Words of Power, and the Ensorcellment of Minds

Mike Hume, editor of spiked!, has written a very timely article on the new free speech wars--timely in that there is currently a clash over the use of a word between two of my LiveJournal friends.

The following quote is very telling:

Now it seems that words themselves can be seen as inherently evil, regardless of context. This looks more like a modern version of the Middle Ages when people believed there were ‘words of power’ that, whether uttered as a prayer, a spell or a curse, could themselves alter real lives and situations.

Words of Power are dangerous things; they remove our free will, because they train us to react by reflex rather than through conscious thought. They dis-empower, because they create "automatic victims", people who are victims without their knowledge but with their volition. They do violence to language, because they steal context and meaning from our speech. Worst of all, they destroy trust, for we place those who use such words in the category of Outsider, while at the same time we demonstrate our autocratic impulse--obey, or be punished.

To create Words of Power is to ensorcell one's own mind. It took centuries to break ourselves from such self-enslavement; it is a shame than we have fallen so easily in so short a time. We are becoming peasants again, and most cannot see anything wrong with that.