Do you like winning arguments?

Why you need to know what the word ¨worb¨ means.

Hey, psst, you!

You´re looking sharp! You seem like a person of discernment and good taste. I mean, you found your way here, didn`t you?

Yep! Must be that you´ve got an eye for quality. You probably read lots of books and stuff, right? Maybe you even got yourself some kinda higher learning in some kinda fancy institution of higher learning, where they taught you how to talk good and stuff.

Clearly, however, you´re no lazy-ass intellectual satisfied with banal answers provided by people oblivious to the magical, mysterious weirdness all around us at every moment. No, you`re cut from a different cloth.

No, if you´re here, it´s because you´re on some kind of intellectual journey, and you´re searching for something. Now, you might not be able to put into words what exactly it is that you`re looking for, but you feel sure that you will recognize what you are looking for when you find it.

In other words, you want the good shit - the magic combination of words that will make the world make sense.

Well, you´ve come to the right place. I´ve got a good idea for you, and I´m pleased to report that I am able to offer it free of charge, with no strings attached. It`d be a bargain at twice the price! There`s no need to thank me. Just pay it forward.

You ready for this? Okay, here goes!

Okay, clearly I miss working at the carnival, but I really do believe that I´ve come across quite a brilliant idea, and I hope that some people take it and run with it.

Now, I can´t take credit for this idea. It came from a YouTube channel that I recently came across called What is Politics? I´ll summarize the idea in a minute, but I really want to encourage you to watch the following video.

It´s a good use of a half-hour, I promise.

How was that? Man, it`s nice to hear someone making sense, isn`t it? It`s such a rarity these days…

Basically, the entire point of this post is to introduce a new word into the political lexicon. The word is ¨worb¨, and it has a very simple definition. A ¨worb¨ is a word that doesn´t mean anything, or at least it doesn´t have a commonly agreed-upon definition. If this doesn`t make sense right away, bear with me for a minute.

The ideas expressed in the above video will likely be familiar to most of my readers. Basically, the guy is bemoaning the sorry state of contemporary discourse, echoing some of Orwell´s main points about the uses and abuses of political language. In decrying the incoherent gobbledygook of post-modernism, he is saying that we need to know what words mean, and we need to insist that people use words in ways congruent with their agreed-upon definition.

Or, in his words:

Many of us feel like the world of politics is broken and needs fixing – but before you can fix your broken car, first you need to know what a car is, and you need to know how a car works, and you need to know what all of the different parts are called, and you need to have the right tools to fix it and you need to know how to use those tools.  So before you can become an effective political actor, first you need basic political literacy.  Which is something that is extremely rare, even among political science PhD’s.

And that’s because politics today is almost 100% pure worbs.

What is a worb, you ask? The YouTuber goes on to explain:

A worb is a word that i just invented which means is a word that everyone uses, but that no one really knows exactly what it means.  Like you think you sort of know what capitalism means, but do you really know what it means? 

He makes a good point. It`s really an activity worth trying. If you feel like playing along, I`d like you to close your eyes after reading this paragraph. What I want you to do is come up with the best definition of capitalism that you can. When you have a satisfactory definition, you can open your eyes again.

(Feel free to share your definition in the comments belows, if you`d like.)

If you´re feeling clever, you could try coming up with one for democracy, or socialism, or fascism. These are probably words you use all the time, and if you use a word, you should know what it means, shouldn´t you?

And if you know what a word means, you should be able to define it, right?

Although more and more people are now waking up to the fact that mainstream political discourse is a steaming, stinking puddle of runny ungulate dung, and there are increasing signs that the masses are stirring from their slumber, it must be acknowledged that there is nothing new about political language being deceptive.

In his classic 1948 essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell complained about the pitiful state of political discourse in his day, writing:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.

More recently, in 2013, Kristian Williams wrote Anarchism and the English Language, an updated version of this treatise which focused specifically on American anarchism at a time when the woke movement was in its ascendancy. He actually went on to write two books about the degeneration of American anarchism into incoherent mumbo-jumbo.

Anarchism and the English Language

The situation has gotten so bad that it has become necessary to define terms in order to make oneself understood. In Iain Davis´s excellent essay COVID Jabs: Ineffective, Oppressive, and Dangerous, he repeatedly cites dictionary definitions of commonly used words such as ownership, slavery, vaccine, infection, and immunity.

Now, one could bemoan the sad state of affairs that requires writers to now define commonly-used words, but such is the world we live in. You gotta roll with the punches, I guess.

In this, Iain Davis is leading the way, doing an admirable job of using dictionary definitions to make extremely solid arguments.

For instance, observe his argument that vaccine mandates, if imposed by force, would amount to slavery.

Watch and learn:

The legal definition of ownership is:

“The exclusive legal right to possession.”

A vaccination mandate decrees that the individual no longer has legal possession of his/her own body. It removes the individual’s legal right to ownership of his/her physical being and hands it over to the state. This constitutes slavery.

Slavery is defined as:

“The condition of being legally owned by someone else and forced to work for or obey them.”

Bam. Point and match. How fucking tidy was that?

My point here is that if you truly want to argue against an idea, you want to focus on that idea. Because words can be used to mean different things, it`s important to make sure that the words you choose will be understood. There`s an easy way to do this: Simply define terms if you think that there is a risk that they will be misunderstood.

So what does all of this have to do with winning arguments?

You may have noticed that almost all debates eventually do turn into debates over the meanings of words. Moreover, the person who has a better grasp of political terms, or who forces their opponent to debate in their terms, will generally win the debate.

In other words, whoever controls the definition of words is in a position of intellectual dominance. I doubt Iain Davis loses many debates.

My point is this - we as a movement should compare notes and use the same definitions of words.

Why? Because we will be more intelligible if we do so, and we will win more debates. And who doesn`t like winning?

It’s really easy for people to win arguments when people get to make up fake definitions of words that no one knows the real definitions of. Or worse, words that have no real definitions, and are nothing but worbs.

So, I really do think that we need to start consciously thinking about how to influence the discourse in ways that suit our purposes. Remember, words are tools. They are means of achieving an end. They are a way of getting what you want.

Is Snow Black?

Now, there have been quite a few attempts in the alternative media to coin new terms, which shows that a lot of people think that our existing political language is inadequate.

Paul Cudenec spent a ton of time arguing that the Great Reset was not communist, but fascist, as did the few Leftist and post-Leftists who took a hard line against COVID measures.

I think everyone eventually decided that the new form of totalitarianism envisaged by our overlords is neither fascism nor communism, but something altogether new, which combines elements of both left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism. When you learn enough about technocracy and communitarianism, this all starts making sense.

(If you don`t know what communitarianism is, it`s basically the attempt of the elites to repurpose propaganda tropes from communism to a different economic system. Bascially, it`s state communism without the pretence of equality, in which a tiny elite of super-rich people rule over over the masses who are indoctrinated with an ideology which teaches them to subordinate their own wishes and desires to those of ¨the greater good¨. So, basically, it`s neo-feudalism, in which the secular ideology of communitarianism fills the role in society that religion used to back in the days of European feudalism. Iain Davis has a killer take on communitarianism. Seriously, go read it. It will only take you 30 minutes to know everything you will ever need to know about communitarianism.)

I guess for now ¨technocracy¨ is the word that we`ve all settled on, although I still think that techno-fascism is also appropriate. I think technocracy is actually quite an appropriate term if it is taken to mean ¨the rule of Technik¨ as opposed to ¨the rule of experts/engineers/technocrats¨.

This is an aside, but in my opinion there will never be any state which is based upon any other expertise than that of the exercise of power. Politics is about power. It`s not about technical expertise. Technocracy can definitely be a misleading term.

Which brings me to another point: if we want to update our operating systems and start using new words, I think that we need to do so deliberately, as a movement. If we want neologisms to catch on, we need to use them repeatedly.

Let me give some examples. Iain Davis refers to the system as the ¨GP3¨, which is short for the Global Public-Private Partnership. CJ Hopkins calls it Globo Cap. Paul Cudenec, Darren Allen and I call it Technik. Hippies and Rastas call it Babylon.

James Corbett refers to the ultra-rich globalist elites as ¨The Powers that Shouldn`t Be¨ (PTSB for short). Others refer to them as the super-class, the parasite class, the predator class, etc.

My point here is that neologisms only work if there is uptake. A new word only enters the vernacular after enough people start using it.

If you take a second to think about new political terms, such as woke, cuck, you will see that there are more words entering the scene from the political right then from the left. I cite this fact in defence of my argument that the Left has officially lost the culture war, at least in English-speaking North America.

Now, I´ve tried before to invent new words, such as ¨pro-com¨ (short for ¨pro-compliance¨, invented as a retort to all the people using ¨anti-masker¨ pejoratively) and ¨smuggle¨ (a Canadian who believes CBC propaganda). Neither of these terms have caught on, but I personally believe that we should always be doing our best to come up with new and better words.

Those of you who are nodding along might enjoy the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, in which an etymologist invents new words for emotional states which lack good descriptive terms.

The video below provides a useful illustration of this:

Pretty cool, eh? It`s interesting to think about the ways that words shape consciousness. For instance, some languages don`t have a word for certain colours, therefore speakers of that language will not see that colour. There`s a fascinating exploration of this subject in a Nexus Void video called How Language Alters our Perceptions.

It also works the other way, by the way. Russian speakers apparently see light blue and dark blue as two fundamentally different colours because they have two different words for them, whereas English speakers see them as two shades of the same colour.

How trippy is that? This flies in the face of the common-sense axiom that ¨seeing is believing¨, suggesting that it might be more accurate to say ¨believing is seeing¨. Or, paradoxically, maybe both statements are equally true.

Okay. I realize I`m jumping around a lot. Let me get back on track. Where were we?

Oh, yeah. I was raving on and on about the invention of the word ¨worb¨. Forgive me if I`m over-enthusiastic, but this guy basically just solved a problem that I didn´t even realize existed. There is no good word for a meaningless word. Could this be a little breakthrough in political theory? I love the fact that it`s one syllable. Really, I want to express the most meaning possible with the least amount of effort.

Let`s recap. A ¨worb¨ is a word that doesn´t mean anything, or at least it doesn´t have a commonly agreed-upon definition. The majority of the words that come out of the mouths of politicians are pure worbs. Democracy, sustainable development, inclusivity, socialism - all these words are used by different people to mean different things. They are used by the members of different in-groups to demarcate the boundaries of that particular group´s preferred version of reality. They do not serve the purpose of actually communicating ideas in any kind of intellectually honest way. They serve to bolster the identity of members of an in-group by differentiating what WE believe versus what THEY believe. These means of affirming group identity is likely a coping mechanism for the alienation produced by the lack of belonging that so many people feel in the modern industrial world.

Human psychology developed over millions of years in order to allow groups of people to meet their needs collectively with the members of their tribe. The psychological need for a feeling of belonging to a group is extremely strong and primal. Woke ideology, i.e. identity politics, plays upon this need. Because modern humans are alienated from genuine community by the socio-economic realities of life under capitalism, we have a strong need to belong to some surrogate group. This is why people are so obsessed with identity politics these days.

Against Identity Politics

From what I`ve seen, a lot of people are drawn to identity politics because of some kind of confusion about who they are, and I believe that a simple explanation for this can be found in primate psychology. When you`re trying to talk about politics, though, this stuff gets very annoying.

Wokesters study the correct use of the correct terms in order to prove that one is privy to the correct, agreed-upon version of THE UNIFYING THING that members of this or that identity-category believe. And, importantly, this UNIFYING THING is conceived of in relation to the beliefs (real or imagined) of an out-group that the in-group defines itself in opposition to. And all of this is dressed up like it`s some kind of morality. What a fucking joke.

My basic argument is very simple - we need to use words correctly. As the video states:

When no one teaches you the definition of a word, you have to figure out what it means by inference, by seeing how other people use it.  And this is a huge problem when you have a bunch of professional manipulators running around changing the meaning of words on purpose so as to fool us into supporting things we don’t actually like or want.

He goes to explain:

Political psychology studies since the 1960’s show us that the less information that we have, the more we rely on things like identity and social cues to shape our political opinions.  Social cues are things like how people dress, what they look like, how they speak and what buzzwords they use – and these cues serve as shortcuts to figuring out which policies we support…

This is something that I have noticed since COVID. By and large, people choose their political beliefs based upon which group they identify with. Fair enough. Typically the members of a given identity-category have certain interests in common. But unfortunately, this leads right into Us Versus Them type thinking.

In other words:

The reality is that everyone in every era uses the popular worbs of the day to get us to support things that we are actually against. 

Not only that, but the malleable definition of worbs also helps politicians turn us into antagonistic tribes of mindless hooting apes who can be whipped up into hating our fellow humans, with whom we share many common political goals. Because without definitions worbs just become identity groups.

Ahem to that. This guy just keeps hitting the nail on the head. In Canada, the CBC managed to gain popular support for putting tens of millions of people on house arrest was by using the extreme unpopularity of Donald Trump to make liberals support policies that they never would have normally supported.

I think it`s really important that people learn the lesson from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Rather than deciding ¨I believe in liberal democracy, therefore I believe in human rights, therefore I oppose the arbitrary suspension of the right to assemble¨, people decided ¨I`m not THAT kind of person, therefore I don`t believe what they believe. Therefore I must believe the opposite.¨ It`s fucking bonkers that the human mind works that way, but apparently it does.

Because the CBC was able to associate being an anti-masker with a Trump supporter, all the people who couldn`t stand Trump didn`t want to be lumped together with his fans. Through the magic of ¨smear-by-association¨, previusly open-minded people became fervently authoritarian anti-anti-maskers. We would do well to take note of the power of political pejoratives.

It`s also worth noting how the invention of new terms can change political discourse. Aas soon as the term Trump Derangement Syndrome entered the vernacular, something clicked into place for a lot of people. Once a phenomenon has a name, it`s easier to speak about.

Now, I have a lot more to say on the subject of words, and I`ve also written quite a lot on the subject, arguing that we need to audit our political vocabularies and de-worb them.

I`ll include links below to some of my previous writing about worbs, especially my critiques of anti-essentialism, post-modernism, and identity politics.

For now, I`ll content myself with proposing a little rule of thumb, which I present to each and every one of you, dear readers, for your consideration.

If you can`t define a word, don`t use it.

Is Snow Black?

Denying reality: a dangerous delusion

Is Fire Hot?

Anarchism and the English Language

Against Identity Politics