A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
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The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
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[H]e was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.[…] Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him.[…] The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.
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For the trouble with lying and decieving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.
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The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
Hannah Arendt taught that when language is twisted so that black is now white and white is now black, all meaning is lost.
A society that removes the power of the truth from the people can do anything to the people without being challenged.
The use of pronouns is a method to control people and remove the power of being able to speak the truth.
If you can not define woman because what you understand to be woman has become fuzzy or you are afraid of identifying whether someone is a woman you remove the power to express what problems a woman might uniquely face.
Thus pronouns are important as they blur the lines of communication and they allow errors to be possible and for abuses of power against women to take place without being seen as clearly as they should be.
Healthcare relies on understanding the sex of someone to give good and appropriate care. In a busy hospital, a doctor or nurse should check notes every time but in reality this doesn't always happen. A patient always referred to by certain pronouns might slip through the net.
Thus it is important to a doctor to maintain pronouns based on sex for the patients safety and the doctors own protection from error or the errors of others.
It helps to preserve the integrity of data so that for example you know that the blood of a male isn't included in a clinical study which is only for women's related issues.
Pronouns are not neutral words which are only about being polite. They are a way of identifying sex and conveying other meaning to others.
A male using a female pronoun is exercising power over women by demonstrating that women can not define themselves on the basis of sex. This leaves women with less power.
The desire for a woman to preserve her dignity and right to privacy for example on a ward from the male gaze is rendered invisible. She comes second to the rights of the person identifying as female and using female pronouns.
It removes the power of a woman to consent to with full information. It has the potential to leave vulnerable women with a history of abuse of some description in situations where they feel uncomfortable and find it difficult to challenge for whatever reason.
There are many reasons why pronouns should not be seen in the context of merely a way of being polite. The use of pronouns is much more than that we should understand that pronouns convey a huge amount more as a communication tool - they are identifiers and markers of power.