globalist Trilateral Commission and the sole author of three books on the globalist technocratic movement (this book being the third), I have followed the process of globalization and the perpetrators of that process for the past forty-five years. In that time, I have observed that there are most definitely despotic figures who conspire together to lay out strategies that achieve certain ends—ends that inevitably and I dare say purposefully target many innocent victims.

When, for instance, United Nations executive Christiana Figueres stated that the UN intended to overthrow capitalism and free market economics, that it had created a timetable to achieve it, that it had the means to do so, and that it was taking immediate action to start the process—she was defining a classic conspiracy. Could Figueres be called a victim of mass formation? As an ideologue, yes. But as one of its hypnotized subjects, no, most certainly not. She was a witting fellow conspirator in a globalist plot, pure and simple.

I will concede that partial blame must be accepted by every adult who has fallen into mass formation. The hundreds of men and women who died in the Jonestown Massacre should never have entered the trap in the first place. (Of course the innocent children whose parents brought them into the cult are excused from all blame.) That said, I acknowledge that it was their cult leader alone who mixed the mass suicide cocktail and ordered them to drink it.

As a psychoanalyst and researcher, Desmet is able to conceive of the mechanics involved in creating and perpetuating mass formation. He is a cogent observer and explicator of the subject. His warnings against mass formation should be taken to heart.

Why? Because the creators and perpetuators of mass formation turn out to be technocrats and transhumanists—the very ones who have dedicated their entire careers to implementing and enforcing the science of social engineering. Thus, in this writer’s opinion, mass formation in the hands of today’s technocrats and transhumanists is as dangerous to civilization as the invention of the atomic bomb.

The evidence, especially since 2020, suggests that those technocrats and transhumanists are deploying the tools of social engineering against rest of the world to the fullest extent. They are conspiring to bring about the most dangerous period of mass formation in human history.

Footnotes

[1] B. F. Skinner, Cumulative Record (B. F. Skinner Foundation, 1999) p. 182.

[2] Britannica’s definition of mechanism: “In philosophy, mechanism is the predominant form of Materialism, which holds that natural phenomena can and should be explained by reference to matter and motion and their laws. It rejected the notion of organisms by reducing biological functions to physical and chemical processes, thus putting an end to spirit–body dualism.”

https://www.britannica.com/topic/mechanism-philosophy .

[3] Britannica’s definition of Taylorism: A “system of scientific management advocated by Fred W. Taylor. In Taylor’s view, the task of factory management was to determine the best way for the worker to do the job, to provide the proper tools and training, and to provide incentives for good performance.” https://www.britannica.com/science/Taylorism .

[4] Britannica’s definition of systems theory (also called social systems theory): “In social science, the study of society as a complex arrangement of elements, including individuals and their beliefs, as they relate to a whole (e.g., a country).” https://www.britannica.com/topic/systems-theory .

[5] “What is Technocracy,” The Technocrat , 1938.

[6] Richard C. Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe , (University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 1.

[7] Op cit., p. 242–243.

[8] Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Horace Liveright, Inc., 1928), p. 8.

[9] Ibid., p. 159.

[10] Gehl, Robert and Lawson, Sean, “Masters of Crowds: The Rise of Mass Social Engineering,” The MIT Press Reader. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/masters-of-crowds-the-rise-of-mass-social-engineering .

[11] Wood, Patrick, “Exposing Propaganda: The Vaccine For Liberty, Truth And Reason,” Technocracy News & Trends, January 17, 2022. https://www.technocracy.news/exposing-propaganda-the-vaccine-for-liberty-truth-and-reason .

[12] Farrell, Henry, “This year’s economics Nobel winner invented a tool that’s both brilliant and undemocratic,” Vox , October 16, 2017. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/10/16/16481836/nudges-thaler-nobel-economics-prize-undemocratic-tool .

[13] Ibid., p. 9.

[14] Furedi, Frank, “’Nudge’ has no place in our democracy,” spiked , January 14, 2022. https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/14/nudge-has-no-place-in-our-democracy

[15] Ibid.

[16] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022), p. 2.

[17] Ibid., p. 17.

[18] Ibid., p. 17.

[19] Ibid., p. 94–96

[20] Ibid., p. 128.

The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism

Patrick Wood

The AIDS War Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical- Industrial Complex

 INTRODUCTION

The perils of telling the truth became known to me at the age of six. Just before Christmas I asked my parents if there were really a Santa Claus. They told me, and a few days later I told my play- mates, who before that had been at least skeptical. Then the flak began. My mother received calls from bitter, sobbing women: their Christmas had been ruined by me! She listened patiently. That evening my father held a frank family discussion. I had done nothing wrong, he counseled, and it was always right to tell the truth — but it was also good to be cautious, for others were not so rational as we.

I do not regret telling the truth about “AIDS”.' I have taken my share of blows for so doing, and I have also given a few — and I have survived, in good health and spirits. The AIDS epidemic is an epidemic of lies, through which hundreds of thousands of people have died and are dying unnecessarily, billions of dollars have gone down the drain, the Public Health Service has disgraced itself, and Science has plunged into whoredom.

The official AIDS paradigm — including the preposterous notion that a biochemically inactive microbe, the so-called “human immunodeficiency virus” (HIV-1), causes the (at last count) 29 AIDS-indicator diseases — represents the most colossal blunder in medical history. But it is more than a blunder. In the course of this book it will become plain why I have employed the metaphor of war: the terrible suffering and loss of life, propaganda, censorship, rumors, hysteria, profiteering, espionage, and sabotage.

This book has been written in the shadow of censorship, which is unofficial, but all-pervasive. Though I might have found a mainstream publisher with the courage to publish it, I have chosen to use my own press. This way I am my own master. No editor has imposed political correctness on me, or stylebook punctuation.

The disadvantage is that I have had to do most of the work myself, including proofreading, which means that inevitably there are mistakes. I apologize for these, and would be grateful to readers who let me know about them — anything from mistakes of fact to dangling participles or faulty verb sequences.

In a way, The AIDS War is the second volume to my first AIDS book, Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story. It is a collection of my major writings on “AIDS”, going back to February 1985: dispatches from the front. I want them to stand for the record, so that no one, when the truth finally prevails, can pretend there were no AIDS- critics, or that we didn’t speak out.

A number of chapters were written especially for this book, and their placement in it is somewhat arbitrary. The most important are Chapter IX: “The Risk-AIDS Hypothesis”, in which I discuss the nature and causes of “AIDS”; and Chapter XX: “Recovery From AIDS”, in which I put forward a comprehensive program of recovery for those with a diagnosis of “AIDS”.

I began researching “AIDS” in early 1983. Initially I was shocked by the incompetence with which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) conducted survey research, my own profession since 1966.

Later I would be shocked by the dishonesty, venality, and ruthless- ness of the AIDS Establishment. It became apparent, after a few years, that I could not do AIDS research and hold down a very demanding job at the same time, so I became a full-time writer, which is what I had always wanted to be.

For a decade of my life I have been fighting on the front lines of the AIDS War, and not alone. Many of my comrades appear as the heroes and heroines of this book. A great many more people have helped me, and I wish I could acknowledge them all — though if I tried, I would probably forget a few. My thanks to all of you.

I am most grateful to Charles Ortleb, publisher of the New York Native and Christopher Street, in whose pages most of my articles originally appeared. While we don’t agree on everything, he has always supported my right to think for myself. My thanks also to L. Craig Schoonmaker and Jan Young, who criticized important chapters and provided practical assistance.

**
The “AIDS epidemic” is, among other things, an epidemic of information overload. AIDS technobabble is dumped on us every day by the media: T-cell ratios, CD-4 receptors, DNA, RNA, latency periods, TAT genes, ELISA test, Western Blot test, p-24 antigen test, polymerase chain reaction test, angiogenesis, nucleoside analogues, AZT, ddI, ddC, d4T, macrophages, lentiviruses, reverse transcriptase, apoptosis, and all the rest of it. Over 60,000 papers on “AIDS” have been published to date — untold millions of words. Nearly all are the intellectual equivalent of toxic waste, which is to say, both useless and dangerous.

At base “AIDS” is really very simple, and yet, paradoxically, it is an uphill struggle to convey that simplicity. I'll do my best.
According to the official paradigm, “AIDS” is new and consti- tutes a coherent, single disease entity — despite the fact that “AIDS” itself has neither symptoms nor diagnostic criteria that are peculiar to itself. Other diseases, such as mumps, measles, polio, chicken pox, rabies, gonorrhea, malaria, salmonella, the common cold, or bubonic plague, can all readily be described and diagnosed. This is not the case with “AIDS”, which is defined entirely in terms of other, old diseases, in conjunction with dubious test results? and even more dubious assumptions. Although people are undeniably sick, “AIDS” itself does not really exist; it is a phoney construct.

“AIDS” is officially defined as the presence of one or more indicator diseases or conditions, none of which is new, plus the tendentiously named “human immunodeficiency virus” (HIV).
INDICATOR DISEASE + HIV = AIDS. Originally there were two indicator diseases: pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS). With the latest change in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) surveillance definition, in 1992, the list of indicator diseases has grown to almost 30; at the same time, there is now talk of dropping KS from the list, as KS not infrequently occurs in individuals — typical members of “risk groups” — in whom there is no evidence of either past or present infection with HIV. The definition is of course a tautology: by requiring the presence of HIV for a diagnosis of “AIDS”, the CDC has given the retrovirus a causal role as an artefact of the definition.

According to the official paradigm, the indicator diseases in an “AIDS” patient are caused by an underlying condition of “immune deficiency”, which is caused by HIV. In fact, everything about the paradigm is wrong. The presumed condition of immune deficiency is not present in all “AIDS” patients; the tests used to diagnose immune deficiency are new, highly inaccurate, and without adequate benchmarks; many of the extremely heterogenous indicator diseases
are not even caused by immune deficiency; and the hypothesized microbial culprit, HIV, is harmless. The AIDS/HIV mythology as a whole represents the biggest blunder in the history of medicine.

The purpose of this chapter is not to refute the HIV-AIDS hypothesis; that was sufficiently done by molecular biologist Peter Duesberg six years ago. Rather, my aim is to present an alternative paradigm, another way of looking at things. I’ll put forward hypotheses as to the real nature of “AIDS” and what its causes might be in different risk groups and in isolated individuals.‘ First, however, let’s clear the slate from all the HIV-related gobbledygook that has prevented clear thinking on the subject.

Two false hypotheses The HIV-AIDS hypothesis is the first false one. It was a foolish hypothesis from the very beginning, and has persisted for over eight years only owing to the cowardice and stupidity of the media and the ruthlessness of the vested interests that comprise the burgeoning HIV-AIDS industry.

HIV cannot be the cause of serious illness, AIDS or otherwise, for reasons of molecular biology. HIV is consistently inactive from a biochemical standpoint, even in patients who are dying from “AIDS”. This argument alone is a devastating and sufficient refutation of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. A biochemically inactive microbe cannot cause illness, any more than the reader of this book could rob a bank at the same time he was in a coma. HIV is a “profoundly conventional retrovirus”, and it is in the nature of retroviruses to coexist peacefully with their hosts.

HIV fails all of Koch’s Postulates, the standard criteria for establishing a causal relationship between a particular microbe and a particular disease. The first postulate, which amounts to good common sense, stipulates that the suspected microbial culprit should be found in all cases of the disease, and especially in tumors associated with the disease. In fact, disregarding for a moment the tautology of the AIDS definition, HIV cannot be detected in a substantial number of AIDS patients, even using the most sensitive, space age techniques. HIV cannot be found in KS lesions. In terms of the virus itself (as opposed to merely viral antibodies or signals), it is impossible to isolate HIV from at least 10 to 20 percent of “AIDS” patients. When a microbe flunks the first postulate, the other three become irrelevant; the microbe cannot be the cause.° The HIV-AIDS hypothesis is also refuted by the epidemiology of the epidemic. Infectious diseases spread, yet “AIDS” has not. For over a decade it has remained rigidly compartmentalized, confined almost entirely to two main risk groups: intravenous drug users and gay men. “AIDS” affects nine times as many males as females, whereas no truly infectious disease would be so gender-selective.

The great bulk of “AIDS” cases fall into the age range of 30 to 45 years, exactly the age group that normally would have the greatest bodily resistance to infectious diseases.‘

The AIDS hypothesis is more fundamental: the hypothesis that “AIDS” exists in any rationally definable way. “AIDS” was from the very beginning a phoney construct, the product of muddled thinking and hidden agendas. Under the obfuscatory rubric of “AIDS” lies the reality of people who are sick in diverse ways and for diverse reasons. The first cases were identified among gay men. (It was then called “GRID”, which stood for “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency”.) The CDC trumpeted forth the message that the gay men with “AIDS” had been incredibly promiscuous. Indeed, some of them had been, in terms of annual numbers of sexual partners.
But in order to understand something like this statistically, it is necessary to see the entire distribution. CDC “analysts” presented only the mean, which is merely one way of expressing the average.

In evaluating “promiscuity” as a risk factor, it is also important to know whether some gay male PWAs had little sex or none at all. Deliberately or not, the CDC researchers omitted this information from their published statistics.
Originally “AIDS” stood for “Auto-Immune Deficiency Syn- drome”. When the folks in the CDC realized that this particular construct would not fly, but the acronym had caught on, they changed it to “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’.

In 1982 the CDC came across ten Haitians who had PCP, toxo- plasmosis, cryptococcus, candidiasis and tuberculosis — which are common in Haiti, though not in the U.S. Simply because the CDC people were unfamiliar with them, they attributed these very heterogeneous diseases (caused by funguses and mycobacteria) to “AIDS”, which, according to their own belief system, the world had never seen before. Through accretions of nonsense like this, the AIDS definition grew into the monstrosity we see at present.

The Risk-AIDS hypothesis

The phrase, “Risk-AIDS hypothesis”, was coined by Peter Duesberg as an alternative to the prevailing HIV-AIDS hypothesis. He and molecular biology graduate student Bryan Ellison have defined it in the following terms:
The alternative views of AIDS can be grouped together as the “risk hypothesis” of AIDS — that the AIDS diseases are entirely separate conditions caused by a variety of factors, most of which have in common only that they involve risk behavior. This view does not see AIDS as being a transmissible condition at all.’

More specifically Duesberg has defined the Risk-AIDS hypothesis as follows:

The risk-AIDS hypothesis suggests that AIDS is caused primarily by non-infectious agents. These include psychoactive drugs, over-medication with antibiotics, and above all AZT, a chain terminator of DNA synthesis administered to treat HIV infection since 1987.

The basic idea here is that different “risk groups” and different individuals are getting sick in different ways and for different reasons. We need to find out what risks have affected their health in ways that caused them to develop one or more of the 30 old illnesses that qualify for a diagnosis of “AIDS”.

With regard to any specific risk group, the question is not, “Why have these people developed AIDS?”, but rather, “Why are these people sick?”. I shall attempt to answer this question, one risk group at a time, in the rest of this chapter.

First, however, it is necessary to address the issue of “blaming the victim”. For several years Peter Duesberg and I and other AIDS dissidents have been subjected to an international slander campaign, the gist of which is that, by challenging the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, we are “blaming the victims”. We have been accused of harboring all kinds of bigotry, including “homophobia” and “drugophobia”.’ I have no desire to point the finger of blame at those who are sick, or to increase their suffering, but I refuse to tell lies under the guise of sensitivity. Lives are at stake, and there is no way to formulate rational risk-reduction or treatment guidelines without telling the truth about etiology. To pretend that the behavior of PWAs has nothing to do with their being sick, is to kill with a false kindness.

Why are IV drug users sick?

Intravenous drug users ([VDUs) represent 29% of the total “AIDS” cases.’° There are three possible hypotheses on why they are getting sick: One, because of shared needles; two, because of the drugs; or three, both. Although the first hypothesis now prevails, it falsely assumes that the drugs themselves are innocuous and play no role in making people sick. Therefore, only the second and third hypotheses are tenable.

To my knowledge no study has ever been conducted to determine whether all, or even most, IVDUs with “AIDS” ever did share needles, although such research would be simple, straightforward, and inexpensive. I’ve spoken to many public health officials who believed that such research existed, but none has ever been able to provide a reference. I have spoken to many I[VDUs — some with “AIDS” and some not, some still using drugs and some “clean and dry”. When I asked them if they had ever shared needles, the overwhelming response has been: “Share needles? Are you crazy? What would I do that for?”

In an interview, the novelist William Burroughs, a man with many decades of knowledge about drugs, expressed skepticism regarding the needles allegedly shared by all IVDUs with “AIDS”:

They say junkies share needles, and that they can’t afford to buy needles. If someone can get up fifty dollars a day for any sort of habit, he can pay two dollars for needles. For an outfit. Now the outfits, a plastic syringe and needle, are sold right in the drug drop for two dollars. There’s no reason for them to share needles — unless some of them are ignorant beyond belief. They know about the danger of serum hepatitis. You can get serum hepatitis, malaria, and syphilis from sharing needles. Serum hepatitis is a very serious condition. So I wonder to what extent they are sharing needles.”

In Italy, 1VDUs comprise the great bulk (about 80%) of “AIDS” cases, and yet needle-sharing is almost unknown. Needles are sold legally in Italy, and anyone can walk into a drug store and buy one.

To anyone who has eyes to see, it is obvious that IVDUs are getting sick now for the same reasons and in the same ways that they were getting sick long before the advent of “AIDS”. Most IVDUs are dying of lung disease, just as they were dying of lung disease 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Dr. Polly Thomas, of the New York City Health Department, has stated publicly that an IVDU with pneumonia or tuberculosis and HIV antibodies would be counted as an “AIDS” case, under the assumption that HIV was the sole cause — however, if the same IVDU had pneumonia but no HIV antibodies, it would be assumed that the drugs were the cause.” He would be just one more junkie with lung disease.

AnIVDU with TB and HIV has “AIDS”; an IVDU with TB but no HIV has TB! This kind of logic belongs in Alice in Wonderland. The reality is that no one has ever observed the slightest difference in clinical profile between patients with any of the indicator diseases plus HIV and those with the same diseases minus HIV. If HIV plays no role in making such patients sicker, or even in altering their clinical profiles, why should anyone assume that HIV is pathogenic at all?

According to British epidemiologist Gordon Stewart, the classic profile of an IVDU and the profile of an “AIDS” patient are one and the same: emaciation and lung disease.’? From 1968 to 1971 — more than a decade before the appearance of “AIDS” — he studied drug addicts in the United States, about whom his team made the following observations:

They were often extremely emaciated, suffering from wasting diseases, various weird blood-borne infections with skin bacteria, Candida and Cryptococci, which would not ordinarily be regarded as pathogenic in their own right... We didn’t find Kaposi’s sarcoma and we didn’t find Pneumocystis (carinii pneumonia) but, then, we weren’t looking for it.”

In his paper, “The role of drugs in the origin of AIDS”, Peter Duesberg cites over a dozen medical references which indicate:

“From as early as 1909 evidence has accumulated that addiction to psychoactive drugs leads to immune suppression and clinical abnormalities similar to AIDS.”

The toxic consequences of drug abuse have been common knowledge for a long, long time. A popular home medical guide cites the following chronic toxicities for heroin and other opiates: “increasing tolerance for the drug, psychological and physical addiction manifested in an intense craving, and a host of physical ailments including liver dysfunctions, pneumonia, lung abscesses, and brain disorders.””*

On a personal note: nothing in the entire AIDS mythology is more unreal to me than the mentality of the AIDS experts regarding IVDUs with “AIDS”. Given their belief in the infectious disease paradigm, I can understand their willingness to believe that all IVDUs with “AIDS” have shared needles, unlikely though that assumption appears to be. But I cannot comprehend their intransi- gent blindness regarding the adverse physical consequences of drug abuse.

I have lived in New York City’s Lower East Side for two and a half decades, and I have observed what drugs do to people. I have seen healthy young guys arrive on the scene in the spring, and then later in the year I have seen the same people standing on the corner and begging — feeble, wizened old men. I have seen dead bodies propped up against walls or sprawled across sidewalks, waiting for EMS units to haul them away. I have watched a person die of a drug overdose.
(It was a late summer afternoon in the glass-roofed back room of a bar. I had spoken a few words to an affable fellow from Latin America, and later observed him lying on a bench. Then all of a sudden he was down on the floor, large amounts of pinkish froth coming out of his mouth and nostrils. People tried to help him. His body jerked a couple of times and he died.) Drugs make people sick. Drug users are getting sick from using drugs. Is it possible for anything to be more obvious?

The AIDS War
Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical- Industrial Complex
John Lauritsen

Politics and the English Language

 

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language – so the arguments runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influences of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa).

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction to proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervour on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet.

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream – as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless, bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery: the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power. and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changeson, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, rift within the lute, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien régime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, Gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.1 The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking’ in meaning.2 Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding features of Mr X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3, above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing – no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective consideration of contemporary phenomena’ – would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry – when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech – it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting-pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink. In (5) words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning – they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another – but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are obbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright,’ I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: ‘(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write – feels, presumably, that he has something new to say – and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence,3 to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot,Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

Horizon, April 1946; Modem British Writing ed. Denys Val Baker, 1947, S.E.; O.R.; C.E.

George Orwell 

Symbols

 

Probably it will elucidate the drift of these foregoing obscure utterances, if we here insert somewhat of our Professor’s speculations on Symbols. To state his whole doctrine, indeed, were beyond our compass: nowhere is he more mysterious, impalpable, than in this of “Fantasy being the organ of the Godlike;” and how “Man thereby, though based, to all seeming, on the small Visible, does nevertheless extend down into the infinite deeps of the Invisible, of which Invisible, indeed, his Life is properly the bodying forth.” Let us, omitting these high transcendental aspects of the matter, study to glean (whether from the Paper-bags or the Printed Volume) what little seems logical and practical, and cunningly arrange it into such degree of coherence as it will assume. By way of proem, take the following not injudicious remarks: — 

“The benignant efficacies of Concealment,” cries our Professor, “who shall speak or sing? SILENCE and SECRECY! Altars might still be raised to them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

“Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence: neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of ‘those secrets known to all.’ Is not Shame (Schaam) the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the sun. Let the sun shine on it, nay do but look at it privily thyself, the root withers, and no flower will glad thee. O my Friends, when we view the fair clustering flowers that overwreathe, for example, the Marriage-bower, and encircle man’s life with the fragrance and hues of Heaven, what hand will not smite the foul plunderer that grubs them up by the roots, and, with grinning, grunting satisfaction, shows us the dung they flourish in! Men speak much of the Printing Press with its Newspapers: du Himmel! what are these to Clothes and the Tailor’s Goose?

“Of kin to the so incalculable influences of Concealment, and connected with still greater things, is the wondrous agency of Symbols. In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation; here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their union be! Thus in many a painted Device, or simple Seal-emblem, the commonest Truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite new emphasis.

“For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By Symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched: He everywhere finds himself encompassed with Symbols, recognized as such or not recognized: the Universe is but one vast Symbol of God; nay if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given force that is in him; a ‘Gospel of Freedom,’ which he, the ‘Messias of Nature,’ preaches, as he can, by act and word? Not a Hut he builds but is the visible embodiment of a Thought; but bears visible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendental sense, symbolical as well as real.”

“Man,” says the Professor elsewhere, in quite antipodal contrast with these high-soaring delineations, which we have here cut short on the verge of the inane, “Man is by birth somewhat of an owl. Perhaps, too, of all the owleries that ever possessed him, the most owlish, if we consider it, is that of your actually existing Motive-Millwrights. Fantastic tricks enough man has played, in his time; has fancied himself to be most things, down even to an animated heap of Glass: but to fancy himself a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on, was reserved for this his latter era. There stands he, his Universe one huge Manger, filled with hay and thistles to be weighed against each other; and looks long-eared enough. Alas, poor devil! spectres are appointed to haunt him: one age he is hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priest-ridden, befooled; in all ages, bedevilled. And now the Genius of Mechanism smothers him worse than any Nightmare did; till the Soul is nigh choked out of him, and only a kind of Digestive, Mechanic life remains. In Earth and in Heaven he can see nothing but Mechanism; has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing else: the world would indeed grind him to pieces; but cannot he fathom the Doctrine of Motives, and cunningly compute these, and mechanize them to grind the other way?

“Were he not, as has been said, purblinded by enchantment, you had but to bid him open his eyes and look. In which country, in which time, was it hitherto that man’s history, or the history of any man, went on by calculated or calculable ‘Motives’? What make ye of your Christianities, and Chivalries, and Reformations, and Marseillaise Hymns, and Reigns of Terror? Nay, has not perhaps the Motive-grinder himself been in Love? Did he never stand so much as a contested Election? Leave him to Time, and the medicating virtue of Nature.”

“Yes, Friends,” elsewhere observes the Professor, “not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward. Nay, even for the basest Sensualist, what is Sense but the implement of Fantasy; the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the dullest existence there is a sheen either of Inspiration or of Madness (thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two), that gleams in from the circumambient Eternity, and colors with its own hues our little islet of Time. The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving retina, healthy or diseased. Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows’-meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they called their Flag; which, had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? Did not the whole Hungarian Nation rise, like some tumultuous moon-stirred Atlantic, when Kaiser Joseph pocketed their Iron Crown; an implement, as was sagaciously observed, in size and commercial value little differing from a horse-shoe? It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognize symbolical worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike?

“Of Symbols, however, I remark farther, that they have both an extrinsic and intrinsic value; oftenest the former only. What, for instance, was in that clouted Shoe, which the Peasants bore aloft with them as ensign in their Bauernkrieg (Peasants’ War)? Or in the Wallet-and-staff round which the Netherland Gueux, glorying in that nickname of Beggars, heroically rallied and prevailed, though against King Philip himself? Intrinsic significance these had none: only extrinsic; as the accidental Standards of multitudes more or less sacredly uniting together; in which union itself, as above noted, there is ever something mystical and borrowing of the Godlike. Under a like category, too, stand, or stood, the stupidest heraldic Coats-of-arms; military Banners everywhere; and generally all national or other sectarian Costumes and Customs: they have no intrinsic, necessary divineness, or even worth; but have acquired an extrinsic one. Nevertheless through all these there glimmers something of a Divine Idea; as through military Banners themselves, the Divine Idea of Duty, of heroic Daring; in some instances of Freedom, of Right. Nay the highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

“Another matter it is, however, when your Symbol has intrinsic meaning, and is of itself fit that men should unite round it. Let but the Godlike manifest itself to Sense, let but Eternity look, more or less visibly, through the Time-Figure (Zeitbild)! Then is it fit that men unite there; and worship together before such Symbol; and so from day to day, and from age to age, superadd to it new divineness.

“Of this latter sort are all true Works of Art: in them (if thou know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternity looking through Time; the Godlike rendered visible. Here too may an extrinsic value gradually superadd itself: thus certain Iliads, and the like, have, in three thousand years, attained quite new significance. But nobler than all in this kind are the Lives of heroic god-inspired Men; for what other Work of Art is so divine? In Death too, in the Death of the Just, as the last perfection of a Work of Art, may we not discern symbolic meaning? In that divinely transfigured Sleep, as of Victory, resting over the beloved face which now knows thee no more, read (if thou canst for tears) the confluence of Time with Eternity, and some gleam of the latter peering through.

“Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen into Prophet, and all men can recognize a present God, and worship the Same: I mean religious Symbols. Various enough have been such religious Symbols, what we call Religions; as men stood in this stage of culture or the other, and could worse or better body forth the Godlike: some Symbols with a transient intrinsic worth; many with only an extrinsic. If thou ask to what height man has carried it in this manner, look on our divinest Symbol: on Jesus of Nazareth, and his Life, and his Biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human Thought not yet reached: this is Christianity and Christendom; a Symbol of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest.

“But, on the whole, as Time adds much to the sacredness of Symbols, so likewise in his progress he at length defaces, or even desecrates them; and Symbols, like all terrestrial Garments, wax old. Homer’s Epos has not ceased to be true; yet it is no longer our Epos, but shines in the distance, if clearer and clearer, yet also smaller and smaller, like a receding Star. It needs a scientific telescope, it needs to be reinterpreted and artificially brought near us, before we can so much as know that it was a Sun. So likewise a day comes when the Runic Thor, with his Eddas, must withdraw into dimness; and many an African Mumbo-Jumbo and Indian Pawaw be utterly abolished. For all things, even Celestial Luminaries, much more atmospheric meteors, have their rise, their culmination, their decline.

“Small is this which thou tellest me, that the Royal Sceptre is but a piece of gilt wood; that the Pyx has become a most foolish box, and truly, as Ancient Pistol thought, ‘of little price.’ A right Conjurer might I name thee, couldst thou conjure back into these wooden tools the divine virtue they once held.

“Of this thing, however, be certain: wouldst thou plant for Eternity, then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his Fantasy and Heart; wouldst thou plant for Year and Day, then plant into his shallow superficial faculties, his Self-love and Arithmetical Understanding, what will grow there. A Hierarch, therefore, and Pontiff of the World will we call him, the Poet and inspired Maker; who, Prometheus-like, can shape new Symbols, and bring new Fire from Heaven to fix it there. Such too will not always be wanting; neither perhaps now are. Meanwhile, as the average of matters goes, we account him Legislator and wise who can so much as tell when a Symbol has grown old, and gently remove it.

“When, as the last English Coronation [*] I was preparing,” concludes this wonderful Professor, “I read in their Newspapers that the ‘Champion of England,’ he who has to offer battle to the Universe for his new King, had brought it so far that he could now ‘mount his horse with little assistance,’ I said to myself: Here also we have a Symbol well-nigh superannuated. Alas, move whithersoever you may, are not the tatters and rags of superannuated worn-out Symbols (in this Ragfair of a World) dropping off everywhere, to hoodwink, to halter, to tether you; nay, if you shake them not aside, threatening to accumulate, and perhaps produce suffocation?”

    * That of George IV. — ED.

The Works of

THOMAS CARLYLE