A contronym is a word having two definitions that contradict each other. Two examples are the word bolt, which can mean to lock with a bolt and to flee, and clip, which means to attach and to detach.
There are many such words and there is also a system of thought based on them. It has no name except for the one I give it here, admittedly an awkward one: The Contronymal Circus. Like words that are their own antonyms, this system of thought confuses and traps, as it is meant to do.
Language is of course slippery and equivocal, with words often connoting multiple meanings. But language is also conditioned by history; even my phrasing it that way is an example of using words in a loose and sloppy way, for “history” doesn’t exist and can’t do anything, people make history, use and shape words for their own designs, even as language then uses them as well.
To say I am making a moot point is an example of my point: Is it arguable or irrelevant to consider? Is that clear?
The American oligarchic political system that is endlessly debated and fixates people’s attention is a contronymal system that contains positive and negative poles that cancel each other out while keeping the believer frozen and frustrated. Once you are in it, you are trapped because there are no outside references – the simulated system of thought is your cage. Biden vs. Trump is an example of this cage.
The great Irish writer James Joyce was born in 1882 in Ireland that was historically subjected to colonial domination by Great Britain. He realized early on that the English language bequeathed to him was not neutrally aesthetic but through usage was politically charged and that words meant one thing to the colonizers and another to the colonized. In The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, his autobiographical novel, he has Stephen Dedalus say about his conversation with his condescending Jesuit English-born dean of studies:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted his words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
For language constitutes “reality” as much as describes it. It is political. Therefore, all cultures of resistance need to reclaim language, which includes not just individual words and their meaning, but phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and narrative structures. When ruling elites can impose language usage on the ruled, they can control their thinking, their sense of “reality,” and their belief in what is possible.
This is why poets are so central to the resistance of oppressed people, and by oppressed people I include residents of the United States who may not describe themselves with that term. For when language is corrupted and thought twisted in sinister ways, all efforts to resist the colonizers of the mind are self-defeating. Double-binds are not reserved for personal relationships but pertain equally to politics and culture. There is a reason why public discourse about politics (and most everything) in the U.S.A. is so circular in nature, so self-defeating, always ending in a dead-end as the system of oligarchic rule rolls along and even strengthens. Think Bush vs. Gore, Obama vs. McCain, Hillary Clinton vs. Trump, Biden vs. Trump, Trump vs. someone. Think of what has happened to reading, writing, and speaking skills throughout the society at every level. Functional illiteracy is widespread. Ignorance may not be bliss even when it’s folly to be wise, for the inability to grasp the contradictory nature of the story you are thinking in has no happy ending.
In the words of the Palestinian writer Edward Said: “As one critic has suggested, nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”
The French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, cast this language conundrum in terms of simulacra and simulation, simulacra between copies of copies that have no originals. He said:
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of the territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory….
Like a narrative structure that is a contronym – self-contradicting – there is no dialectical tension because the system has swallowed it. There is no critical negativity, no place to stand outside to rebel because the simulacrum encompasses the positive and negative in a circulatory process that makes everything equivalent but the “positivity” of the simulacrum itself. You are inside the whale: “The virtual space of the global is the space of the screen and the network, of immanence and the digital, of a dimensionless space-time.”
What I am trying to say is difficult to grasp because it is so twisted. To use language to untwist this example of what the poet William Blake called the “mind-forged manacles” that is the essence of explicit or implicit propaganda is hard because it involves uncovering the words used and the narratives we imbibe to understand our worlds. It involves grasping the presuppositions of a counterfeit system. It is much harder by the day because language has been radically reduced to slogans and words to images of images. Artificial Intelligence is further reducing all reality to illusions. We are caged in a system of contradictions, a narrative of contronyms through which we must see.
At the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce, the great wordsmith and experimenter with form who would go on to write Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, has Stephen Dedalus declare that he will leave Ireland to go and “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
It is time for us to leave as well, to abandon a way of thinking that offers us the false choice of the evil of two lessers in a corrupt system. We have been sold a counterfeit bill of goods, one forged in the devious minds of deans of deception who make Stephen’s interlocuter look like an obnoxious amateur.
Dear friends, here is a great article sent to me by a Venezuelan political scientist and international politics expert, about who really rules USA:
Who is the real shadow power in United States?
By: Germán Gorráiz López | Saturday, 07/20/2024 05:11 AM | Printable version
Source: https://www.aporrea.org/internacionales/a332643.html
The next US elections will not only be the usual struggle between Democrats and Republicans to alternate in power but a dramatic battle between the Atlanticist defenders of Unipolarity or the Wolfowitz Doctrine against the defenders of the Isolationist Doctrine of the US, embodied in Donald Trump, and whose outcome will mark the design of the new global geopolitical architecture of the next five years.
Is the Fourth Branch of Government the real power in the shadows?
The Fourth Branch of Government in the United States would be made up of pathogens of a totalitarian nature and turned into a parallel state and true shadow power, and one of whose basic pillars would be BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world with more than 10 trillion dollars in assets under direct management and about 20 trillion dollars managed by its risk monitoring software called “Aladdin”.
We would thus be facing a mega financial giant with a portfolio larger than that of the largest Chinese bank and with portfolios of more than 30% in leading companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Coca Cola, Twitter, PepsiCo, Ferrari, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Exxon Mobil, Pfizer, McDonald’s or Uber and that would have hastily withdrawn the advertisement where the alleged perpetrator of the attack on Trump would appear. Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Exxon Mobil and the control of US foreign policy
Stevens Coll, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner in his book “Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power,” states that “ExxonMobil is a corporate state within the American state and has its own foreign policy rules.” Likewise, in the book, Coll states that “ExxonMobil has an office in Washington and the donations of its political action committee for the presidential election campaigns in the United States are very much oriented towards one sector, the Republican Party.” Thus, the former executive director of Exxon, Rex Tillerson, was appointed by Trump Secretary of State or Foreign Minister, so in the event of Trump’s victory, Exxon will again try to remotely direct US foreign policy and reissue the “Desert Storm” operation to regain control of Iraqi oil fields by expeditious methods.
The Federal Reserve under Fourth Branch control
The Federal Reserve directs the country’s monetary policy to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates in the United States economy.
The Fed is in theory a public bank subject to congressional regulation, but its preferred shareholders would be banks and private investors. Its current Chairman, Jerome Powell, was chosen by Trump and continued with Biden, would have a mandate until 2026 and would come professionally from The Carlyle Group, whose main shareholders would be the financial Siamese twins BlackRock and Vanguard, so the Fourth Branch will predictably continue to control US monetary policy.
Homeland Security and the plot against Trump
After the failure of the judicial offensive against Trump, the second phase of the plot against Trump consisted of the gestation of an endogenous plot to prevent Trump’s re-election in the 2024 Presidential elections through expeditious methods (read Magnicide), a plot that would be a real work of labyrinthine engineering and whose executing arm would be the Homeland Security.La Homeland Security would be a macro agency made up of the “big live” (the DIA, the CIA, NSA, NGA, and NRO) and together with mega financial companies such as BlackRock and Vanguard, arms companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and oil companies such as Exxon Mobil, would make up the so-called Fourth Branch of Government according to Tom Engelhardt.
Its members would be pathogens of a totalitarian nature and turned into a parallel state and real power in the shadows and in turn would be swallowed up by George Soros’ “Club of the Islands”, and would have designed a plot to neutralize Trump. This plot materialized in the failed attack on the Pennsylvania rally, and a new assassination attempt before the November Elections cannot be ruled out to get the US to return to the path of governments protected by the real power in the shadows (Fourth Branch of Government).
Edward, what a great article about how US ruling class, the US government twists language, and fools people, lies to people, by sort of playing a magical mental spell on the masses witht he way the US government communicates its important messages to the US citizens. For example, i remember that Condolezza Rice in order to fool people into claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction used a game of words like this:
“We believe that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”. -Condolezza Rice
That statement by Condolezza Rice to a smart person means that the US government believes that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, but it is not a total absolute truth, because the US government cannot provide and did not provide a hard evidence about Saddam Hussein and the Iraq government owning weapons of mass destruction.
But to a dumb person without any scientific evidence-based thinking skills, that statement by Condolezza Rice means that the Iraq government and Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. .
And this is the way the US president also speak when they are asked any question by journalists and reporters. The US government and most of its presidents in the last decades have never used a straight talking type of communicating its messages with the masses. What a scam, what deceitful way of talking, of communicating
And most americans do not have the thinking skill, the deconstruction tactics, the philology skills in order to be aware of how the US government deceives its people by even the way they communicate with people
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Instead of bewailing apparent descent into Nihilism, might it be optimum to perhaps recognize Nihilism always wins; at the same time, the individual may, always, continuously, fight against that — even if Nihilism should be as inevitable as death of the body?
In this scenario, dialectic cannot be erased, as it is inherent to the structure of the struggle. Camus well understood this.
The truth is one, the falsehood, infinite, Aristotle told us.
Following this, what can one conclude from the words coming out of mouth of the liar? Nothing. Nothing at all.
Thus scrutiny [of all, everything they claim] is essential, the sine qua non of living in our complex, industrial society, replete with liars in positions of authority and power, in business, politics, education. . . .
Ronny L. Jackson, MD, provides evidence of nothing on whether a bullet, from a firearm, actually struck Trump.
Donald Trump’s MD, Ronny Jackson, failed to employ actual medical records; and instead: is he, too, part of an unfortunate gaslighting conspiracy against the public?
This is what Ronny Jackson is claiming: “. . . .As reported and witnessed by the entire world, he sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear from a high-powered rifle used by the would be assassin. . . .”
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/112820414450748116
To be definitive, to be actual concrete medical evidence, this MD should have said along the lines as follows:
“Actual medical records and statements from the attending physicians state that Trump sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear.”
Someone who is in actual authority prosecuting/investigating this alleged crime. . . it is for them, not Ronny Jackson, to claim: “from a high-powered rifle used by the would be assassin.” On what authority is Jackson making this part of his claims?
Jackson gives away the game when he states: “As reported and witnessed by the entire world. . . .”
According to Rumsfeld, the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq may have been somewhere east, west, north, south of Baghdad. In other words, he was gas lighting.
No MD worth his salt would cite “As reported and witnessed by the entire world” to make a claim about an injury.
In this vein, in Fauci-speak, “it doesn’t really matter” “if” “vaccine” “effectiveness” is “a hundred percent, 50 percent, or 20 percent, it is always, always better to get vaccinated than not”. He made this statement before congress in December, 2019.
Be that as it may. . . .Until a false flag operation/psy op, etc., on July 13, 2024, can definitely, explicitly, be ruled out, based on all the evidence, via a genuine, authentic investigation — otherwise: what are they investigating, pray tell? This must be step one, period.
Simple logic doesn’t just go out the window. Any investigation that claims to be a genuine investigation must address this matter first, otherwise they are just “jerking us around,” as it were.
If this is a false flag, was Trump in on it? Did a bullet actually strike him? Who has benefited politically from all of this? Does who benefits still mean anything in criminal investigations?
When the “shots were fired”, the Trump supporters filming that, who claimed they are “news” “Organization” taping that live, [inexplicably?] panned far far away from Trump, and then, inexplicably, muted the sound, when he became surrounded by s e c r e t s e r v i c e.
An actual news organization would have panned even closer and turned up the sound!
Why is there no blood on Trump’s right hand right after he was allegedly shot on right ear, — and he had just put his right hand there, on ear, no more than a second prior? This is what the video feed, that was a live feed, too, showed, to my eyes, at any rate.
What do you get combining contronym and oxymora?
-30-
Thank you Jim…..you said, “Thus scrutiny [of all, everything they claim] is essential, the sine qua non of living in our complex, industrial society, replete with liars in positions of authority and power, in business, politics, education. . . .”
Education ? It is indoctrination to acquire universal compliance and obedience to other liars. We lie to our loved ones across the dinner table. We lie to our neighbors. We lie to ourselves. We no longer need authority over us. Our lies are all we have and we reinforce these lies when we talk to our neighbors or try to rescue someone in need of help. We need to stop all of this crap and cry real tears. After we cry for hours, we do not need to quote someone else. It is OUR tears….,We need to discuss alternatives to every damn thing we have been trained to obey and comply with; the alternatives not the details of obedience and compliance. We are too easily distracted from our immediate existence! We seem to refuse to acknowledge life itself!
Borrrrrrring. . .
How bout the assassination, pretentious ass?
This makes such sense to me, especially as an astrologer.
There are four languages that I speak: English my native language, Thai as an expat in the land of a million Buddhist statues, music and astrology.
I have been working on the astrology charts of Donald Trump, the July 4, 1776 chart of the US, and Joe Biden. All have the planet Uranus in Gemini–the sign of duality, which is dominated by the planet Mercury–communication, language, and two minds.
So what–you all say, as nobody here is likely to be an astrologer.
Well, Uranus is radical, chaotic, and always makes waves; and Gemini and Mercury are known for confusion, and shaking the middle up for grabs. By grabs I mean survival–the way to survive the chaos is through finding the golden center of consciousness.
As the battles continue in our very political mess, we Americans need to remember that finding the middle path within consciousness, transcends the rot, and frees us to start again. And as Joyce had Stephen Dedalus say ““forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
Thank you very much for your post. I read it on Lew Rockwell.
I probably don’t need to point this out (since Baudrillard is one of your sources), but
“… there is no dialectical tension because the system has swallowed it. There is no critical negativity, no place to stand outside to rebel because the simulacrum encompasses the positive and negative in a circulatory process that makes everything equivalent but the “positivity” of the simulacrum itself”
is a fairly accurate formulation of what has for four decades or more has been called “postmodernism”: the (cultural) logic of “late capitalism” indeed!
(For the record, I personally favor Terry Eagleton over Fredric Jameson when it comes to assessing the consequences of this development––though Perry Anderson also has some interesting things to say re the latter).
A fine essay, Ed.
There’s a fascinating documentary, “The Language of Spirituality”, that explores: “Do the languages and cosmologies of Native America hold the keys to the mysteries of quantum physics and the nature of reality?” Also i learned that in Lakota there is no word for or concept of “domination”…which is what the political system is based on, domination of the masses and the resources to fuel the system, hence too much destruction and pollution of Earth’s habitats. Indigenous languages convey ways of working WITH the Earth.
Thank you Mankh for speaking this. There are too many words, yet little is said. Feel, Intuit…use voice for song.
Thanks for appreciating, Joseph, and i agree with what you wrote. And listen… to the birds, the wind, etc.
When presented with ‘Hobson’s choice’ it is best to take ‘the road less traveled’.
The road to freedom, or, as the Buddha, Jesus and Mohamed suggested, the path within.