Calling Things by their Proper Names

Time for a quotation from Confucius (Or K’ung Fu-tzu, in the sensible old Wade-Giles transcription),  (Book 13, Chapter 3) ‘If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.’

 

This early Orwellian statement, predating the Sage of Wallington by 2,500 years, has seldom been more applicable. I’m not sure if Orwell would have been so interested in the punishment issues, but there is no doubt that failing to call things by their proper names is the beginning of stupidity. 

 

And we don’t call them by their proper names. Look at the recent announcement about ‘Child Care’ , in which ‘the government’ was said to be going to pay future so-called ‘parents’ up to £2,000 a year for something called ‘Childcare’ (or (‘Chowdcare’ as it is more generally pronounced in the public-sector classes).

 

Of course the claim is almost entirely false. The government has no money. It will have to tax you and me to find this money. Nor is it certain to pay it, as it will have left office, probably forever, by the time the plan is due to be implemented. Then there are these ‘parents’. The word, I was always told, derived from the Latin ‘pareo’ meaning ‘I obey’, on the assumption that the parents are those who are obeyed by their offspring, and the offspring obey their parents.   

 

As this relation of authority and obedience has been abolished in law, and cannot be enforced by the alleged parents, whose former power of discipline is now increasingly classified as ‘abuse',  these people are not parents in any case little more than related adults. As they are not required by custom or law to be in any kind of stable or permanent relationship, they aren’t necessarily even related.

 

And then again, since both of them  have been compelled by custom and need to work away from the home, during their children’s waking hours, and further compelled by custom and law to hand them over in later life to supposed 'schools' (no time to discuss this remarkable word here); and as those 'schools' (and the 'universities' to which they lead) follow the desires and aims of the state rather than of the ‘parents’, the supposedly ‘parental’ relationship is pretty much vestigial.

 

As for ‘Chowdcare’, all observant people have shuddered with horror for years at the suggestion that anyone they loved might fall into the ‘care’ of the modern state, and ‘caring’ has become, for the informed, a synonym for ‘hypocritical’. Few mothers are so hopeless that a paid stranger will ever care more than they do for their own small child.

 

And this subsidy, by which we are taxed so that we can pay strangers to mind our offspring during the formative hours of their lives, has yet another significance. For, while it is available to couples with a joint income of up to £300,000 a year,  it is absolutely refused to those households (be they never so poor)  in which one parent remains defiantly at home, 'chained to the kitchen sink'. And I am fairly sure that it is also refused to two-wageslave households who receive childminding help from grandparents or other close relatives. You can have the subsidy as long as both parents abandon their children, and as long as the minders are not relatives.

 

I think this is fairly obvious, don’t you? Once all its elements have been properly described,  it is clearly an incitement to disaffection, a bribe of our own money, offered to us in return for following the repellent and greedy opinion that wageslavery is more important than nurture of the next generation, that motherhood is a contemptible waste of a woman’s talents - all the crazed anti-family Bolshevism that poured from the pens and mouths of the wildest leftist revolutionaries in the 1960s, and is – 50 years later – the settled policy of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

 

And still the Left moan that they have been beaten, sidelined and betrayed. Are they too stupid to see that they have won, or too clever to admit that they are winning, while there is still any work left to do?