Denying the word does not make the thing go away.

Public discourse in the 2020s is getting weirder all the time. The “newspeak” of George Orwell was an early predictor of this phenomenon. People are trying to make ideas and things go away by making it impossible to say them.

That kind of thing was “double plus ungood” in Airstrip one, Oceania, and now it has become reality in the present day Atlantic block. I hope it is not necessary to explain to too many people what ‘Atlantic block’, ‘Atlantic empire’, or ‘Atlanticists,’ signifies. When I use such terms I am not engaging in Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ but doing the opposite.

I am using new terms like ‘Atlanticist’ to reflect the structure of evolving reality. Wokism, another new and needed term, is mostly about inventing new terms, as well as trying to eliminate old ones, so as to deny reality. Of course, Wokisms opposite, the Libertarian cults, do much the same thing.

Orwell in his novel “1984” based his “newspeak”, the artificial language forced on the population by a totalitarian elite, on the official jargon in use in Stalin’s Soviet Union. This was going on at the time Orwell wrote, but it seemed to continue right up to the fall of the Soviet bloc. I recently attended a presentation by a person who had lived in the Soviet east bloc, who compared that language with what is being used now in the west.

She was concerned about the way things are going in the twenty first century west. It reminded her of the way language kept getting more ridiculous and extreme in the Soviet bloc just before it all collapsed. She had a theory that Orwell type language is a big marker of a society headed for collapse.

If there is anything clear in the traumatic twenties, it is that the Atlantic bloc is shrinking back to its core states, which are facing social and economic collapse. This is denied by the ideologic personalities in the Atlantic information/perception management bubble; left, right, and centre. Normal people are aware that something is going badly wrong, but most people do not want to be attacked by fanatics so they keep their heads down.

The most disturbing thing about it is when people who may be otherwise fairly sensible fall into an attempt to eliminate a word and the concept behind it. They often do not seem to realize where the particular meme is really coming from. My example is the idea that there is no such thing as the economy, there is only society, and the word economy was never used until about the nineteen sixties.

This idea seems to originate with the fake left. It seems to be encouraged by the ‘climate’ people, and the Neo Malthusians behind that. If you still have not got it as to what that is all about, it is using the false claim of a climate crisis requiring a drastic reduction of economic activity, requiring a sharply reduced standard of living world wide, or reduction in population.

The idea seems to get some additional push from the residual sixties “flower child” mentality. We can all just sit back and smoke pot and think beautiful thoughts, and all we need with which to live will magically appear.

Also, it seems to be a reaction against the old Maggie Thatcher idea that there is no such thing as society. In other words, there is only an economy. Economy is the only thing mediating human relationships and society is a delusion created by leftists.

So, contrarily, there is no such thing as economy. There is just society. Civilization is about nothing more than relationships, ideas, narratives, and so on.

Anyone with any clue about life in modern, industrialized polities should know that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. They are instead interdependent. But here is another old word which a lot of people do not like; polity.

Society is about how groups of people order themselves; from a tribe of hunter gatherers, to residents of a building, to the people of a polity, oops!, city or country. Economy is about the means by which the material conditions for a society are created. Polity is about how the people of a defined area integrate society and economy so as to enable civilization.

Polity might be used as an euphemism for two words which certain types of ideological people do not like. Libertarian type people hate “Government”. Socialist and anarchist people want to smash “The State”.

We can use other words for this thing, but the thing is still there. An old philosopher called Hobbes, back in the1600s, described what happens when we get this supposedly terrible thing out of our lives. Our lives then become “nasty, brutish, and short”.

Most twenty first century ideological people really hate Hobbes. Left people call him an early type of fascist. Libertarian right people label him as a collectivist or early of type of communist.

The truth is, we can adopt any kind of beautiful ideology, use any word or deny and word for it, the awful thing will still be there. If we want to live well, we will need a well run polity which can integrate society and economy into a working system. Without good governance our lives are inevitably nastier, more brutish, and shorter.

Thus society and economy depend on each other. Society grows and thrives within the material base which economy creates for it. The economy flourishes best when an advanced society directs and shapes it towards its ends.

These words, and the things they signify, are not recent. They seem to go back to the 1600s, right about the time the modern world developed, with the end of feudalism and the rise of the scientific revolution. Hobbes lived in those times.

Consult any good etymological dictionary, and it will tell you that the earliest use of ‘economy’ in the modern sense was at that time, four centuries back. Before that, economy meant the management of a household or estate. The term “political economy” came about to describe the management of a whole country, or polity.

The word ‘polity’ emerged at that time as well. The words “government” and “state” are a lot older. They came out of feudal times.

So, people began to go to universities to study political economy. They developed ideas about how the productive resources available to society should be enhanced and organized so as to deliver the best material living standard to that society, to that polity, or to that set of people.

In the twentieth century, western polities came to be more tightly controlled by capitalism. That word had developed in the previous century when they needed the word to describe the thing.

Capitalists did not like the ideas which political economists were coming up with. So, they got the universities to split the subject of “political economy” in two. “Economics” would be about organizing the economy to meet the needs of capitalists, and nothing else.

“Political Science” would be the study of the processes in a polity by which the benefits of society are portioned out. “Political” is a very old word going back to the ancient Greek democracies. Recently, there is a movement to reattach “political” and “economy”.

The word “society” also became used in its present sense in the 1600s. Before that it meant “friendship” or associations of like minded people. It was usually linked with the word “civil” to refer to the public and legal structures which create the frame for associations.

Within the past century, “sociology” became a subject in universities. It was the study of how societies work. It was discovered that societies break down when there is no order, safety, and certainty provided by a good polity, and the material abundance provided by a good economy.

Thus it is seen that society and economy are mutually dependant. Yet in recent times there are movements to deny one or the other. Because of the growing compartmentalizing of thinking, the words come to mean things to ideological people which they do not want.

So for “libertarian” types, who have bought into the meme, promoted by capitalism, that all government is bad and an interference with “liberties”, “society” means “socialism”, which means totalitarian communism. So, there is really no such thing as society. The economy will give us what we actually need, somehow.

And so, for people with a “left” mindset, or who at least reject the economy and “markets” as the solution for everything, the word economy means “capitalism”. So there is really no such thing as an economy. The commodities needed for survival and a decent life will somehow be provided to us in some other way.

Of course, the most successful economy on the planet right now is the People’s Republic of China. It is governed by its communist party. It has a very efficient economy run according to methods adapted from capitalism to fit social aims.

Thus, there is such a thing as an economy. There is such a thing as a society. To live well in future we need to live in a social economy.

Thus we need to resolve these two concepts. That means rejecting the perception management fed into our heads by malevolent forces who want economic breakdown on the one hand, and social breakdown on the other. That will be hard to do until the degenerating system which promotes these ideas collapses as did the old Soviet bloc.

However, what is interesting about the Atlanticist empire is that there are factions in the ruling elite fighting each other. One wants pure industrial capitalism and one wants population reduction and a return to feudalism. That seems to make the language war more intense.

When all this nonsense finally collapses, people can begin to use language properly again. They can begin to think properly again. They can then begin to see clearly the relation between economy and society.

They can start building polities which serve human needs much better.