Verbocracy and Semantic Fog—Talking the People into Submission

After the First World War, we became more conscious of our attitude toward words. This attitude was gradually changing. Our trust in official catchwords and clichés and in idealistic labels had diminished. We became more and more aware of the fact that the important questions were what groups and powers told behind the words, and white their secret intentions were. But in our easygoing way we often forget to ask this question, and we are all more or less susceptible to noisy, oft-repeated words.

The formulation of big propagandistic lies and fraudulent catchwords has a very well-defined purpose in Totalitaria, and words themselves have acquired a special functions in the service of power, which we may call verbocracy. The Big Lie and the phony slogan at first confuse and then dull the hearers, making them willing to accept every suggested myth of happiness. The task of the totalitarian propagandist is to build special pictures in the minds of the citizenry so that finally they will no longer see and hear with their own eyes and ears but will look at the world through the fog of official catchwords and will develop the automatic responses appropriate to totalitarian mythology.

The multiform use of words in double talk serves as an attack on our logic, that is, an attack on our understanding of what monolithic dictatorship really is. Hear, hear the nonsense: "Peace is war and war is peace! Democracy is tyranny and freedom is slavery! Virtue is vice and truth is a lie." So says the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's grim novel, 1984. And we saw this nightmare fantasy come true when our soldiers who had spend long years in North Korean prison camps returned home talking of totalitarian China with the deceiving cliché of "the people's democracy." Pavloviaon conditioning to special words forces people into an automatic thinking that is tied to those words. The words we use to influence our behavior in daily life; they determine what thoughts we have.

In Totalitaria, facts are replaced by fantasy and distortion. People are taught systematically and intentionally to lie (Winokur). History is reconstructed, new myths are build up whose purpose is twofold: to strengthen and flatter the totalitarian leader, and to confuse the luckless citizens of the country. The whole vocabulary is a dictated set of slowly hypnotizing slogans. In the semantic fog that permeates the atmosphere, words lose their direct communicative function. They become merely commanding signs, triggering off reactions of fear and terror. They are battle crimes and Pavlovian signals, and no longer represent free thinking. The word, once considered a first token of free human creation, is transformed into a mechanical tool. In Totalitaria, words may have a seductive action, soothing or charming their hearers, but they are not allowed to have intrinsic meaning. They are conditioners, emotional triggers, serving to imprint the desired reaction patters on their hearers.

— Joost Meerloo, 1956 - The Rape of The Mind