Up is Down, Down is Up

This week we had the murder of Alexey Navalny, Russian anti-corruption crusader and leader of the opposition against Putin and his tyrannical oligarchy. Putin killed him, either by direct order or by gradually poisoning him and then sending him to a brutal Siberian penal colony. In response to Navalny's murder, Donald Trump, who is a sociopathic narcissist incapable of empathy, sympathy or even seeing anything from anyone else's point of view, commented on Navalny's 'sudden' death that it made him more aware of how America was corrupt and in 'decline'. What he meant was that he sees himself as being 'persecuted' by the American legal system after two recent massive monetary civil case judgments against him, and two major federal indictments. Of course, the comparison to Navalny is absurd. Trump is an adjudged rapist and white-collar criminal who lives in a multi-million dollar Palm Beach estate. He is the exact opposite of a corruption fighter like Navalny, whose only crime was speaking out against Putin. Trump is using the news of Navalny's death to impugn American rule of law. In Russia, where using the term 'war' to describe the war in Ukraine is 'illegal', there is no rule of law, only rule by an all-powerful tyrant. To suggest that the rule of law in America bears any resemblance to what passes for a legal system in Russia is Orwellian. Navalny's persecution bears zero similarity to Trump's criminality, it's the opposite. By erasing the distinction, Trump wants to subvert the meaning of right and wrong and turn America into a Russia-style tyranny.

The world in which we live, the shape of reality, is constructed from words. Change the meaning of the words and the construction shifts and potentially collapses. It's that fragile.

We learned the truism of the importance of words, that they construct our world, in our biblical reckoning of how the world was spoken into existence. "And God said 'Let there be light / God saw that the light was good / And He separated the light from the darkness." Spoken words bring the physical world into existence, and the words embody meaning that separates opposites. When words lose their capacity to distinguish (light and dark), the foundational meaning on which the world is constructed collapses.

In his novel 1984 Orwell updated the idea when he described how the essence of (Soviet-type) totalitarian control over people hinged on subverting the dilalectical principle of meaning that undergirds civilization, with phrases like "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” If words mean their opposite, there is effectively no meaning at all. In physical terms it's like a negative and positive canceling out coherence and truth.  

These are some of the opposite-equivalences we are experiencing in the public informational sphere that are intended to cancel out meaning: 

Self-Defense is Genocide

Insurrection is Patriotism

Criminality is Innocence

Freedom is Subservience 

Losing is Winning

Justice is Persecution

Victimization is Virtue

This week, with Navalny's death, it felt to me like the foundations of global order were shaking. I couldn't comprehend why. Trump comparing himself to Navalny clarified it for me. Order slips into chaos when language loses its meaning.