Off-beat Political Jargon
In one of my fantasy future lives, I write some sort of kick-ass political manifesto.
Of course, for it to be a successful manifesto, it needs to be chock full of opaque political jargon. People must actually learn a new language to be able to understand it--this makes it impossible for devotees to accept criticism from without. The only people who have a chance of being listened to will be people who buy in, learn the lingo, then defect. But by that time, so many of the dissenters will have been filtered out that the remaining few can be ignored.
I think this is why Marxism lasted so long.
[All of this is of course wild speculation...]
[...wild speculation that reminds me of Poetic Terrorism. Remember this? "Ontological anarchy"? What can that possibly mean? It's not worth the effort to decipher it, thus the jargon becomes insulation from all sorts of thoughtful questions...]
[..also it reminds me of Richard Stallman's insistence on people using his terminology when referring to open source/free software.]
Anyway, all of this is just introduction for the following point: In my opaque political jargon, I'm going to insist on replacing "special interests" with "special ignorances." I think the switch combines genuine sympathy with damning condescension really nicely.
Of course, for it to be a successful manifesto, it needs to be chock full of opaque political jargon. People must actually learn a new language to be able to understand it--this makes it impossible for devotees to accept criticism from without. The only people who have a chance of being listened to will be people who buy in, learn the lingo, then defect. But by that time, so many of the dissenters will have been filtered out that the remaining few can be ignored.
I think this is why Marxism lasted so long.
[All of this is of course wild speculation...]
[...wild speculation that reminds me of Poetic Terrorism. Remember this? "Ontological anarchy"? What can that possibly mean? It's not worth the effort to decipher it, thus the jargon becomes insulation from all sorts of thoughtful questions...]
[..also it reminds me of Richard Stallman's insistence on people using his terminology when referring to open source/free software.]
Anyway, all of this is just introduction for the following point: In my opaque political jargon, I'm going to insist on replacing "special interests" with "special ignorances." I think the switch combines genuine sympathy with damning condescension really nicely.