It is well known that the Conservatives love to accuse their adversaries of using Newspeak. A few days ago, one of those spoke freely against a recipe for pasta carbonara without pork, called “inclusive”. It would be, in the opinion of this expert, a new stage of the very threatening drift woke : “food orwellism”. We know the song, accusing progressives of being “Orwellians” is just as conventional as it is convenient.
Let’s admit it straight away: this criticism, although too often coated in puffiness and confusion, is not always wrong. However, a problem persists… because to make George Orwell a fellow traveler of conservatism, you have to be oddly… Orwellian.
First, you have to tear out the work – or rather the novel 1984, since the curators never cite others – to the philosophy that gave birth to it. Orwell was a revolutionary anarchist. He fought the right and the extreme right all his life, including taking up arms during the Spanish Revolution of 1936, an episode that inspired him to write 1984. This book also criticizes the authoritarianism of state minions, a libertarian perspective totally absent from conservative rhetoric. The latter in fact never denounces police newspeak – which is always “forced to question” and which never represses – or that of the political class – which manipulates to satiety empty concepts such as “employment insurance”, “pacification or “welcome tax”.
If some progressives do indeed abuse Newspeak, they are far from having a monopoly on it. Excessively manipulated by the right, the word woke Paradoxically testifies to this: “Countless words, says Orwell, such as: honor, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, religion, had simply ceased to exist. A few cover words encompassed them and, by encompassing them, suppressed them. »
Isn’t that exactly the function of the word woke ? Isn’t it a “cover word” encompassing “countless words” such as progressivism, left, multiculturalism, anti-racism, feminism, socialism, anarchism, environmentalism, intersectionality, postmodernism, deconstruction?
It is enough to read a few pages of the news to see it. In the mouths of conservative columnists, the word woke becomes, as the philosopher Herbert Marcuse said, a “hypnotic formula”.
It is not for nothing that the articles concerning the wokism all look alike. They have no need to be authentic or to formulate an original analysis. Their function is below of reflection. They are propaganda and are therefore the negation of critical thinking.
Word woke moreover makes it impossible to reply: “The ritualized concept is immune to contradiction,” says Marcuse. The qualifiers “progressive”, “feminist”, “socialist” or “anti-racist” are not in any context understood as negative. These concepts challenge others: feminism recalls suffragettes, violence against women and equal pay; socialism evokes resistance, revolution, workers’ rights and national liberation struggles; anti-racism recalls the struggle for civil rights and against apartheid, etc.
These words can also evoke their antithesis: the reverse of the progressive is the “conservative”, the reverse of the feminist is the “macho”, the reverse of the communist is the “capitalist” and the reverse of the anti-racist is the “racist”. They therefore evoke a contradiction to which the issuer does not wish to be exposed.
Word woke – just like “terrorist”, “totalitarian” or “violent” – thus eliminates upstream any statement that does not confirm the insult. He is everything And nothing at a time. It becomes what its adversaries make of it, who sculpt it as they please in order to better sell the controversy of the day.
THE woke is therefore both dominant and weak. Dominant : from Hollywood to Radio-Canada via our schools and even our plates, it provokes “media lynchings” and threatens civilisation. Weak : he embodies the stereotypical figure of the spoiled and whiny child. He is sensitive, emotional, “permanently” offended. He refuses to grow and is guided by his emotions alone.
Chest of drawers, the woke allows therefore to subject to the left Exactly what the conservatives complain about: to discredit, to demonize, to throw out of the media space… Even more: the woke embodies the exact reflection of conservative thinking, which misses no opportunity to victimize itself while pretending to be virile and rebellious.
Newspeak is thus everywhere, including in the condemnation of its use. It is not the tool of a particular ideological camp, but the grammar, the syntax and the words of a one-dimensional debate, of a cultural war masking the reality of a society struggling more and more to give a meaning to his rout.