The Engineering of Consent
On Richard Dawkins' meme theory — the application of evolutionary logic to the propagation of ideas — what it means that some ideas survive and reproduce not because they are true but because they are contagious, and what memetics reveals about the information environment we actually inhabit
The Engineering of Consent
On Orwell's invented language as a predictive document, the contemporary forms of controlled vocabulary and doublethink, and why the destruction of linguistic precision is always a project of those who benefit from the thoughts that become unthinkable
The Engineering of Consent
On how language softens atrocity, why the euphemism treadmill runs indefinitely, what happens to thought when the vocabulary for hard things is systematically replaced by vocabulary that makes them easier to bear, and who benefits from the replacement
The Engineering of Consent
On Edward Bernays — Sigmund Freud's nephew, the inventor of public relations, the man who demonstrated that democratic publics could be engineered through the systematic manipulation of symbols and desires — and the industry he founded that has not stopped running since
The Hidden Grammar
On the Logos doctrine from Heraclitus through Philo through John's Gospel — the philosophical claim that reality is structured by a rational principle that language participates in — and what it means to take that claim seriously rather than metaphorically
The Hidden Grammar
On Daniel Everett's discovery that the Pirahã language of the Amazon appears to violate Chomsky's proposed linguistic universals, what that implies about the relationship between language, culture, and cognition, and why the debate is about more than linguistics
The Hidden Grammar
On what it would mean if the deep structure underlying all human languages is also the structure underlying reality itself, the esoteric and scientific traditions that have made versions of this claim, and whether the convergence is meaningful
The Hidden Grammar
On universal grammar — the claim that all human languages share a deep structure that is not learned but innate — what it implies about the nature of mind, and why the most controversial linguist of the twentieth century may be pointing at something the sciences of mind have not yet caught up with
The Word That Makes the World
On what lies at the edge of the sayable, what mystics, poets, and mathematicians do when language fails, and what the silence at the limit of the speakable reveals about the nature of mind and the nature of reality
The Word That Makes the World
On David Bohm's proposal for a new mode of language built for process rather than things, why he believed subject-object grammar encodes a fragmentary worldview, and what a language adequate to the implicate order would have to be able to do
The Word That Makes the World
On the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — the claim that the language you speak shapes the thoughts you can think — the evidence that has accumulated, the limits that have been established, and why the weak version is more interesting than the strong one
The Word That Makes the World
On the empirical evidence for linguistic relativity across color perception, time, number, and spatial cognition — and what it means that the basic categories of human experience are not universal but vary with the language community