How our language shapes our reality

INTRODUCTION: Author of the classic “Brave new world", Aldous Huxley, a British writer, and philosopher, is one of the prominent literary figures of the 20th century. In this memo, discover top insights from one of his essay  “Words and Behaviour”:

On the primary characteristic of words and that of language, Huxley writes: "Words form the thread on which we string our experiences". Had it not been for this, we would've led "a life made up of discreet and mutually irrelevant episodes." Words foster consistency.

Words revealing our true intent. "Feeling and desire provide us with our motive power; words give continuity to what we do and to a considerable extent determine our direction"

How words are used to manipulate others and even ourselves: 1) FALSIFICATION OF FACTS: "we choose to give continuity to our experience by means of words which falsify the facts, this is because the falsification is somehow to our advantage as egotists".

Huxley writes, "language is a device which men use for suppressing and distorting the truth. A real-life example: "Finding the reality of war too unpleasant to contemplate, we create a verbal alternative to that reality, parallel with it, but in quality quite different from it."

2)ABSTRACTION: "You cannot have international justice unless you are prepared to impose it by force", is: "You cannot have international justice unless you are prepared to drop thermite and high explosives upon the inhabitants of foreign cities". Notice the abstraction in play.

3) PERSONIFICATION: Huxley argues that, in politics and wars, there is attribution of personal characteristics to collectivities, and to institutions because it is easier to feel violently toward a person than toward an abstraction. For example, "The enemy", "the red army".

"Personification leads easily to deification; and where the nation is deified, its government ceases to be a mere convenience, like drains or a telephone system, and, partaking in the sacredness of the entity it represents, claims to give orders by divine right"

In conclusion, Huxley writes,"We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, alibi of stupidity."

Solution? Clear and structured language. "Problems shall be spoken of and thought about exclusively in terms of concrete reality; that is to say, of persons." Depersonifying abstractions and personifying human beings, not the other way around.