Language control, emotional manipulation, blackmail and its impact on being able to describe reality.

Arendt is fantastic. I’ve only read excerpts of what she says. I really need to read ‘The origins of Totalitarianism’.

Arendt discusses misinformation, loneliness, linguistic instability etc. as pre-conditions in The Road to Totalitarianism. Thoughtful essay on totalitarianism creating loneliness and the wider political and social consequences of that.

"Totalitarianism destroys man’s ability to think, while turning each in his lonely isolation against all others"

Totalitarian movements use ideology to isolate individuals. Isolate means ‘to cause a person to be or remain alone or apart from others’. Arendt spends the first part of ‘Ideology and Terror’ breaking down the ‘recipes of ideologies’ into their basic ingredients to show how this is done:

ideologies are divorced from the world of lived experience, and foreclose the possibility of new experience;
ideologies are concerned with controlling and predicting the tide of history;
ideologies do not explain what is, they explain what becomes;
ideologies rely on logical procedures in thinking that are divorced from reality;
ideological thinking insists upon a ‘truer reality’, that is concealed behind the world of perceptible things.
The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves. By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power. And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right.

https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-rooted-in-loneliness

With the added layer of deliberately making the permitted language unclear, so people are doubly afraid because they do not understand.

Absolutely.

In real life, I might well afford someone the courtesy of using their preferred pronoun. But this decision is up to me. My words, from my mouth. My brain having to alter its processing. My neurodivergency struggling to cope with that.

But I'm not an arsehole. If you're not one either, I'm likely to use preferred pronouns around you.

When I need to describe my reality I need to use accurate words. Especially when I'm speaking from a marginalised position or on behalf of those in marginalised positions.

I won't force my children to use wrong sex pronouns because they have been brought up to believe she and he have equal value. They're simply a description of sex not a judgement. One of my kids was "misgendered" solidly until puberty made their sex obvious. To teach them that "misgendering" is an issue undoes the value of equality that I've instilled.

This is the manipulation.
This is the blackmail.
This is how you are made to comply with ideology

It is indeed.