Member-only story
Logicide and authoritarianism: thoughts on why “dark” is now a double plus good adjective
One of the clear findings of research on 20th century forms of closed or dictatorial societies, sometimes called “totalitarian”, is that the damage to basic norms they do extends even to language. (See Camus, Arendt, Orwell and more)
Terms and slogans from Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, until recently, sounded completely foreign to people raised in the liberal democracies. All this talk of The People and The Revolution and The Leader, let alone the bureaucratese language which inevitably accompanies government crimes, like “final solution.”
Analysts of totalitarian language also identify “logicide” as one invariable feature. It’s appearing now, and has been for a while, in the US and the world of the tech-bros, fast becoming our new gods.
“Logicide” is the destruction of the old meaning of words, and their complete resignification. That means, their complete change of meaning.
In Nazism, for instance, following Nietzsche, “barbarian” became a positive term. In Nazism, it was also double plus good to be “fanatical”, a Nazi “fanatic”.
