Abuse of Language: Insurrection
SOCRATES: You were saying, in fact, that the rhetorician will have greater powers of persuasion than the physician even in a matter of health?
GORGIAS: Yes, with the multitude,—that is.
SOCRATES: You mean to say, with the ignorant; for with those who know he cannot be supposed to have greater powers of persuasion…And the same holds of the relation of rhetoric to all the other arts; the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?
GORGIAS: Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort?—not to have learned the other arts, but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them?
SOCRATES: Whether the rhetorician is or not inferior on this account is a question which we will hereafter examine if the enquiry is likely to be of any service to us; but I would rather begin by asking, whether he is or is not as ignorant of the just and unjust, base and honourable, good and evil, as he is of medicine and the other arts; I mean to say, does he really know anything of what is good and evil, base or honourable, just or unjust in them; or has he only a way with the ignorant of persuading them that he not knowing is to be esteemed to know more about these things than some one else who knows?
Ancient Greece had a problem: professors. Sometimes referred to as rhetoricians but more often called Sophists, they were “professional educators who toured the Greek world offering instruction in a wide range of subjects, with particular emphasis on skill in public speaking and the successful conduct of life.” They were verbal wordsmiths capable of making black appear white and good appear evil with verbal concoctions, and most were quite successful. They were intelligent, learned men who spent their days educating the elite of their time, and—according to the famous ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—they were full of shit. But that wasn’t the primary contention between the ancient philosophers and their interlocutors. Plato had his sights set on a deeper, more integral problem when juxtaposing Socrates with Sophists in his dialogues: the abuse of language.
In his book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper explains that, according to Plato, the Sophists were “corrupting the meaning and dignity of the word." The specific threat for Plato, writes Pieper, “comes from the sophists’ way of cultivating the word with exceptional awareness of linguistic nuances and utmost formal intelligence, from their way of pushing and perfecting the employment of verbal constructions to crafty limits, thereby—and precisely in this—corrupting the meaning and the dignity of the very same word.”
Language depicts reality: “We speak in order to name and identify something that is real,”1 and laying aside conversing about fiction, language is about reality. To speak of conversing brings out another aspect of language: its interpersonal character. There is no such thing as a personal language; it’s a collective phenomenon, and we speak about reality to others: “In the very attempt to know reality, there is already present the aim of communication.”2
A speech act makes the thing spoken about an object for all involved; it makes the idea or concept concerned “there” for us. Listing off the items on a grocery list to your partner makes those items a common focal point for you both in a way that counting them off in your head doesn’t. It puts the object, the list, “out there” into the world for you and your conversation partner to cognize. It’s no longer an object for me but for us. Communication requires this shared object to function.
You can, of course, lie, but is lying communication? Pieper thinks not: “A lie is the opposite of communication. It means specifically to withhold the other’s share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality.” And so, these two inseparable facets of language, its concern with reality and interpersonal character, become corrupted when we abuse language. Furthermore, this corruption is difficult to contain because language is not siloed within specific fields or domains, for it is the medium through which all human life is lived; it “sustains the common existence of the human spirit.”3
Humans become objects to be manipulated, handled, and controlled when:
“Whoever speaks to another person—not simply, we presume, in spontaneous conversation but using well-considered words, and whoever in so doing is explicitly not committed to the truth—whoever, in other words, is in this guided by something other than the truth—such a person, from that moment on, no longer considers the other a partner, as equal. In fact, he no longer respects the other as a human person. From that moment on, to be precise, all conversation ceases.”4
A plethora of domains exemplify this kind of language; the most extensive is arguably advertisement. Billions of dollars, maybe even trillions, are spent to woo and manipulate you into acquiring commodities, and they do so by appealing to your noblest and basest desires and thoughts. Advertisements can be innocuous or insidious, depending on your viewpoint, but I have neither the space nor inclination to analyze the marketing industry here. Instead, I want to focus our attention on the media, where the abuse of language is always and ever on display.
Across the political spectrum, journalists, news anchors, political commentators, politicians, spokespersons, etc., are, to varying degrees, trying to manipulate you much like advertisers. Billions are spent to procure your assent to this or that cause, to convince you this war is just, that candidate is worthy, or those people are out to get you, but sophistic verbal contortions are not always readily recognized; by their nature, they come concealed and disguised, making it challenging to identify the borderline that separates genuine communication rooted in reality from the mere manipulation of words, and here lies one piece of its perniciousness.
In everyday discourse, this is bad enough, but what happens when this is applied en masse, when this non-communication becomes public discourse and not merely private? It becomes an instrument of power. “Public discourse itself, separated from the standard of truth, creates on its part, the more it prevails, an atmosphere of epidemic proneness and vulnerability to the reign of the tyrant. Serving the tyranny, the corruption and abuse of language becomes better known as propaganda.”5
The corruption and abuse of language reach its zenith when deployed in service of power, and this is not limited to traditional fountains of authority. In contemporary society, propaganda is often created and disseminated through unofficial channels like social media, traditional media, think tanks, NGOs, and special interest groups, making it all the more difficult to parse. In any case, the abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with propaganda, the abuse of language. The two are inherently connected, “the relationship based on mere power…stands in direct proportion to the most devastating breakdown in orientation toward reality.”6 To abuse one’s political power is to create a relationship of domination and control between the abuser and the abused, the ruler and the ruled. This is done en masse through propaganda, which treats reality as a putty to be molded to one’s desires.
Supplanting reality with a pseudo-reality has its detriments. One could write with ease about insurrection and propaganda as it relates to Donald Trump and the sycophantic media’s lies about January 6th and the 2020 election, but these speak for themselves, and at this point, most Americans have made up their minds one way or the other. Instead, I would like to draw your attention to how the word ‘insurrection’ has been abused since that day.
Right-wing commentators and officials have called just about everything an insurrection since January 6th: Biden’s cognitive deficits and policies, peaceful protests in state capitol buildings, peaceful children’s protests, anti-genocide protests, Supreme Court draft leaks, a singular protestor in a congressional committee meeting, and even pathways to citizenship for immigrants.
The deliberate and repeated association of an act your party is accused of with unrelated and often trivial events is politically expedient. It is an attempt to muddy the waters, to dilute the impact of concentrated focus on the immoral actions of January 6th. These fallacious equivalencies deserve contempt, even ridicule, and their authors do not possess the “exceptional awareness of linguistic nuances and utmost formal intelligence” required to be considered sophisticated sophistry. Still, one comparison rises to that level and deserves a rebuttal.
January 6th has been compared to the BLM protests of 2020 in the halls of Congress and courtrooms, by conservative intellectuals, commentators, the masses on Twitter, and former president Trump.
One might be tempted to conclude these comparisons are apt. Even if the BLM protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, they both had spasms of violence; the summer protests resulted in far greater property destruction, were more widespread, and had more looting; one could even plausibly argue (however strained in the case of the attempted insurrection) that, in both instances, when there was violence, it was in response to police action.
Indeed, the National Review’s editor-in-chief, Rich Lowry, exemplifies this thinking and adds that the liberal media’s use of ‘uprising’ instead of ‘insurrection’ belies this fact:
An uprising is functionally indistinguishable from an insurrection. Merriam-Webster defines the former as “a usually localized act of popular violence in defiance usually of an established government.” It defines the latter as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.”
Perhaps uprising has a more positive connotation, but there’s really no difference here — we’re talking about acts of violent revolution.
Even if we assume all these similarities and exacerbations are accurate, one fundamental difference remains: intent. The people who converged on the capitol building did so with the intent to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and at the behest of a want-to-be dictator desperately attempting to overthrow a democratic government. The people who protested George Floyd’s extrajudicial murder did so for racial justice, with no intent to deprive the American people of a duly elected democratic government.
This essential difference is reflected in the word choice of liberal media when characterizing both events. Not all acts of violence in defiance of government are revolts, but all revolts are acts of violence in defiance of government. Just as not all animals are mammals, but all mammals are animals. The Rodney King riots of 1992 were acts of popular violence in defiance of an established government. Still, they were not revolts because there was no intent to overthrow the government, hence why those events are also referred to as the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and not the 1992 Los Angeles insurrection.
Sometimes, presenting arguments like this in terms of formal logic may be helpful. After unpacking the terms (A) ‘revolt’ and (B) ‘defiance,’ Lowry’s argument looks something like this:
All A are B
Some B are A
Therefore all B are A
The problem should be immediately apparent. You cannot draw a universal conclusion from a particular and a universal premise. This is a formal logical fallacy that is easy to slip under the radar when attempting to fool your audience by comparing similar but denotatively distinct definitions.
Ignoring the essential difference in intent while erecting a façade of objectivity by appealing to dictionary definitions that distinguish between ‘revolt’ and ‘defiance’ only to collapse them by calling both a violent revolution is the exact sort of sophisticated sophistry Plato warned about. Given the National Review’s weak-kneed response to anyone facing criminal punishment for the events of that day, I expect nothing less.
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Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language Abuse of Power (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 15.
Ibid., 16.
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 33.
When you ask yourself why do they use propaganda you inevitably conclude “Because it works”. It worked yesterday and it will work today as long as the majority of the masses are uneducated .
Tfw you write an article about the horrors of sophistry while selectively quoting from Plato to allege that the Capitol riot that killed no one was bad and the BLM riots that killed numerous people were good. Obviously, your argument is predicated on the idea that the BLM riots were justified, but, ill-equipped to make that argument head on, you take it as granted, assuming it as a predicate of your argument, and cowardly engage in semantic sophistry about the use of the word "insurrection" to cover up your sophistry. Even when playing with all these handicaps, you still lose the argument easily, considering that many BLM rioters openly admitted that their desire was to overthrow the government. "But it was for a good cause!" You plead, proving that all of your philosophical posturing was merely an empty facade. You could have simply written "Rioting is bad, except if you're the good guys," and it would've been much, much more intelligent.