Through the Looking Glass

Words have always mattered a great deal to me, and, I suspect to you too,  I love nothing more than discovering a new word or exploring an expression which helps me to make sense of the world, especially when there is a seismic shift of the sort that is currently happening. This post is about how language shapes our thoughts and beliefs and who has the power to shape the language. It is about truth and lies, information, disinformation and misinformation, and I strongly suggest that you don’t read it if you have no interest in or have decided to switch off from the current news cycle.

My purpose with this post is simple. It is to say that epistemic reality or knowledge exists and that 2+2 does not equal 5 because someone powerful tells you it does.

In order to do this I’d like to explore the adjective ‘Orwellian’ and the expression ‘Through the Looking Glass’ from The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland to explain how they are helping me to make sense of what is happening and also how they help me to know that I am not going mad. 

I’ll start with my interpretation of the adjective ‘Orwellian'. Orwell’s novel 1984 was my ‘coming of age’ book. I first read it at the age of about 16 and have since reread it several times. Since that first reading I have used 1984 as my way of evaluating how I stand as an ordinary person in relation to the power of the state. I measure everything I am able to do, think, write and say against what I’d be able to do, think, write and say if I had the misfortune to live under a totalitarian regime, as described in Orwell’s warning from post-war 1948, when the book was first published.

The hero of the book is Winston Smith whose job in the Ministry of Truth is to ‘correct’ or, in reality, falsify the historical record to conform to whatever the all-powerful Big Brother says is now the truth. Winston is intelligent and sane enough to know that he lives in a world in which reality for all human beings who live in Oceania, is not found in the evidence of their own eyes and ears but in whatever they are told to think, believe and feel by those in control. 

The really chilling aspect of the book is in the way that Big Brother understands that language shapes and structures the way we think about the world. Winston’s first act of rebellion and subversion is to buy a note book, a rare find in a second hand shop, in order to start writing down his thoughts. The reason that this act is so subversive is to be found in three concepts which feel relevant to our world in 2025. The first is Newspeak, the second is Doublespeak, and the third is Doublethink.

All three seek to use language in a particular way in order to confuse, disconcert and undermine the capacity for critical thinking. Disinformation and misinformation is constantly churned out, whilst people are hard at work to ban words so that the vocabulary shrinks along with the concepts that those words represent.  Winston knows that Newspeak, Doublespeak and Doublethink are designed to manipulate him into submission by denying the evidence of his own eyes, ears and brain, so he tries to find others who might have realised what is really going on. He comes to believe that the charismatic O’Brien may be part of a revolutionary group called The Brotherhood. 

Unfortunately O’Brien is actually an agent of the state who has identified the danger that Winston’s free thinking represents.Winston is arrested for ‘re-education’ and presented with the threat of his deepest, darkest fears in Room 101 (to have a cage of hungry rats placed over his head), he capitulates, accepts that if O’Brien says that 2+2 = 5, then that indeed must be true. On acceptance that the truth is whatever Big Brother has decided, Winston is released, a broken man who is no longer a threat to the state or the system that underpins its power.

My understanding of the term ‘Orwellian’ is of a dystopian world in which the meaning of all language becomes the preserve of anyone powerful enough to define it and have other people accept that definition, even when those people know that it is not true. Which is essentially what Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty says to Alice in ‘Through the Looking Glass:’ “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more or less.” Alice replied “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things?”  To which Humprty Dumpty retorted; “The question is, who is to be master, that is all.”

My understanding of the regimes in Russia and China under the all powerful and autocratic long term leadership of Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping is that protest is futile, elections are a sham and that opposition is quickly crushed, as happened with Alexei Navalny. That there is state control of all forms of media and the law, all of which creates a daily reality that Winston Smith would immediately recognise, because Big Brother is not only watching you but is also monitoring all your conversations and punishment for any transgressions will be swift and brutal. Similar autocracies are evident in North Korea and Belarus.

My understanding also is that three years ago Russia invaded the sovereign territory of Ukraine in an illegal act of aggression which has been bravely resisted by the Ukrainian people led with great fortitude by President Zelensky who had been made leader after free and fair elections. We have all seen the evidence of this on our television screens. In this effort he has been supported by money and arms from both the USA and countries in Europe, including the UK. How then to make sense of the fact that just yesterday (Monday) the US government sided with Russia, North Korea, and Belarus to vote against a United Nations resolution to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

In addition to this sudden reversal of the entire postwar world order of who is allied with whom, there have been some surprising, shocking and baffling statements coming from the White House including an assertion that it is President Zelensky rather than President Putin who is a dictator, and it was he rather than Putin who was personally responsible for the war with Russia because he failed to ‘do a deal’ to prevent the invasion. There were also claims that Zelensky’s popularity is as low as 4% and that he was no longer the legitimate leader of the country as he had failed to hold scheduled elections due to martial law. It’s akin to Roosevelt labelling Churchill an unelected dictator in 1940 and switching support to the Nazis as their bombs blitzed London.

For the first time in my long life, I feel as if I have slipped through the looking glass into an Orwellian nightmare of falsehoods. Humpty Dumpty and Big Brother would have us all believe that 2+2 = 5 but I prefer epistemic or objective reality (aka the truth), so I am indebted to the BBC Verify Fact Checking service for the following information, which I am quoting verbatim*:

Claim: “Zelensky is a dictator without elections”

Fact: “Zelensky's first five-year term of office was due to come to an end in May 2024. However, Ukraine has been under martial law since the Russian invasion in February 2022, which means elections are suspended because some experts have observed that holding elections in Ukraine before the conflict ends would be practically impossible, as Russian attacks on many cities persist and millions of citizens are displaced abroad or living under Russian occupation. For his part, Zelensky has vowed to hold elections as soon as practicable”.

Claim: 'I hate to say it, but he's down at 4% approval rating'

Fact: “It's unclear what source the president was citing as he didn't provide evidence. We have asked the White House to clarify this. Official polling is limited and it is extremely difficult to carry out accurate surveys during a time of war. Millions of Ukrainians have fled and Russia has occupied around a fifth of the country.

However, some polling has been possible to carry out by telephone. A survey conducted this month found that 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted the president, according to the Ukraine-based Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. However, that was down from 77% at the end of 2023, and 90% in May 2022 - suggesting that the president has suffered a drop-off in his popularity”.

Claim: 'Ukraine should have never started it'

“President Putin has stated: "It was they who started the war in 2014. Our goal is to stop this war. And we did not start this war in 2022," Russian President Vladimir Putin told US talk show host Tucker Carlson in February 2024. This has now been repeated by President Trump.

Fact: Putin launched the invasion on 24 February 2022, stating that the aim of the operation was to "demilitarise and denazify" the pro-Western government of Volodymyr Zelensky and prevent the country from joining Nato”.

Never before in my seventy-seven years have I felt so like Winston Smith, drowning in a sea of endless misinformation, disinformation and, yes, lies. I am writing this in some trepidation. Some will tell me off for daring to criticize the US government. Others will say they came to buy lipstick not to get a lecture on semantics. Others may threaten to take their custom away from LFF as a punishment for daring to express my thoughts. It’s not as bad as being threatened with Room 101, but it does make me wonder if I should just keep my thoughts and worries to myself. 

However, I have come to think that my sanity in this new shape-shifting world order lies in seeking out objective, epistemic reality - aka the truth. It also lies in sharing that truth and (hopefully with more success than poor old Winston Smith) seeking out others who may feel as I do. 

Please tell me that I am not alone. That 2+2=4. That you agree that Russia invaded Ukraine. That I am not going mad and neither are you. Oh - and a nice new word for you: Kakistocracy - do look it up!

*If you want to take me to task for relying on BBC Verify, then try this detailed and comprehensive corrective to various falsehoods about Ukraine from the ISW (Institute for the Study of War): https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-fact-sheet-february-21-2025:

Tricia x

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