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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Nathan Smith.
A Modern Day Magic Trick
Language often tricks the brain into believing things it shouldn’t. That’s why they call it spelling.
Magic spells are all around us. Like slavery, you can’t get rid of magic; all you can do is change the name of the phenomenon. Modern folk think they are immune to the shaman’s wobbling stick, but while the iPhone and penicillin are cool technologies, our brains haven’t advanced much in the last thousand years and remain embarrassingly susceptible to magic.
When it comes to modern magic tricks, a common mistake people make is to think a trick is being played on them when actually they are just observing an old trick invented by their ancestors to quell their enemies. We can see a trick happening; we just forgot how it works, so we sum the force vector in the wrong direction because we are bad at maths.
An excellent recent example was the chocolate-maker Whittaker’s choice to rename one of its chocolate blocks with Maori language, rather than English. “Creamy Milk” became “Miraka Kirimi”.
Obviously, some people felt a trick was being played on them. Was this an honest celebration of Maori culture or part of an insidious erosion of Western values? Who gets to make such decisions? What do they want for New Zealand’s future? All good questions.
Joseph Stalin once said the writer is the engineer of the human soul. Whoever came up with the idea to rename Whittaker’s creamy milk chocolate definitely falls into the bracket of “writer”, which means the creative decision was calculated, planned and likely passed through dozens of layers of corporate bureaucracy before reaching the supermarket shelves. That’s our first clue for the proper direction of the vector force.
Our second clue is that the name “Creamy Milk” was still included in tiny font directly below the giant font of “Miraka Kirimi”. Does the Maori language have equivalents of “creamy” and “milk”? Maybe. But it doesn’t really matter. The inclusion of “Creamy Milk” below “Miraka Kirimi” implies Whittaker’s already assumes most Kiwis don’t know much Maori, so the entire point of the campaign is to teach Maori to the public by using micro association lessons like this.
OK, with these two clues, the outline of the magic trick is coming into focus. Let’s go further.
Consider that another name for a writer is “author”, which is the first six letters of the word “authority”. An authority decides the default assumption – the ‘frame’. In the case of Whittaker’s chocolate, you might think the smaller font size means that English is considered inferior to Maori because “Miraka Kirimi” is set in larger font size. But you would be wrong.
Remember, since Whittaker’s knows the average customer is unlikely to know much Maori, the only way English-speaking customers will understand what they are buying is by associating the words “Miraka Kirimi” with “Creamy Milk” on the same package. See it yet?
Said differently, the default assumption – made by Whittaker’s – is that Maori words do not exist outside the framework of the English language. Because “Miraka Kirimi” is only comprehensible to the average shopper by linking it to the English term “Creamy Milk”, English remains the linguistic base for the entire Maori language. I’m not telling you this; Whittaker’s is telling you this.
The effect of marketing campaigns like this is to entrench the idea that English is the authority, the author, of the entire Maori language. Before settlers arrived here the Maori did not have a written language. European missionaries transliterated Maori words by attaching them to English letters and phonemes. In so doing, Maori was permanently trapped in the English frame of reference.
Now can you see the magic trick?
Whittaker’s rebranding indicates it is not a corruption of New Zealand’s European roots. The force vector of the trick is entirely the other way: the continuation of the cultural domination of the Maori people.
This is not some trite postmodern analysis. Political control has the express purpose of grafting one culture’s forms and letters onto another’s language. That’s what the Normans did to Old English after 1066 and what the Romans did to the Gauls a thousand years earlier. This tactic has been used by every conquering army for millennia.
While Whittaker’s magic trick appeared to be a corruption of the English language, by piecing together the machinery of how power works, the true trick is revealed to be yet another example of the Maori culture being reduced to the status of supporting cast for the main character of British culture.
What is especially hilarious is that Whittaker’s is achieving – in broad daylight and applauded by the leftist clowns on social media – what the Government could never get away with and what, I’m sure, the Whittaker’s marketing team thought they were “fighting” against: garden-variety colonialism.
This controversy is like a historical sonar ping.
To me, the signal bouncing back showed how the 20th century was the golden age of lies. Those liars, like the painters of the 16th century, will be remembered forever as the Old Masters of their art. They were so skilled at their magic tricks that their children in 2022 no longer know who is doing the propagandising and in which direction the propaganda is flowing.
Because we seem to have forgotten that words are weapons, an author(ity) is no longer needed to control the masses. There is no 21st-century successor to Edward Bernays or Walter Lippmann. Instead, their lies worked so well that most people are now constantly self-policing their thoughts while being convinced their thoughts are policed from the outside. Truly bizarre.
For example, I can’t tell you how many times a friend or colleague has pointed to the latest insanity before jokingly adding, “but you aren’t allowed to say that now”. I guess this coda is supposed to be a wink that the speaker is aware they are seeing propaganda but wants to appear ironically aloof from the propaganda to prove they still have free thought.
But as someone said, irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage. A mentor once advised me never to say, “I might do X or Y.” The correct language was to say, “I will do X or Y”, since words are instructions for my brain.
The same is true about the phrase “but you aren’t allowed to say that now”. This is self-policing. The brain is instructing itself about what is permissible. No commissar is needed. The truth is, you can say whatever you want. You just have to be comfortable with the social consequences of saying it. But that has always been the price for telling the truth.
Whittaker’s renaming of its chocolate was an insidious magic trick to maintain the status quo. But it wouldn’t work without self-policing.
The worst magic trick of all is adopting the jargon of your enemies. When you do this, it may feel like you’re taking advantage of the enemy, but you are only adopting their frame. As Gandalf said to Frodo, keep the Black Speech of Mordor out of your mouth.
By ironically saying something like “Did you just assume my gender?” you are inviting that term – and all its political baggage – into your mind like a vampire waiting to be asked indoors. And, just like a vampire, the Black Speech will slowly suck the life out of you.
Using an enemy’s jargon moulds your thinking to conform with, not escape, the ideology of your enemy. Worse, since this jargon comes from the enemy’s camp, thinking with these words is unconsciously humiliating and therefore weakening. And while many true ideas can be humiliating when expressed in the enemy’s jargon, the false ones are far more damaging precisely because they are a lie.
It is a bit late for Maori to follow this advice, but in the current struggle to control your mind, you should be using old words if you can and inventing new words if you must. But keep the tongue of Mordor out of your mouth, and ideally your ears as well. Any use of the enemy’s jargon is an act of submission. Can you imagine how much more humiliating it would be for your entire language to be written in your enemy’s script?
That’s exactly why it is so important to get the maths right. When you use English letters, you will think English thoughts. It is inevitable. In this way, the Maori language itself is a political weapon for controlling the Maori culture. Obviously, not a single person at Whittaker’s understands this. But the maths is still summed the same way, regardless.
Language makes thought possible. When they prevent you from saying the obvious over time, it becomes impossible to see the obvious. Which is why they do it.
Those who control your words, control your mind.
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