Chapter 7 of Hayek's analysis of why civilization was developed in his magnum opus 'The Fatal Conceit', is about 'Our poisoned language'. It certainly is poisoned. Polluted, opaque, crawling with bacteria, diseased, the modern tongue and word has little meaning, is largely irrelevant, and expresses the opposite of reality. Up is now down; bad is good, Islam is peace, humans are a virus, abortions are rights [of convenience for the female only] and the mud turtle is more important than a fetus. Ignoring reality is 'intellectual' and chic. In this vein socialist theft and coercion is now deemed love and compassion.

“When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty.” [Confucius]

As Hayek states, the Orwellian language of society today, emanates from the poisoned verbiage of the elites and their socialist theology:

“The continuing influence of socialism on the language of intellectuals and scholars is evident also in descriptive studies of history and anthropology. As Braudel asks: 'Who among us has not spoken about the class struggle, the modes of production, the labour force, the surplus value, the relative pauperization, the practice, the alienation, the infrastructure, the dialectics, the dictatorship of the proletariat....'?”

The language of Marx, Saint-Simon, Hegel [the intellectual buffoon who taught Marx his dialectics and was a craven power seeker]; Rousseau and even Russell and Einstein, now permeates every aspect of cultural existence and expression. Politicians, most of whom have never worked in a real market system, or who come from the burgeoning and oppressive [from a social standpoint pun intended], legal and bureaucratic disciplines; happily mouth the socialist verbiage and care not a whit from whence it came or even, at a profounder level, what they really mean. For the statist or socialist, which in the main means most politicians, it is a 'fact' that class struggle, 'unequal' production modes, alienation due to 'greedy capitalists' or the 'machine', or the 'confiscation' of surplus and labour value [ie profits]; rend society 'unjust'. Ergo only the caring compassionate socialist, with tears pouring down their painted cheeks can engender 'fairness' for all.

But what is a society ? This is an important question. What is the individual-society relationship ?

“Apparently a people, a nation, a population, a company, an association, a group, a horde, a band, a tribe, the members of a race, of a religion, sport, entertainment, and the inhabitants of any particular place, all are, or constitute, societies.”

Society is of course not a unit or a whole. Neither are most groups, even the smallest ones. But once you start coagulating individuals into a mass, and identify values to that mass, it becomes much simpler to order, control and shape that non-existent society to the whims of the elite.

“The crucial difference overlooked in this confusion is that the small group can be led in its activities by agreed aims or the will of its members, while the extended order that is also a 'society' is formed into a concordant structure by its members' observance of similar rules of conduct in the pursuit of different individual purposes.”

Fascism or Fasces [a bundle of sticks wrapped around an axe], is the destruction of the individual and the creation of only the communal. That is what the word means. It has nothing to do with 'right wing', 'conservative' or neo-con theologies. The word fascism centers upon and only deals with, the relationship of the individual to the state. That relationship is simple for fascists. The communal is uber alles, the individual is nothing. Hence the national socialists of Germany were very keen to have every person belong to a 'social group' which supported the cult of the state.

Once the individual is submerged into a 'social' organisation of some mass, it becomes much easier to erect systems to control him. The singular person matters not. It is the 'social' which counts and the groups of that large social which constitute and support the communal. Hence social medicine, social rights, social programs, social 'values', social objectives, social ends, social means, and social contracts. Social replaces the individual with the communal.

“...the empty adjective 'social'....it appeals to men to redesign what they never could have designed at all. And...it also has required the power to empty the nouns it qualifies of their meaning.”

The adjective 'social' is a mandatory tool, used to insert as an obligation, expectation and right, so that the state can manufacture and control every aspect of existence.

Hayek lists 160 nouns, that the useless and perverted adjective 'social' now fronts including: justice, obligation, peace, medicine, views, right, worker, want, world, end, good, harmony, pleasure, power, control, development, democracy and life. Like the trace chemical co2, this little adjective is a very busy agent of distortion indeed.

And the consequences are deleterious:

“Pretending to be lovers of freedom, they [the socialist] condemn several property, contract, competition, advertising, profit and even money itself. Imagining that their reason can tell them how to arrange human efforts to serve their innate wishes better, they themselves pose a grave threat to civilisation.”

Socialism has nothing to do with freedom, natural law rights, wealth, better living standards, earned rights, culture, a real heritage or real progress named civilization. The attributes of socialism lead to the opposites. Socialism rejects political-economic and social evolution and reality. It also rejects the evolution of morality itself a hybrid of both reason and instinct [see chapter 1]. Socialist thought either fully embraces the primitive [Rousseau] or the utterly rational [which in reality is irrational], such as Russell, Keynes or even Einstein. As such socialism is devoid of both morality and rationality. This is why it always fails – but only after much destruction has been wrought.

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Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six