Evolution of the "Liberal"
Can anyone tell me when and how the term "Liberal" changed. The word root means freedom, and the original meaning (now called "Classical" Liberal) advocated freedom for citizens. Today it universally seems to advocate freedom for state in contrast with freedom for citizens.
In hindsight, it seems like a rhetorical trick, but I doubt it was. That seems a bit too clever.
Perhaps it was a gradual process where early liberals just let their philosophy slowly become corrupted, until the name lost its original meaning.
I'm interested here in the damaging evolution of language, and what other political words are being hijacked today, and how can we stop that process.
In hindsight, it seems like a rhetorical trick, but I doubt it was. That seems a bit too clever.
Perhaps it was a gradual process where early liberals just let their philosophy slowly become corrupted, until the name lost its original meaning.
I'm interested here in the damaging evolution of language, and what other political words are being hijacked today, and how can we stop that process.
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Progressive used to mean forward-thinking, making positive progress. It has come to mean what liberal now means. The meanings evolved, but not naturally. It's sort of a forced evolution as performed by Dr. Frankenstein.
And it certainly was a quite successful (and IMO intentional) "re-branding", as corporate Newspeak would call it. I know it relates to Marx and his followers, when the word "liberty" was transformed from "liberty to do..." to "liberty "from"...exploitation, hunger, the need to work...etc...
(I damned if I can find it now, or even an online reference, but I'm certain I read in a legitimate source that the "New School for Social Research" in New York City was originally named after Karl Marx...but that was shortly "re-branded".)
The Political Compass site does away with the over-simplistic "left versus right" thing and instead maps people's alignments on a two dimensional graph. If you've got a couple of minutes to answer a few questions, it's an interesting study:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
widespread attention of the students to "arts" or
specialties of all kinds would produce a well-rounded
individual. . according to my mom, whose degree
was in something like social studies from Agnes
Scott in atlanta. . I asked about engineering, and
she said that science was included. . but engineering
is the application of science to the betterment of
humankind, I said. . we went circular from there.
liberals probably adopted the name from something
like this, I would think -- the well-rounded learning
of everything progressive for humankind -- progress
toward the envisioned utopia. . maybe? -- j
Perhaps the libertarian party needs to reclaim it, it might help their voting numbers.
And worse, defense of a "tradition" _because_ it is tradition is no defense at all. The basic weakness of conservatism is not their rhetoric. They believe it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYAHNv7l...
Progressing ever forward in the great ideas of deception..
It seems to me that there is a lack of focus in at least some of the comments that you received. Let me try to explain why I think that.
There is an axiom which I believe to be self evident: "To be able to write well, you have to be able to think well." Writing is a communication means among humans. So is speaking. We seem to be more readily able to recognize a confused mind from confused speech than from confused writing. I do not know why is that, but I suspect that it might be because the speech is so much older than writing, so that our discerning skills had much longer time to develop. As we know, words are labels for the concepts in our consciousness. That is why a confusion in language is a confusion in concepts. It can be involuntary or deliberate(!).
All communications addressed broadly at the public have the purpose of imparting knowledge, thus attempting to change the minds of the recipients. Increasing knowledge is a change of mind. So is the deliberately misleading distortion of recipients' concepts. You can call it mind control.
From Wikipedia:
"Mind control (also known as brainwashing, reeducation, coercive persuasion, thought control, or thought reform) is a theoretical indoctrination process which results in "an impairment of autonomy, an inability to think independently, and a disruption of beliefs and affiliations. In this context, brainwashing refers to the involuntary reeducation of basic beliefs and values".
Throughout history, the mind control thrived. From oracles, to religion ("God's word"), to witchcraft ("Devil's word"), to political campaigning, to advertising etc. On this last one. Just listen to how frequently TV advertisement teach kids broken logic.
The labels "progressive", "socialist", "liberal" and now back to "progressive" have been used by people who wish, by use of the government's monopoly on use of force, to enforce on all people their version of Utopia. It is a fundamentally dishonest approach. They resort to dishonesty because they cannot defend their approach on straight logic and reality. The roots are in Kantian and subsequent evil philosophies. Evil, because they deny reason, knowledge and even existence. In practice, when people begin to see through the falsity of the label of the period, they change to a knew label, in the hope that people will not notice that the only difference is in the label. You may wish to read the item entitled "Liberals" in Rand's Lexicon.
One last thing. DanShu, above, voices trouble in deciding which label applies to him. To me, the answer is obvious. The only label for him is DanShu. That does not prevent him from being a member of a political party, activist group or anything else. We each have an obligation to acquire and "install" in ourselves our own philosophies. Yes, they will be unique, just as each one of us is a unique, unrepeatable rational animal. I subscribe to an Objectivist philosophy. I don't even know if my philosophy in every detail coincides with the views of Ayn Rand. The knowledge that our principles coincide is enough for me.
Please forgive me the verbosity. I am obsessed by a strong desire to never be misunderstood. Alas, I do not know how write (and think!) as well as Ayn Rand did.
Ayn Rand emphasized the importance of concepts and definitions. She identified several logical fallacies focused on invalid use of concepts, not just fallacies of 'propositions': the fallacies of the stolen concept, floating abstractions, frozen abstractions, etc.
She wrote a whole book on the proper formation of concepts -- Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology -- as a defense of reason as our means to knowledge.
Conceptual thought is more fundamental than communication. You can't make statements without concepts, and you can't think properly with missing concepts. As Ayn Rand put it in IOE: "Cognition precedes communication".
The abuse of language today, muddying and destroying proper concepts, has the effect of making it literally impossible to properly think and therefore to argue for individualism, science, etc.
And that is the way they play on it, with a built-in evaluation emotionally substituting for saying what they mean. That is why you should always use the term term "progressive" in a political context by spelling it out in the form of "never-ending, progressively increasing controls" and refer to their "regression" to tyranny.
"Conservative" did not originally mean conserving the intent and meaning of the Constitution, it means conserving tradition and the status quo in general. Political conservatives have in general advocated preserving tradition because it is tradition, and do not and cannot defend individualism.
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