I read George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 way back sometime in my youth. Orwell, a socialist who saw the potential tyranny of socialism (read his Animal Farm for a withering treatment of Soviet-style communism under Stalin), displayed in 1984 just how bad it could get.
One of the words he introduced in the novel was Newspeak. It has now become part of our vocabulary. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term this way:
Propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meaning.
Vagueness and reversal of established terminology, giving new and often perverted meanings to words, has now become an art in our society. Here’s one cartoonist who has noticed how this has come into play lately:
We used to think that global warming meant the temperature is getting warmer. Silly us. Now we know that global warming creates record cold waves.
Tax cuts used to mean that people paid fewer taxes. Wrong again. Somehow, those evil tax cuts are going to make us pay more. Oh, and everyone is going to die very soon because of them.
On university campuses across the nation, free speech is under attack because it’s not really free speech anymore, but speech that oppresses certain classes of people. That cannot be allowed. The First Amendment must be abolished so we can be free indeed.
See how it works? No? Well, join the club.
Pernicious as these developments are in overturning basic logic and even threatening our right to speak our minds in public, there is a moral inversion that is not new. It goes way back, even to the beginning of the human race—and we see it rising in our day as well.
The prophet Isaiah, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, explained it this way:
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
And clever in their own sightWoe to those who are heroes in drinking wine
And valiant men in mixing strong drink,Who justify the wicked for a bribe,
And take away the rights of the ones who are in the right!
Abortion is the fulfillment of reproductive rights, not the murder of an innocent child.
Homosexuality/same-sex marriage is love in action, not a perversion of God’s gift of sex.
The end justifies the means: as long as you come out on top in the end, you are to be praised regardless of how you got there. Righteousness in the means one uses is outmoded and unrealistic. All that matters is winning.
Those are the examples that immediately come to mind, but there are more.
Have we reached our own version of 1984, albeit a few decades later? Are we allowing Newspeak to guide our thinking and short-circuit genuine logic?
Don’t follow the herd. Think as God intended you to think. Take a stand for truth even when that stand is a lonely one. God sees. He honors those who stand.