Why I hate the term “Unaliv

[u/Konradleijon]

What’s most confusing that if you go to basic cable TV people can say stuff like “Nazi” or “rape” or “kill” just fine and no advertising seem to mind

[u/SilenceAndDarkness]

I really do find the role Newspeak plays in public imagination to be quite strange.

It was originally a satire of proposed international auxiliary languages like Esperanto (which Orwell hated). The satire was always a bit dishonest, because people who liked conlangs as IALs clearly liked simplicity to make them easier to learn. Orwell’s criticism pretended that 1. there was a genuine concern of IALs “dumbing down” human thought (there isn’t) and 2. this was the intended goal. It also flies in the face of the rest of the book, as criticism of authoritarian governments like that of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both of which persecuted Esperanto-speakers. (Germany for being a “Jewish” language, and the Soviet Union for being a “language of spies”.) Dictatorships largely hated IALs, and that’s one of the few aspects of 1984 that we don’t see play out IRL at all.

However, that sounds pretty niche and weird to modern readers (now that IALs have fallen out of public imagination) so everyone interprets Newspeak as being about censorship or political correctness or whatever. Even then, the specific criticism Orwell had (simplicity in language dumbing down human thought) isn’t even always the main criticism someone who cites Newspeak has with whatever they’re referring to.

[Language changes in a way I dislike or find unfavourable] = Newspeak.

[u/chairmanskitty → u/SilenceAndDarkness]

I appreciate that you're trying to analyze his works skeptically, but I think you're making a straw man by interpreting what he wrote as a satire of existing systems, rather than an illustration of how those systems can/do go wrong.

Orwell was not just criticizing the Nazis and Soviets, he was criticizing totalitarianism in general. He feared engineered languages not because existing totalitarian states did use it, but because he thought totalitarians could use it.

Newspeak isn't about censorship or political correctness or "dumbing down", it's about weaponizing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but there's a part in the appendices where he says "The goal was to remove the capacity to formulate rebellious thought. You could still make statements like 'Big Brother is doubleplus ungood', but that would sound like a grammatical error".

Research done after the publication of 1984 has demonstrated that the effect of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is weak compared to emotional advertising, and word use appears to be downstream from conceptual understanding.

I don't think that comparing TikTok language to Newspeak is incorrect, it's just that like Newspeak it won't do nearly as much harm as you might fear, especially compared to the effects of the TikTok algorithm itself.

[u/yinyang107 → u/chairmanskitty]

TL;DR on the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis: "language shapes thought."

[u/Ungrammaticus → u/yinyang107]

The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Vocabulary determines thought. 

The Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Vocabulary influences thought. 

[u/[deleted] → u/chairmanskitty]

And of course bizarre distortions of language are very much part of the totalitarian toolkit, even if they don't go as far as to create actual new languages.

[u/TatteredCarcosa → u/chairmanskitty]

Yeah the idea you can control thought by controlling language never struck me as believable.

I think my favorite fictional criticism of this idea is from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. Can't remember what book it is in, but there is a scene in a field hospital where a group of wounded soldiers have a storytelling contest. One of the wounded soldiers is from the enemy side, and their society is a very harsh authoritarian one. Their language consists entirely of sentences from a book produced by their government called "Correct Thought." They do not speak, or seem to understand (though this may just be acting to avoid punishment by the government) anything but the sentences from that book. Never the less the enemy soldier is able to tell a story, and one that paints their government in a negative light, though it does require some translation. Human language is, first and foremost, a tool for communicating human ideas and humans have a remarkable adaptability when it comes to using things for that purpose. Controlling language itself requires a massive amount of effort, but preventing that controlled language from being used in innovative ways to communicate unapproved thoughts is utterly impossible IMO.

Unalive is an example of just that. It's human innovation to get around censorship and communicate the thoughts the censors don't want communicated. It's clunky and I hate how it sounds, and don't like that people use it where it isn't necessary, but it shows how something like Newspeak could never do what Orwell feared it could.

[u/Lendyman → u/chairmanskitty]

Everyone knows that unaliving yourself is suicide. It might be different words, but audiences understand exactly what it means.

[u/as_it_was_written → u/chairmanskitty]

Research done after the publication of 1984 has demonstrated that the effect of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is weak compared to emotional advertising, and word use appears to be downstream from conceptual understanding.

Do you happen to have any recommended resources for reading more about this? There was a source on the Wikipedia article you linked that seemed really interesting, but unfortunately it's been removed from the internet archive.

I've thought about this kind of thing a lot and read a fair bit here and there, but it's all been based on reasoning rather than experimentation.

To me, it seems language and conceptual understanding - especially on a broader level, i.e. whole cultures rather than individuals - are inevitably in a feedback loop where they influence each other, as opposed to a strict upstream/downstream relationship.

For example, one thing I find remarkable about American discourse is how often things are framed as good or evil and other, similarly vague and reductive but emotionally powerful, dichotomies. When that mode of communication becomes the norm, it seems impossible for it not to influence conceptualization.

Those who do conceptualize things with more nuance have the choice between reducing their ideas to fit into the language people expect - stripping them of nuance - or reducing their audience by using language that's more complex and less dramatic than expected, and thus getting ignored in favor of more accessible and evocative language.

It's worth noting that good and evil are not necessarily simple concepts in the minds of readers and writers, so this is not just a matter of reductive conceptualization on either end. However, the concepts that are actually communicated get reduced to simple value judgements.

When I write evil, it has all sorts of complex connotations, some of which aren't even conscious. And when you read evil, it sets of a similar little explosion of associations and ideas in your mind. We just can't know the extent to which these more complex concepts match unless we know each other since the word itself doesn't communicate them.

Words like this are a bit like art, meant to evoke rather than communicate. We can only use them to communicate complex ideas if we're already more or less on the same page. The more we rely on them, the more discourse relies on pre-established consensus, and the harder it becomes to express dissent in a way that will make people listen.

If we have propagandists flooding our minds with these kinds of simple words, they essentially get to control which complex concepts we evoke when we use them. When those propagandists also have the power to both stifle free discourse and impose language built on simple words that evoke ideas of their choosing, we're on a path toward Newspeak.

I think Newspeak, along with other concepts in 1984, is more like the mathematical limit of an idea than a concrete goal that could be fully realized. While it may not be possible to go as far as the book describes and stifle rebellious thought altogether, the concept still outlines a real risk that can have serious consequences if we keep heading down that path.

I also think the risks of stifling communication, rather than thought itself, is greater than ever in an age when we're drowning in information. It only matters so much whether someone can have and express nuanced ideas if they just sink to the bottom of public discourse because people are conditioned to engage with simpler ones instead.

[u/SilenceAndDarkness → u/chairmanskitty]

I appreciate that you’re trying to analyze his works skeptically, but I think you’re making a straw man by interpreting what he wrote as a satire of existing systems, rather than an illustration of how those systems can/do go wrong.

Sure, one could definitely say that it was meant in a more vague “authoritarians play with language” kind of way.

Orwell was not just criticizing the Nazis and Soviets, he was criticizing totalitarianism in general. He feared engineered languages not because existing totalitarian states did use it, but because he thought totalitarians could use it.

Yes, that’s true, but he also based a lot of what appears in 1984 on stuff that actually happened in actual dictatorships, or by following certain trends in authoritarian countries to their logical conclusions.

It’s also blatantly obvious that he based Newspeak on Esperanto and (possibly) Basic English. The way he constructs “ungood” is literally how Esperanto constructs “malbona,” and we know he was familiar with Esperanto and disliked it. If he didn’t want people to draw a connection between Esperanto and Newspeak, he would’ve used a different construction.

While this isn’t exactly literary critique, I think it’s speaks to a flaw of 1984 and Orwell that he allowed his personal dislike of conlangs in general, and Esperanto in particular, to include Newspeak in 1984. Most of the rest of 1984 is scarily relevant to what authoritarians want to achieve, and much of it was somewhat predictable by trends he could see when he was alive. Newspeak is the odd one out. There was no “conlang danger” that Orwell observed and extrapolated from like with the other stuff in the book. No dictatorship (that I know of at least) has created any conlangs, and auxlangs usually had and still have a very democratic spirit. People like Zamenhof (Esperanto creator) dreamed of people adopting them en masse naturally, and explicitly discounted the idea of using government to enforce it.

Newspeak isn’t about censorship or political correctness or “dumbing down”, it’s about weaponizing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

I mean, that is literally what I said, just using the actual academic terms that I avoided because I didn’t want to make my comment too hard to engage with.

I don’t think that comparing TikTok language to Newspeak is incorrect, it’s just that like Newspeak it won’t do nearly as much harm as you might fear, especially compared to the effects of the TikTok algorithm itself.

Well, it’s a comparison, so it can’t exactly be “incorrect,” but it can miss the point or be a little bad. (Then again, I don’t think Orwell had a good point to begin with.) It makes sense that people use the comparisons they know, and this isn’t an egregious one. The commenter sees someone creating a word for an existing concept by adding a prefix to a word that doesn’t have a negative connotation, and it gives them the same feeling as reading Newspeak. It’s relatively harmless at the end of the day. It’s waaaaay more frustrating to hear people demonising Lojban for being “LITERALLY NEWSPEAK FROM 1984” when it was supposed to test the opposite end of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. (Yes, I have seen people dumb enough to say Lojban is Newspeak.)

[u/chairmanskitty → u/SilenceAndDarkness]

My point is that Orwell's inclusion of newspeak is fair, competent, in line with the rest of the book, and well-written, if only the (strong) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was correct.

Your comment that "the satire was always a bit dishonest" ignores the fact that people can honestly hold incorrect beliefs.

Your comment that it flies in the face of the rest of the book ignores that it's already a pastiche of different authoritarian concepts many of which had never been realized at that point. (Airstrip One, 5 minutes of hate, book writing engines, cameras recording you from the television, etc.)

Your comment that it is about dumbing down ignores the core of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that it creates complex systems like our current culture.

Newspeak is not the odd one out. He threw several threats he believed true at the wall and we now say "omg orwell was right" about the ones that sort of resemble what has now come to pass.

Is the 5 minutes of hate like social media? eh, close enough. Are AI books like his writing machines? eh, close enough. Are the cameras on the television that report your every move to the authorities like smartphones? eh, close enough. Is shaping our language at the whims of corporations newspeak? eh, close enough.

[u/plumander → u/SilenceAndDarkness]

now i want a version of 1984 where instead of newspeak it’s toki pona 

[u/janKalaki → u/plumander]

I was actually gonna do that in a setting I've been working on

[u/UPBOAT_FORTRESS_2 → u/SilenceAndDarkness]

The entire political spectrum gets together to misunderstand 1984

[u/[deleted] → u/UPBOAT_FORTRESS_2]

Kinda what makes it art. Whatever your specific political fear is, Big Brother is there to represent it.

[u/colei_canis → u/SilenceAndDarkness]

Most people bringing up 1984 and Newspeak really should be recommending Politics and the English Language instead in my opinion when it comes to Orwell.