How Words Can Control Your Thoughts
In 1949, George Orwell published a book you may have heard of called 1984. The novel follows Winston Smith, a man living in the nation of Oceania, one of three “super-states” remaining in the titular future year. Oceania is ruled by the Party, an administrative body adhering to an ideology called “Ingsoc,” an abbreviation of “English Socialism.” Through a campaign of perpetual surveillance, the Party crushes dissenters and rules unopposed, presumably forever.
Chances are, you already know most of this. You may have even been made to read 1984 in your high school English class. It is a good book, even though I would personally never like to reread it (in my opinion, it is horribly depressing). A remarkably prophetic work, 1984 is often mentioned in discussions of surveillance and the gradual erosion of privacy and free speech in an age where increasingly large portions of our lives are documented on the internet. However, one element of Orwell’s vision that often falls through the cracks was his prediction for how the strategic control of language could be used to shape discussion such that dissent becomes impossible.
In the far-flung future year of 1984, the Party has developed a new version of the English language called Newspeak, which all members of the Party, including Winston, are required to use in all official correspondence. The Newspeak dictionary is written such that large swaths of the English language are condensed into single words; for instance, all adjectives with positive connotations are combined into the word “good”. Additionally, certain words which express ideas offensive to the party have been removed or redefined; for instance, the definition of the word “free” has changed such that being “free” in the sense of freedom no longer exists, and the word only refers to being “rid of,” as in "this field is free from weeds." In this way, Newspeak makes it impossible to express disagreement with the Party, since the necessary vocabulary no longer exists. Winston’s colleague, Syme, who works in the department which writes the dictionary, describes it this way:
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. [...] [By 2050] the whole literature of the past will have been destroyed [...] not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished?
What Syme is saying here is that, through the strategic redefinition of language, debate and thought can also be controlled. The scope of possible opinions can be reduced by eliminating the language used to express them. Like much of 1984, the mechanics of Newspeak would prove to be eerily predictive of the future direction of political discourse.
What You Say Changes What You Believe
You may think that, for all the literary merit of George Orwell’s work, he underestimated the intelligence of average people. After all, there’s no way that you or I could be made to believe something obviously untrue just because we were forced to say it, or to forget something true just because we were unable to say it. Unfortunately for both of us, that’s incorrect. There is a myriad psychological research which suggests that the way we talk about the things we experience can change our perception of them. For instance, “leading” language in questioning can cause an individual to misremember something they saw even moments before. In one study, participants were asked to watch a video of a car crash and then answer some questions about what they had seen. They were given one of several possible questionnaires, including one whose questions were written in a neutral way (“about how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?”) and one written in a highly suggestive way (“about how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?”). Results showed that participants who received the leading questions estimated the speed of the vehicles and the damage caused by the crash to be greater than those who received the neutral questions. This effect of leading questioning is well-known in the realm of law enforcement; researchers have raised concerns that leading questioning during witness interviews can skew their testimony and result in false convictions.
Other effects are more subtle. In Spanish, it isn’t customary to assign a cause to an accidental event. For example, where an English speaker may say that “the man broke the vase” when recalling a household accident, a Spanish speaker would simply say “the vase broke.” One interesting study found that, when shown a video of one such accident, native Spanish speakers were less likely to remember who had caused the accident than were native English speakers. Furthermore, English speakers who were exposed to “agentic” language in an unrelated context before watching the video were more likely to remember the cause of the accident than those who were not. The language you use to describe an event doesn’t just influence your memory of what happened, but also your memory of why and how it happened. These types of effects happen because our memories aren’t picture-perfect; you repeatedly “rehearse” your memories between the time you make them and the time you remember them, and interference in the rehearsal process can change how they are remembered.
What you say can also change how you feel about certain things. You may, quite reasonably, assume that what you think influences what you say and do, and not vice-versa. In some respects this is true, but there’s a two-way street between your attitudes and your actions. For example, studies have shown that if an individual is asked to endorse something about which they have no strong feelings, they will later report more positive feelings toward it than they did beforehand. This happens for a few reasons. There are some topics about which you don’t really know how you feel, and when you need to recall how you feel about them, you observe your own behaviour to make that decision. For example, in the procedure mentioned above, participants may decide that they must feel somewhat positively towards the given product, since they agreed to endorse it. Additionally, people are typically uncomfortable with hypocrisy, and we feel the need to justify our actions to ourselves so that we do not feel like hypocrites. This is called “cognitive dissonance”. We are made uncomfortable by saying something we don’t believe, so we change our feelings to match what we have said or done in the past.
Furthermore, simply repeating something or hearing it repeated often will make it seem more true. As much as we like to believe that we are critical thinkers, we often rely on mental shortcuts to evaluate new information. One of the ways that we do this is by comparing new information to similar things we have already heard, and we are most likely to compare it to information we can easily remember. The more easily we remember a given fact, the more reliable and truthful it seems. For example, you may have heard the “moss only grows on the North side of a tree;” this is actually completely false, but because it is repeated so often, it seems to us to be more true than any new information which contradicts it. We believe it simply because we remember it very easily.
No one’s mind is really a steel trap. Your memories and even your feelings about certain topics are subject to interference over time. It’s entirely possible for your opinion of something to change completely without any conscious reevaluation on your part.
Morally-Coded Language
Language isn’t just a means to communicate facts, it’s also a way that we communicate our feelings and our beliefs. Even when we’re not explicitly stating our personal feelings about a certain topic, we often insert them into what we say through the words that we use. Language that appears objective can often imply moral judgements, even if we don’t intend for it to do so. This is what I would call “morally-coded language”. In 1984, this is depicted in a rather literal way: the Newspeak dictionary defines “good”-ness as all that of which the Party approves, and “ungood”-ness as all that which it maligns. But morally-coded language can emerge in much more subtle ways in our daily lives. Chances are, you already use morally coded language all the time, but you may not notice it. Morally-coded language can be hard to detect when it’s confirming something you already believe.
For example, if I said to you that “Winston Churchill was a brilliant statesman,” you would likely find no issue with this. After all, Churchill was a very competent leader whose skills were invaluable to the Allied Forces’ victory in the Second World War. However, if I said something like “Joseph Mengele was a brilliant physician,” you would likely take issue with that statement. Even though Mengele was arguably as skilled in medicine as Churchill was in statecraft, there is a positive moral judgement implied in the word “brilliant” that you likely feel is more applicable to Churchill than to Mengele. However, you may not have noticed the implicit moral dimension of the word until it was applied to someone who you do not associate with positive qualities. For this reason, it is easy not to notice when moral language is being used, or how it reinforces your existing beliefs.
Morally coded language like this can be used covertly to influence your beliefs about a certain topic. Because we do not often consider the implicit moral value of our words, we can plausibly deny that such words contain any moral judgements at all. Strictly speaking, all that the word “brilliant” really means is intelligent or skilled in a given field, and therefore it is arguably accurate to describe Mengele as brilliant. So, if I wanted to make you feel more positively about Joseph Mengele, I might ask you to recite a short biography which includes the phrase “Mengele was a brilliant physician.” Because this is factually accurate, you may think nothing of it. However, due to the psychological effects of speech I have outlined above, you will likely find yourself more positively inclined towards Mengele after doing so.
In public debate, morally-coded language is often used strategically to reinforce a particular perspective or position. For example, on the issue of abortion, people typically refer to the two opposing perspectives as “pro-choice” and “pro-life”. The two sides of the debate could be more accurately called “pro-abortion” and “anti-abortion,” but the titles are chosen strategically by their adherents in order to associate their side with a morally positive concept (choice and life, respectively). In both cases, this reduces the debate to a moral binary: if you accept that one side of the debate is “pro-life,” then the opposition must necessarily be “anti-life,” which would certainly be more offensive to the average person than merely being “pro-choice”. In this way, both sides invent a moral high-ground through the strategic use of morally-coded language.
Political Correctness
George Orwell’s political attitudes, and particularly his opinion of socialism, didn’t come solely from a lifetime of study and discussion; it came from real-world experience. In 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain at the height of the civil war to fight with the communist-backed Republican government against the country’s rising fascist contingent who would ultimately prevail in the coming years. While serving, Orwell was exposed to the party politics of the socialist Republicans, and was appalled by their internal squabbling, their failure to provide for their own troops, and their deliberate misrepresentations of reality in their official publications, all of which would eventually inform his depiction of the Party in 1984. In the end, Orwell was condemned by the Republicans as a fascist sympathizer. He returned to England no more favourable towards fascism, but now also disillusioned with the socialist opposition. This is all to say that Orwell’s depiction of a totalitarian future was so prophetic because it was based on a real, firsthand experience of revolutionary politics. 1984 wasn’t a work of pure imagination, it was an extrapolation of the ideology he saw in-action in Spain.
Thankfully, in this more enlightened year of 2026, we’re still at least a few steps away from the draconian misery of Oceania under the Party. That doesn’t mean, however, that we are immune to the tactics of control that the Party uses. Control over the language we use may be subtle, but it is no less sinister nor less effective.
A few years ago, I took a course in which one of the topics covered was Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). My professor stressed that everyone in society deserved equity, and thus DEI practices were critically important. While discussing this topic, my professor updated us on recent language standards for discussing DEI. Frankly, I have no idea who actually decides what language is politically correct and what’s not, but once it is decided, the new standard often becomes ubiquitous rather quickly. My professor told us that the word “minority” was no longer acceptable to refer to nonwhite people, women, LGBT people, et cetera. Instead, the term “equity-seeking people” had been adopted in order to reflect that these groups required special considerations under DEI standards even when they were not actually a minority in a given population. My professor continued to say that in the time since this term had been adopted, it too had been deemed unacceptable, and the new standard term was “equity-deserving” people, in order to reflect that the responsibility to seek equity was not upon these people themselves, but rather upon society as a whole. Utterly vexed by this line of reasoning, I asked my professor something to the effect of: “if everyone in society deserves equity, then doesn’t the term ‘equity-deserving’ refer to everyone in society?” to which my professor replied: “technically, yes, but when we say ‘equity-deserving people,’ we’re referring to minorities.”
I take issue with this terminology because – in addition to being self-contradictory – it embeds a factual and moral judgement into a literal description of a group of people. Initially, the term “minority” merely describes the trait which distinguishes this group from the broader population: that they have some characteristic which most of the given population do not have. In the second iteration, the term “equity-seeking people” embeds a secondary, factual judgement about this group of people: that they do not have something (equity) that other people have. In the tertiary iteration, “equity-deserving people,” a further, moral judgement is embedded: that not only does this group of people not have something that others have, but that they deserve to have it, and it is society’s responsibility to give it to them. If you accept that this is the only acceptable way to refer to this group of people, it becomes impossible to even mention the group without implying agreement with this moral judgement. Therefore, it becomes impossible to disagree. After all, it would be an obvious contradiction of terms to suggest that “equity-deserving people” don’t deserve equity.
This is hardly the only instance in which politically correct language is used to change the ethical framework used to discuss a given topic. Some changes, admittedly, do serve to neutralize ethical assumptions in discussion, such as the use of person-first language (i.e., “people with disabilities” as opposed to “disabled people”). However, many other changes serve either to embed ethical assumptions where previously there were none, or to invert the existing ethical assumption. For example, my textbook for an unrelated class asserted that the appropriate term for people with disabilities was now “people with exceptionalities;” this change in terminology does not neutralize ethical assumptions about the population, but merely implies an opposite assumption by substituting a term with negative associations for one with positive associations. Furthermore, I think it is a rather hollow concession, given that not once in the entirety of that textbook was the term “exceptionality” used to refer to anything other than a disability. Similarly, I have heard from one of my former professors that a reviewer on a recent paper insisted that the term “at-risk” be changed to “at-promise” (at promise of what, exactly?).
There are those among us who believe that taking issue with politically correct language is simply nitpicking – that arguing about language is purely pedantic, and a diversion from real issues. To those people I would say this: firstly, any change that is important enough to implement in the first place is important enough to dispute. Secondly, the language that we use is critically important for enabling productive discussion. In his landmark 1651 book Leviathan, philosopher Thomas Hobbes posits that language is the foundation of logic, and without a common language in which the meanings of things are agreed-upon by all parties, it is impossible for a debate to reach any meaningful conclusion. Since Hobbes said that, it has also become clear that language itself has the capacity to change what we think, what we remember, and how we feel. Not only is free and honest speech necessary for productive debate, but it is necessary to maintain the integrity of our thoughts and beliefs. Control over language is control over thought, and anyone who values their freedom to think, feel, and speak according to their own conscience ought never to cede that control to someone else.