Within the academic field of linguistics is a small group of inquirers whose specialty is semantics. Within that group is a still smaller group who inquire into the relationship between language and thought formulation. That group is further divided into those who study anthropology and language, or sociolinguists, and psychology and language, or psycholinguists. As if such division were not sufficient, there is a group (possibly now defunct—intellectual curiosity being the fickle thing it is) who once studied specifically the “Whorf hypothesis.”

Very briefly, and vastly over-simplified, Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir theorized that language influences objective reality via subjective human perception. The famous experiment among the Hopi Indians in the late 19th or early 20th centuries would seem, at first glance and removed from actual historical context, to grant some measure of credibility to that theory. Specifically, an experiment in quantum physics was performed in the language of the Hopis that was impossible to perform in European languages.

Since then, the whole area of inquiry has been plundered by so many different academic special interest groups that it’s now dispersed into something of a Babel-like impossibility of verbal formulation. (There is epic irony here.) And, as if competitive academic division were not enough to destroy unified inquiry, we must also add that endowment of the so-called Enlightenment, the artificial divorce of philosophy and science, rendering further investigation impossible due to the limitations imposed by scientific method.

That such a linguistic theory has proven effective and useful in politics and in what we have come to call “social engineering” is now history. The phase-like changes from “Negro” to “black” to “African-American” could be chapter headings in the story of the assimilation of “white” and “black” peoples in America. The same language manipulation was used to implement feminist goals (“chairperson”, for example.) And the recent declaration of Hillary Clinton that homosexual rights are the same as human rights is the verbal formula for the engine of the homosexual movement. It must be mentioned, however, that this last bit of engineering involves something quite different from the preceding use of diction as a social engineering tool, because it involves a structural alteration—the obliteration of the distinction between the two discrete verb bases of our perception of reality: a confusion of doing with being. (I have already written a post on this topic.)

Since language has been proven to affect our perception of reality, such a confusion of being and doing literally constitutes a flirtation with insanity, though the basis for that dangerous flirtation has already been successfully achieved in the strange distinction between “fetus” and “human,” the same kind of nomenclature confusion that would have apples as one thing and fruit, quite another—and different—thing. One of the most remarkable examples of such agenda-driven manipulations of language is the U.N. declaration some years ago that Zionism is racism. “Racism” having become such a temptingly powerful word, that august body chose to ignore the objective reality that Jews (Zionist or not) are Semites—but so are the “Palestinians.” It was a triumph of political expedience over sanity. So is the definition of a sexual activity, [insanely] presented as a verb of being instead of the verb of doing that it actually is. But, if a fetus can be distinguished from a human, anything is possible.

The Whorf Hypothesis was pursued with vigor in the early twentieth century by the forces of ideological “racial” supremacy (misnamed “race”; humans are not a race, but a species) that provided the framework for facism, for genetic engineering, and for population control, the natural children of that ideology. Perhaps the abandonment of a God-concept left a vacuum meant for vertical, hierarchical conceptualization which—having to go somewhere or other—was thus illogically applied to the horizontal god of Humanism, becoming new categories of relative superiority vs. inferiority. (It’s no coincidence that Jews specifically should be perceived as the archenemy of such linguistic adventurism.) And so the sophistication of syntax found in the languages of civilized peoples, particularly the orderly nature of Germanic syntax, was construed as an indication of superiority over the “primitive” languages of “lesser” peoples. The belief in human evolution made possible the confusion of species and races, thus Germanic peoples were more highly “evolved” than other members of the human “race”.

The defeat of Nazism (but not of Planned Parenthood, which escaped semantic detection) is largely responsible, historically, for the demise of formal academic inquiry into the hypothesis, facism having become unpopular, but the political usefulness of the theory gained strength by going underground, as it were, where it became the powerful arm of communist ideology while that ideology lasted, and where it is now newly useful among the social engineers of our day.

At some point, we must devoutly hope that thinking people will ask themselves: What, actually, is this? (“This” may refer to literally anything.) When that happens, we return to the source of rational thought, to pre-Babel Hebrew Eden, where Adam, the first to ask this question, began the process of naming, the event that started it all: language, history, civilization, the distinction between human and animal, and what we call “sanity” by the cognition of something we call Truth.

Therein lies the supernatural source of the ancient reverence for the “Word” of God, the Holy of Holies, that is still characteristic of Judaism to this day, a characteristic that must present as a singular entity (a monotheistic) and non(read meta)physical (uncreated) concept of God, as unique today among the religions and myths of the world as it was some five thousand years ago. For Christians, the natural offspring of the Jews, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This reverence for the Word directly contradicts the hubris, the self-elevation, necessary to all who would seize control of it, for where the Word is sovereign, there can be no manipulation of it. It cannot be used to achieve an end of one’s own design. That is why the Jews (and by extension, their Christian daughter) are the perceived enemy of so many—not just now, today, but throughout all the darkness of human history. That which is seen as a stumbling block to progress by some is recognized by others as the Savior from the abyss of insanity, not metaphorical, but literal, actual—real.

So, said St. John, “In the beginning was….” What? Whatever one’s alpha answer, it is also one’s omega.