Tom Dahlberg and Erick Kaardal
Experts are always out to wreck the people's language, to reduce it, ideologize it and thereby control it in order to control the people.
Neopopulist rebellion is based on taking back our language and is therefore rebellion at the foundational level. It doesn't matter if the courts redefine "marriage". We'll take the word back and insist on a culture that will not sustain their language.
Obviously government could get out of marriage altogether. Marriage could become a totally private contract, defined by ecclesiastical law consistent with the language of the people, or by secular contract law that is consistent with the language of the people. A contract is unintelligible if it invents new language, or uses a private language.
Those who wish to redefine "marriage" use government to change culture. Experts, using the power of government, are trying to force a new definition of marriage in attempt to change culture through technical law. A "technical law" is a law that ignores ordinary language and adopts a special, technical definition for words that are already in use. Technical law, like a law that establishes a marital relationship between same sex partners, turns an ordinary term into a technical term. It's an attempt to change the culture. There's only one reason for government to redefine something that the people can obviously, and have obviously defined on their own for thousands of years -- to change the culture; to put experts in charge of culture and politics by changing the language.
Therefore Neopopulists take the language back, no matter what the government says. Neopopulists understand that in a culture where the people are NOT on the run from the authority and aggression of the experts and their attempt to coopt the language, a decision to change something as fundamental as marriage could never have been made by a court or a legislature in the first place. Elites are able to turn "marriage" into a technical term only because the people have caved into the whole theory that experts should run the world. The moment the people reject that premise, as all good Neopopulists do, and start taking back the language, they are stripping the experts of their power. And this is instantaneous.
In a Neopopulist world, the people manage their courts, their bureaucrats, their politicians, by maintaining complete control of the language. They understand that without control of the language they cannot control their culture or their politics. The "experts" have always understood this.
Why did the people lose complete control of their language in the first place? It's simple. The government schools taught the people since they were small children that we live in a world of occult, expert knowledge, and that the experts should run things. They were taught to subject themselves to expertise in the age of science and "reason". They were taught all of the myths of Modernism.
But now we are post modern. The Modern tradition -- it's scientism, rationalism, reductionism -- has been debunked. Above all else, it has not produced the government -- of the people and for the people -- that the people want. And how could it?
The Neopopulist project is a post-Modern democratic project. The first thing it does is recruit the people into a post-Modern mind, the immediate implication of which is take back the language and free one's mind using that liberated language. We mock and ridicule the Modern tradition and its whole theory of expertise. In particular we see the reductionism that Modern Rationalism has applied to morality and politics as a completely phony attempt on the part of ideologues to accrue power. Ideology is a will to power, and the notion that there are moral and political experts other than the people themselves is blatant nonsense. The Postivist reduction of value, of right and wrong, of human morality, is reductionist nonsense. And Classical utilitarianism can hardly be taken seriously by adults. No court, no politician, no bureaucrat has an objective calculator of utility that works over the complexity of a society. The experts do not know best and they cannot know best. This leads to the Neopopulist rejection of all the expert language used in the moral, psychological and political sphere which is based implicitly on the idea that knowledge of the Good is an expert form of knowledge. Neopopulists do not sacrifice their knowledge of the Good, or the language with which it is described, to experts and their language.
Obviously the ideal Neopopulist politician is a man or woman who does the same. They do not pretend -- ever -- to know what's best. They do not pretend to have a utilitarian calculator or an occult and more valid understanding of "marriage" or "the Good". We are vehemently anti-Platonic. The Neopopulist politician simply lives by an agenda in terms of which the people select him, and he expects to be managed by the people. He gets thrown out the moment he claims to know best. A politician can always argue that the people do not know best. This may even be true. Only God is able to measure the net utility for all of Mankind of any human decision. But until God himself, the only moral expert in the Universe, is directly managing human affairs, it is crazy for the people to allow themselves to be tyrannized by "experts". There is no longer a good reason for it. There never was.
What happens when the people are recruited out of the Modern mind, take back their language, and reassert their traditions (their description of reality in their language)? What happens when this language turns out to be common, and as it becomes practiced the people become increasingly integrated? What happens when the democracy inherent in the process of making ordinary language brings the people together in one shared reality, which must happen in order for people to live in the same world together and progress?
Obviously, it then becomes increasingly impossible for the elite class to impose structure, like "technical law", which is, in this Neopopulist context, unintelligible at best. In a society which mocks ideology and insists on the people's control of the language with which the nature of the world, the nature of man, and man's destiny is described, it becomes impossible for experts to make any decisions unless they are entirely consistent with the the people's language; with popular phenomenology. In such a world, expertism is dead. In this world, technical laws cannot change popular culture, and therefore the whole project of technical law is dead. Indeed, the whole expert project is dead.
Under the current circumstances, because the expert technical law redefining "marriage" is nothing more or less than an attempt to control the culture, the project fails the instant the people simply take back the word "marriage" and ridicule the expert decision. The victory of the people is intantaneous and complete because the whole project is about the implementation of new, ideological culture, i.e. mind control.
There are numerous examples of this intense desire that ideologues and experts have, to control, nay, destroy the ordinary language of the people, with which the people describe the world in which they live. Experts long to destroy ordinary language so the world can be remade according to an expert plan.
In fact, all of human folly, including every ideological horror throughout history, is based on the profoundly obsessive and completely deluded attempt on the part of disappointed scientists and ideologues to change reality by changing the way that everybody talks about it.
Communists insist that all the people talk about the world in strictly reductionist, ideological, communist terms - or be punished, preferably by death. Nazis require the same. Totalitarians are petrified by ordinary language. Both the Communists and the Nazis were petrified by ordinary religious language. The Chinese government continues to persecute the unofficial Christian Church which liberates the ordinary language of human nature, language which is full of religious concepts that are taken literally.
Comical Modern philosophers, who consider themselves great benefactors of mankind for pushing it toward "reason", have insisted in the recent past that moral language is just "emotivist", or short hand for utilitarian calculations. And of course huge philosophical problems like the division between mind and body, spirit and matter, let along God and Man, must be reduced to something completely rational and "scientific" in some kind of new, philosophically informed language. The Experts want to control the language in terms of which the ordinary man thinks about his world and describes his world to others.
Ordinary language world-wide is religious and unsystematic. It eschews all scientistic reduction. It is full of objects like minds as well as bodies, spirit as well as matter, right and wrong, God, angels, demons, good and evil. The modern secular expert abhors the language of the ordinary man and woman. It is a "form of life" as Wittgenstein would put it, which is utterly distasteful to them. It creates a world, describes a world, that they cannot control. Language must be rationalized and when it is rationalized it will only recognize what is real to the reductionist, the ideologue, the scientist.
Only in our own bizarre age, suffering under a system of the most egregiously boring government education, could the people ever be compelled to remain sober in the face of this hilarious expert project. Neopopulism will teach the people to mock this absurdity with impunity and experience their own power bestowed upon them by their own language informed by their own experience. The experts will never completely control ordinary language, which springs from the phenomenology of lived experience - the experience of our humanity. They cannot realize the totalitarian dream of controlling the very manner in which we think about our world by controlling the language.
Emotivism, Positivism, Utilitarianism, Communism, Capitalism, Liberalism, Conservatism, are all dead from a Neopopulist perspective. And even "Neopopulism" is paradoxically faulty as a definitional project.
Positivism in particular was the most extreme Modern attempt to reduce ordinary language to scientistic language, and died a miserable death in the middle of the Twentieth Century. It argued that a statement was not even cognitive, not even meaningful unless it could, in principle, be directly verified or falsified -- which is the sort of thing that only a technical expert would do. But of course, not even scientific language could live up to the standard, and so the standard was dropped for essentially political reasons! But surely, the real cause of the death of such comical nonsense is simply that the people know damn well that they are saying something, and saying something meaningful when they talk about right and wrong and even God and Heaven and Hell. It's not much different, if different at all, than Descartes knowing that he exists, even if he cannot "prove" it. Philosophers and psychologists are ridiculed by popular culture (and Neopopulists) for obvious reasons. It's all inauthentic. The linguistic emperors never had any clothes on.
Did they think they could unilaterally declare language that was perfectly meaningful to most of mankind, suddenly meaningless? They are pompous idiots. Did they really think that men and women would stop describing their experience with their ordinary language, or even with a new understanding of their ordinary language? The whole "ideal language movement" in philosophy was pedantic nonsense. It was beneath human dignity. We Neopopulists are not academics. We insist on living! An ideal language may define the rigorous structure of logic in the abstract, but it can never determine by itself how to translate arguments in ordinary language into pure propositional logic. Just another form of ideological reductionism.
Here is the joyful proclamation of Neopopulism:
Free your minds by freeing your language. Embrace your ordinary language. Mock the "ideal", i.e. ideological language of the Modern Expert. The Modern Expert is a clown. The Modern Expert is the true anti-intellectual. He has abandoned the relevant examination of real language and real life and has become a reductionist ideologue. The heart of it is scientism and Modern Utilitarianism in ethics and politics. You, the ordinary people, are the real thinkers, the sincere thinkers. You think about life and its meaning. The expert's linguistic rules are an attempt to enslave you to a one dimensional world where there is neither glory nor despair.
Talk about your world in precisely the manner that you and your neighbors can and do understand.
THIS IS THE CORE OF THE NEOPOPULIST MANIFESTO!
FREE YOUR MIND! FREE YOUR LANGUAGE! DO IT NOW! NEVER GO BACK! YOU DON'T HAVE TO TAKE EXPERTS SERIOUSLY. YOU DON'T HAVE TO DEBATE WITH THEM. IT'S YOUR WORLD. IT'S YOUR LANGUAGE. IT'S YOUR LIFE. IT'S YOUR CULTURE. REBELL!
And when you rebell right down to the level of insisting on your own ordinary, "unscientific" language and turning your back on the language of the "experts" and the mainstream media, you have rebelled (rung a different bell) so profoundly, so completely, they will never be able to control you -- or any neighbor with whom you talk while you are talking to him! You have rebelled at the foundational level. Everything follows from that.
But beware of the nihilists, who pretend to be rejecting Modern authority, and even Modern language, but who are, in fact, its most quintessential agent. For example, all of the small format rags that pretend to be alternative culture, are actually the penultimate expression of the Modern world view and its inherent reductionism, boredom, and nihilism. These nihilists are NOT rebelling. They are ultimate conformists to Modernism while the experts in government are penultimate conformists to Modernism. Their implicit complaint is that mainstream culture and government has not conformed enough to Modernism! They are simply the Mainstream Media with Modern, logical nerve.
Neopopulism dismisses them as the most ridiculous and radical examples of the Modern mind. They have even less clothes on than the major figures of the modern age - the scientists and the politicians. We know who they really are - just more Modernists with nary a rebellious bone in their bodies. They are utter, consumate conformity. That is the nature of nihilism. Nihilists understand that the objective of Modernism, as nihilism, is to bore us unto death.
Conservatism was once a sympathetic attempt to imbue the people's ordinary language, like religious language, with authority. But today, Conservative intellectuals mostly repudiate the people and simply argue with Liberals about who the real "experts" are. They have grown naïve and powerless. They no longer know how to rebel. They are too Burkean to accept the fact that the Constitution has no power that the people themselves, nay the ordinary language of the people, do not (does not) give it.
Above all else the experts, power mongers, and nihilists consider religious language, as ordinary language, to be the most dangerous process in the world. Therefore we the people pray and worship. We cause intense pain to the nihilists and all other Modernists by being joyful. We populate our universe with entities, like God, which petrify the experts. We are happy without expert input, while others are miserable because of it. We are in a state of consummate rebellion. This is Neopopulist Nirvana. The experts are insane by our standards, by our language. But above all else, they, and their nihilist children bore us. There is no logical contact.
Write this on your walls: "The experts and their nihilist children bore me." This is the handwriting on the wall. This is the end of an age.
MN Neopopulism insists that Neopopulism is a paradox. It is an "ism" that rejects the "ism". It recognizes that when experts attempt to "define" Neopopulism they may be trying to control it and reduce it. MN Neopopulism is a phenomenological, ordinary language movement. It recognizes that Neopopulism is a series of family resemblances among the people - Catholics and Lutherans, Republicans and Democrats, who share the primary traits of a free mind, free language, and mockery of the pathetic experts and their moribund Modern, rationalist tradition. From these traits, from this joyous rebellion, all of life, all of language, all of faith, will follow. Let the experts, and their nihilist progeny bore themselves to death.
We are going to live.
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