Schmitt on the Night of the Long Knives

Translation via Kakao & Google of Carl Schmitt's 1 August, 1944article, which defends the Night of the Long Knives. The original German article is available here.

"In 1933, the leader spoke about state and law. He showed the contrast of a substantial right, not separated from morality and justice, to the empty law—equity of an untrue neutrality and developed—the inner contradictions of the Weimar system, which destroyed itself in this neutral legality and delivered to its own enemies.He then concluded the phrase: "This must be a warning to us."

"In his speech to the whole German people on 13th November, the Reichstag was a German state speech. On July 1, 1934, the leader recalled another historical warning. The strong German Empire founded by Bismarck collapsed during the World War because it did not have the power to "use of its.war articles" at the crucial moment. Paralyzed by the way in which a liberal "right-wing state" was thought, a politically instinctless civil bureaucracy did not find the courage to treat mutineers and enemies of the state under the right of law. Anyone who reads the report on the public plenary session of October 9, 1917 in Volume 310 of the Reichstag printed matter today will be shocked and understand the Fuehrer's warning. The message of the Reich government at the time that the ringleaders of the mutinous sailors had negotiated with members of the Reichstag from the Independent Socialist Party, the German Reichstag responded in sheer indignation by not curtailing a party's constitutional right to carry out propaganda in the army and that conclusive evidence of high treason was lacking. Kun, this conclusive evidence was spat in our faces a year later by the Independent Socialists. With unprecedented bravery and terrible sacrifices, the German people stood up to a whole world for four years. But his political leadership has sadly failed in the fight against poisoning and the undermining of German law and a sense of honor. To this day we atone for the inhibitions and paralysis of the German governments of the world war.

"All moral indignation over the shame of such a collapse has accumulated in Adolf Hitler and has become in him the driving force of a political act. All experiences and warnings in the history of the German misfortune are alive in him. Most fear the harshness of such warnings and prefer to flee into an evasive and balancing superficiality. But the Fuhrer takes the lessons of German history seriously. That gives him the right and the strength to establish a new state and a new order.

"II. The Fuehrer protects the law from the worst: abuse, if at the moment of danger he creates justice by virtue of his leadership as the highest judge: "At that hour I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thus the German people in the highest level Judge. The true guide is always also a judge. Judgeship flows from leadership. Anyone who wants to separate or even oppose each other in: ies makes the judgII. The Fuehrer protects the law from the worst: abuse, if at the moment of danger he creates justice by virtue of his leadership as the highest judge: "At that hour I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and thus the German people in the highest level Judge. The true guide is always also a judge. Judgeship flows from leadership. Anyone who wants to separate the two from one another or even to oppose them makes the judge either a counter-leader or a tool of a counter-leader and seeks to unhinge the state with the help of the judiciary. This is a tried and tested method not only of the destruction of the state, but also of the law. It was characteristic of the legal blindness of liberal legal thinking that one sought to turn criminal law into the great license, the "Magna Charta of Criminals" (Fr. v. Liszt). Constitutional law then had to become the Magna Charta of treason and treason in the same way. The judiciary is thereby transformed into an imputed enterprise, to whose predictable and predictable functioning the criminal has a well-earned subjective right. State and people, however, are completely tied up in an allegedly complete legality. For extreme emergencies, he may be secretly granted apocryphal emergency exits, which are recognized by some liberal law teachers as the case may be, and denied by others in the name of the constitutional state and viewed as "legally non-existent". With this kind of jurisprudence, however, the Fuehrer's word that he acted as "the people's highest judge" is incomprehensible. It can only reinterpret the Fuehrer's judicial act as a measure of the state of siege that needs to be legalized retrospectively The sentence of our current constitutional law, the principle of the primacy of political leadership, is thereby twisted into a legally insignificant phrase and the thanks that the Reichstag has expressed to the Führer in the name of the German People into an indemnity or even an acquittal.e either a counter-leader or a tool of a counter-leader and seeks to unhinge the state with the help of the judiciary. This is a tried and tested method not only of the destruction of the state, but also of the law. It was characteristic of the legal blindness of liberal legal thinking that one sought to turn criminal law into the "lVIagna Charta des Criminal" (Fr. von Liszt). Constitutional law then had to become the Magna Charta of treason and treason in the same way. The judiciary is thereby transformed into an imputed enterprise, to whose predictable and predictable functioning the criminal has a well-earned subjective right. State and people, however, are completely tied up in an allegedly complete legality. For extreme emergencies, he may be secretly granted apocryphal emergency exits, which are recognized by some liberal law teachers as the case may be, and denied by others in the name of the constitutional state and viewed as "legally non-existent". With this kind of jurisprudence, however, the Fuehrer's word that he acted as "the people's highest judge" is incomprehensible. It can only reinterpret the Fuehrer's judicial act as a measure of the state of siege that needs to be legalized retrospectively The sentence of our current constitutional law, the principle of the primacy of political leadership, is thereby twisted into a legally insignificant phrase and the thanks that the Reichstag has expressed to the Führer in the name of the German People into an indemnity or even an acquittal.

"In truth, the Fuehrer's act was real jurisdiction. It is not subject to the judiciary, but was itself the highest judiciary. It was not the act of a republican dictator who, while the law closes its eyes for a moment, creates accomplished facts in a space devoid of the law, so that the fictions of complete legality can then take place again on the ground of new facts thus created . The Fuhrer's judicature arises from the same source of law from which all the law of every people arises. In the greatest need the highest right proves itself and appears the highest degree of judicially avenging realization of this right. All right comes from the people's right to life. Every state law, every judicial judgment contains only as much law as it flows from this source. The rest is not a right, but rather a "positive set of compulsory norms" which a skilful criminal scoffs at.

"III. In sharp opposition, the Führer emphasized the difference between his government and his state and the state and the governments of the Weimar system: "I did not want to surrender the young Reich to the fate of the old." "On Jan. 30, 1933, a new government was not formed for the umpteenth time, but a new regiment removed an old and sick age." If the Fuhrer calls for the liquidation of a dismal section of German history with such words, it is also of legal significance for our legal thinking, for legal practice and interpretation of the law. We have to re-examine our previous methods and lines of thought, the prevailing doctrines and the preliminary decisions of the highest courts in all areas of law. We must not blindly adhere to the legal terms, arguments, and precedents produced by an old and sick age. Many a sentence in the reasons for the decision of our courts can of course be understood from a justified resistance to the corruption of the system of that time; But even that, if carried on thoughtlessly, would mean the opposite today and make the judiciary the enemy of today's state. When the Reichsgericht in June 1932 (RGSt. 66, 386) saw the point of judicial independence in "protecting the citizen in his legally recognized rights against the possible arbitrariness of a government hostile to him", it was spoken from a liberal, individualistic attitude. “The judges' turn is thought of as a front position not only vis-à-vis the head of state and the government, but also vis-à-vis the administrative organs in general.” 1) That is understandable from that time To enforce institutions, including the judiciary, with the greatest determination.

"At the end of the 18th century, the old man linked the question of state emergency law with the question of the delimitation of judicial matters and government matters and taught that in the event of danger or great damage to the state, the government could turn any judicial matter into a government matter to explain. In the 19th century, Dufour,. one of the fathers of French administrative law, which defines the act of government (acte de gouvernement), which is beyond judicial review, as meaning that its aim is the defense of society, namely the defense against internal and external, open or hidden, present or future enemies be. Whatever one may think of such provisions, they in any case point to a legally essential peculiarity of the political "government acts" which have gained legal recognition even in liberal constitutional states. In a leader state, however, in which legislation, government and judiciary are mutually exclusive not, as in a liberal constitutional state, mutually mistrustful control 2), what is otherwise legal for an "act of government" must apply to an incomparably higher degree to an act through which the Führer has proven his highest leadership and judiciary.

"The Fuhrer himself determines the content and scope of his action. The speech once again ensured that the state of "normal justice" has been restored since Sunday, July 1, 1934 ) denotes in the form of a government law the temporal and material scope of the immediate Führer action. Outside or within the time range of the three days, unrelated to the Führer action and not authorized by the Führer, "special actions" are all the more serious injustice, the higher and purer the right of the leader is. According to the declarations of the Prussian Prime Minister Göring on July 12 and the Minister of Justice Gürtner on July 20, 19341), particularly strict prosecution of such inadmissible special procedures is ordered. That the delimitation of authorized and unauthorized action in case of doubt cannot be a matter for the courts, should be self-evident from the previous indications about the peculiarity of the act of government and the action of the Fuhrer.

"IV. Within the total scope of those three days, those judicial acts of the Führer stand out particularly through which he as leader of the movement atoned for the particular breach of faith committed against him as the highest political leader of the movement by his subordinates. As such, the leader of the movement asked for a judicial task, the internal right of which cannot be realized by anyone else. In his speech in the Reichstag, the Fuehrer expressly emphasized that there is only one bearer of political will in our state, the National Socialist Party. But a community that is structured and ordered in such a way into the state, movement, people, also includes the own internal right of those state-supporting life and community orders which are based in a special way on the oath of loyalty to the Führer. The fact that the party fulfills its task depends today no less than the fate of the political unity of the German people themselves. "This enormous task, in which the whole danger of the political is accumulated, cannot be done anywhere else, least of all remove a civil court from the party or the SA, which proceeds in the form of a judicial procedure. Here it is entirely up to itself "2). Here, because of the special qualification of the crime, the political leader has become the highest judge in a specific way.

"V. Again and again the Führer reminds us of the collapse of 1918. This is where our current situation is determined. Anyone who wants to judge the serious events of June 30th correctly must not take the events of this and the two following days out of the context of our overall political situation and isolate and encapsulate them according to the type of certain criminal procedural methods until the political substance has been driven out and only then a "purely legal factual element" or "non-factual element" remains. Such methods cannot do justice to any highly political process. But it belongs to the poisoning of the people of the last decades and is a trick of anti-German propaganda that has been practiced for a long time, precisely this isolation, experienced as the sole "rule of law" to present. In the autumn of 1917 all German parliamentarians, confused in their legal thinking, namely capitalists and communists, clericals and atheists, demanded with remarkable unanimity that Germany's political fate should be surrendered to such "processual fictions and distortions," and one spiritually The helpless bureaucracy at that time did not even feel the political sense of those "legal" demands emotionally. When faced with the act of Adolf Hitler, some enemies of Germany will come with similar demands. You will find it unheard of that today's German state asked for the strength and the will to distinguish friend and foe. They will promise us the praise and applause of the whole world if we again fall down, as we did in 1919, and sacrifice our political existence to the idols of liberalism. Anyone who sifts through the enormous background of our overall political situation will understand the admonitions and warnings of the Führer and prepare for the great spiritual battle in which we have to uphold our right." 

What They Mean by "White Supremacy"

 The word gets tossed out all the time, but seeing them actually define it is always useful:

"When I say white, I am not talking about skin pigmentation. I am talking about a worldview that embraces white supremacy. That includes many whites, but also a lot of brown and black bodies that also are white in their worldview.”"

Examples, De La Torre said, include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose legal opinions have routinely supported the dominant culture, and Hispanics who supported Donald Trump.

Baptist News

White supremacy is basically Americans governing on behalf of typical American norms and views. 

The way that intersectionality, social justice, and hypermodernity work is to actively attack "whiteness" (traditional Western culture) and accuse it of all working for 'white supremacy.' This is in spite of the fact that it was the "white supremacist" system that appointed Justice Thomas, and that it was in the context of Western models for human rights and objectivity that the concept of universal human rights was born. 

Other peoples are allowed to have their own cultures and experiences, and they are encouraged to live those experiences and to share them widely. But, anyone who is living in a way that resembles traditional American perspectives is pathologized. 

To the social justice left, it is only possible to positively be part of a non-white cultures or to be a hypermodernist that actively disassociates oneself from traditional Western culture. 

Anglobraining

 English men are still slaves of empiricism. Which means they get an allergic reaction reaction you ask them to generalize about something. This is the legacy of William of Ockham*, where there are no universals in nature. Englishmen by nature do not believe in universals.

"So you end up with these trivialities - they're good at trivialities. The best example would be logical positivism, the end of philosophy, which is the direct heir of William of Ockham as well."

E. Michael Jones in his Degenerate Moderns Brazilian Edition interview

*Link is to the best & most succinct explanation of Ockham's denunciation of universals.

One of the most annoying and constant features of philosophizing in English is the constant pushback against coming to any general conclusions or universals; there is always the desire to find some exception, or to dream up some absurd hypothetical that uncharitably bypasses normal interpretations of the opposition's arguments. Everything has to be couched in such perfect language because there is no longer any principle of charity, nor any desire to actually attack the content of the argument head-on. 

Let us refer to the act of seeking out edge cases & absurd hypotheticals to bypass universals and normal lines of argument as Anglobraining. It is the effort to turn everything into a discussion about trivialities and exceptions, making either universals or grander logical arguments irrelevant, and the desire to shrimp out of any such arguments, seeing them as impossible or improperly setup. 

One of the First & Most Important Anglibrainers: William of Ockham; note the massive Angloschnoz.

Everything is premised on the world being dominated by a materialistic unreality. By unreality, we mean something that fails to be constant or measurable because the second we put our finger down on it it begins to vanish before our eyes. Everything is reduced to nihil because the anglobrainer will literally drag you into quantum mechanics before he is willing to concede that universals or rationality can provide us with enough to have an actual discussion.

Perhaps a terrific example of this is how any discussion about gender esssentialism has to be completely derailed by the existence of intersex peoples. By intersex, of course, we mean an actual definition of people whose chromosomal sex is inconsistent with their phenotype, which occurs in 0.018% of the population (PubMed).

Of course it is not the case that intersex people are completely irrelevant to a discussion on gender essentialism. They are certainly a category which must be accounted for in an essentialist's position, but most people tend to believe that if something is applicable to 99.9% of people, it is quite insightful of a measure for humans in general. The exception to the rule does not break the rule, it affirms the rule. The rule points out the anomalous, which makes it a good rule, and that which fails to conform to this rule is something that has to be addressed in light of the rule. 

If a species no longer fits into the same genus, the structure of the family is not broken; the system simply refined. But the Anglobrain would have you believe that the very idea of taxonomic rank must be done away with. 

Some people are born blind. We do not let that change our ideas about how eyes should function because, maybe, it is unfair to people born blind to say that they should function at all. Likewise, people who are born with irregularities in their manifestation of sexual characteristics are not viewed as something that should throw an entire wrench into how we should view sexual functionality in humans. 

But the Anglobrain thinks that all talk of essentialism must be called off if there is any sort of complaint to be made against a model based on universals. 

Gender isn't real because we can't empirically conclude that sex is even necessarily real since intersex people exist. 

The same can be applied to discussions about morality. 

A man cannot say we shouldn't change the names of historic buildings in response to a story about General Lee's name being removed from something because he would certainly support changing the name of a campus building named after the historically relatively insignificant pedophile who that donated to have it built, as in the case of Sir Ron Bierley and Wellington College.

Moreover, we are supposed to be forever hung up on the problem of thou shalt not kill  and thou shalt not steal because of arguments about self-defense and Robin Hood. Conversation is never allowed to advance into a rich discussion of ethics because we cannot get over the fact that the language has not been meticulously assembled with nano-optical tweezers & microscopes.

The anglobrain wants every inch of every argument to be painstakingly defined because he has one move: insert the edge case; attack the universal. 

But it is ultimately not the duty of the writer to turn every broadly philosophical work into a narrow, analytical philosophical paper. It is the job of the reader to understand the core of the argument, and then to make a case corresponding to the argument, pointing out any potential common ground, and pointing out important differences. 

This does not suit some people, though, because they dislike the idea of philosophy being between competing systems for understanding the world that try to navigate a common reality. 

Their version of philosophy does not include usable universals, thus is not a common reality to be navigated. It's a battlefield of atomized individuals which do not contribute to any whole, but only live out a solitary existence in a world of fog. 

Anglobraining is derailing everything with postmodernity and races toward antinomianism.

Yarvin on the Three Forms of Government

 Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, recently summarized power in the following way: 

There are three political forces: monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Every regime is based on one and suppresses the other two.

Democracy is the strongest but least stable force; truly democratic regimes are rare. Oligarchy is the most stable force; it is especially good at suppressing democracy, because it is especially good at pretending to be democracy. The only threats to an oligarchy are either a foreign oligarchy, or a union of democracy and monarchy—in which democratic energy installs a monarch.

It is very easy to show that, when democratic energy is weak, monarchy is the only possible successor of oligarchy. In general and with only clearly limited exceptions, the first job of any new regime is to dismantle and replace the institutions of the old. Like any other serious task, only unity of command can solve this problem.

Gray Mirror

Yarvin basically understands that most democracy is illegitimate, a fact which Plato recognized in the era before Christ, and something that the American founding fathers more or less knew. 

Yarvin understands that Oligarchs manufacture consent via democratic institutions, which gives us an illusion of a mandate from heaven.

Mandates from heaven actually used to be honest: they were said to come from God! Of course, whether or not they did is up for debate, and we would probably insist that it's impossible that all these different mandates did come from God, but what is perhaps the key to this is the mandate of heaven vis a vis understanding that the heaven being referenced is the metaphysics that govern the cosmos. 

That way, we can abstract the principle enough to make it more universally palatable to different religions, and people who are atheists but recognize the power of immutable principles which govern human nature can likewise feel a certain loyalty to these regimes. 

Monarchy is the third form of government being referenced here. I think that we must interpret this as monarchy in the literal appeal to the mandate of heaven in an undemocratic fashion. In this sense, literal monarchy or more republicanized and fashed out forms of it can be scene as being in the same vein. 

Yarvin says another thing that is very interesting:

Therefore, “democratic energy installs a monarch” is a description of all revolutions—at least, all internal revolutions.

The nature of democratic energy is unstable. It is going to throw into power a Lenin or a Washington, and then it will generally begin to dissipate as the regime consolidates itself. 

The revolution dissipates, but the principles endure.  

Chauvin's Defense Relying on Handwritten Notes? Third World Stuff

 One of the more important characteristics of any country that I would consider to be developed would be its ability for the professionals and experts to simply report the truth transparently without any fear of reprisal or blowback. 

Every country, of course, has sacred cows which it tries to protect. This is not really an issue. But when it comes to reporting the facts clearly & concisely of a crime or some other incident that does not need to be inherently political, there can be no effort to make a cover up. 

But take a look at what Chauvin's defense team is relying on:

Handwritten notes of a law enforcement interview with Dr. Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, say Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system. 

"If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3," Baker told investigators.

Kare11

The documents that should clearly convey this information are too opaque to clearly communicate this information. This, alone, would be just potentially be an error of how the documents themselves are organized, but combined with the fact that one can expect "expert" witnesses and the coroners themselves to firmly put themselves into the pocket of the prosecutor's, the defense is absolutely forced to rely on documents like these. 

You are no longer living in a truly developed country when it is the case that people are too shy to speak the facts in a court case because political interest groups are so invested in their narratives that they seek to win political points through dishonesty. 

Any society which cannot examine individual events objectively has no hope of having a functioning democracy.

27% of People in 1937 Didn't Have Religious Membership

 An interesting paragraph jumped out at me while looking through an article on religiosity: 

The polling giant has been measuring church membership since 1937 when nearly three-quarters of the population (73%) reported membership in a house of worship. For much of that time, membership remained at about 70% but began to decline after 1999. By the late 2000s, membership had dropped to about 62% and has continued to fall.

KTLA 

Many people would focus on the fact that this article talks about membership in houses of worship dropping dramatically, but the fact of the matter is that it is pretty surprising that nearly a third of Americans historically did not see themselves as members of a particular religious tradition. 

This reminds me of polls from the 19th century which showed that a third or more of scientists were atheists, and polls of Parisians from the same time which showed similarly that only 80% of them identified as Christians. Neither the Jewish or Muslim populations of the city would scarcely make up the rest of the 20% to 100, so sizable religionless populations did exist in those times. 

It may very well be the case that a third of Americans have always been somewhat religionless. I am not saying outright atheist, though certainly it would not be too difficult to believe that maybe 1 in 10 Americans were historically atheist as Rodney Stark has implied, but I can imagine that a very large amount of Americans had extremely mild views about God and spirituality. 

The early 20th century was a time when the occult flourished, after all, and the 1950s onwards were full of New Age movements, fixations on things like hypnotism and Freudian psychology. 

Americans tend to be so obsessed with this idea that grandma & grandpa (and great-grandma & great-grandpa) were pious pillars of their community, along with absolutely everyone else in the community, that they forget that there were porn theaters, prostitutes, alcoholics, atheists, literal Communists and Anarchists, practitioners of the occult, etc., thriving in urban areas, and no doubt having presences in towns and villages. 

Rorty & Linguistical Cynicism

While discussing philosophy with a Rorty fan, I came across this very interesting excerpt: 

In Rorty's view, both Dewey's pragmatism and Darwinism encourage us to see vocabularies as tools, to be assessed in terms of the particular purposes they may serve. Our vocabularies, Rorty suggests, "have no more of a representational relation to an intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater's snout or the bowerbird's skill at weaving." (TP 48)

Pragmatic evaluation of various linguistically infused practices requires a degree of specificity. From Rorty's perspective, to suggest that we might evaluate vocabularies with respect to their ability to uncover the truth, would be like claiming to evaluate tools for their ability to help us get what we want—full stop. Is the hammer or the saw or the scissors better—in general? Questions about usefulness can only be answered, Rorty points out, once we give substance to our purposes.

Rorty's pragmatist appropriation of Darwin also defuses the significance of reduction. He rejects as representationalist the sort of naturalism that implies a program of nomological or conceptual reduction to terms at home in a basic science. Rorty's naturalism echoes Nietzsche's perspectivism; a descriptive vocabulary is useful insofar as the patterns it highlights are usefully attended to by creatures with needs and interests like ours. Darwinian naturalism, for Rorty, implies that there is no one privileged vocabulary whose purpose it is to serve as a critical touchstone for our various descriptive practices.

For Rorty, then, any vocabulary, even that of evolutionary explanation, is a tool for a purpose, and therefore subject to teleological assessment. Typically, Rorty justifies his own commitment to Darwinian naturalism by suggesting that this vocabulary is suited to further the secularization and democratization of society that Rorty thinks we should aim for. 

Stanford Encyclopedia's article on Rorty.

Rorty. Relaxin'.

Rorty understands language in a very cynical way -- which is not a bad way at all of understanding language. 

I believe it is actually the case that people have always understood the potential for language to be abused. What is a lie, after all, if not an abuse of language? But Rorty's cynicism is deeper than this. It views all language as pragmatic in essence, and thus never actually is entirely honest. 

Perhaps I am being too hard on him, and my interpretation is not entirely correct, but that is not something to be bogged down in when this idea alone is quite interesting.

If the language we use to discuss ideas is ultimately for specific purposes, and not meant to be precise presentations of our real perception of how the world is and what our ideas are, we have to treat the way that anyone talks to us skeptically. We become a part of anyone's agenda when we assent to the way that they are using language. 

Rorty is not wrong in viewing language as behaving this way. 

I think that, especially in modernity, language has begun to mean this. Our justifications for the Iraq war can be seen as a large ruse to profit off of the highly lucrative oil trade and to serve other geopolitical interests. 

When we see the way that all political groups can shift back and forth on things like free speech and property rights when it suits them, we see that hypocrisy can seem almost unconscious and natural. Thus all of the words & ideals previously presented seem like a bunch of hot air, and to have originally only been uttered to serve a single purpose, and to not really be about the ideas in themselves. 

But I think that people tend to believe what they are saying, even if they renege on these words later, and that there are many people who are incredibly sincere in their beliefs and do not yield. The religious, in particular, have an inclination to uphold their precise descriptions of reality, and all that the Saints wrote and martyrs confessed. 

I think that Rorty's assessment is particularly poignant due to the circumstances in which we 20th & 21st century people live: our governments are "democracies" that consist of oligarchs manufacturing consent via the media, who are always engaged in employing ideas and symbolism to manipulate people. Many of these people are not even necessarily very political or philosophical by nature, but are told that it is their duty to be as such. 

Because the populace is not particularly invested in their own narratives, the elites who rule via the manufacturing of consent are blessed by their fickleness.

You can also see the elites benefiting from the cynical use of language in the marketplace. Advertisements are themselves a form of propagandizing in practice. You can see it also cynically employed in law as well, where great efforts are gone to to follow the 'letter of the law' and the very meaning of language becomes distorted. 

Western liberal democracies have cynical views of language because they are ruled by merchants & lawyers who view language as pragmatic tools. Rorty was undoubtedly able to make this conclusion, and it affected the very way that he views language. 

But I think that, in a society more grounded in tradition & language, we would not be having cynical views about language, but rather cynical views about humans, and we would be talking about hypocrisy and not gutting human communications.