How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

keywords have a tendency to become parasitic: they enter the mind and displace thought. George Orwell, in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” captures this phenomenon with an eerie vividness: When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.*5 And Orwell concludes that “this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity”—and also, one might add, social conformity.