Why awareness, information, and online discourse fail to restore meaning—and why embodiment, proximity, and lived responsibility still matter more then you think.
Strong and precise, Wout. What you’re exposing here is not only a meaning crisis, but also a terminological one.
The deception rarely lies in explicit falsehoods, but in language that renders the underlying mechanism invisible. Dominant ideologies are most powerful when they become nameless—when they no longer appear as a choice, but as “the way the world simply works.” What is politically designed gets framed as natural law or common sense.
That logic runs straight through your essay:
citizens are reframed as consumers, democratic agency becomes buying and selling, responsibility is individualized while its causes are structural. Terms like investment, freedom, or reform often mask extraction and dismantling, yet sound like progress. An architectural problem is moralized—and therefore made untouchable.
Within such a linguistic frame, explanation cannot restore what has been lost. More awareness inside the same vocabulary only sharpens the friction and deepens the sense of exhaustion. Meaning does not return through better descriptions, but when people are placed back into conditions where language is no longer sufficient—where proximity, consequence, and responsibility cannot be outsourced.
This is why your insistence on embodiment and physical presence lands so clearly. Meaning will not re-emerge through scale, reach, or content, but through breaking the semantic membrane that has separated us from lived reality.
Whoever controls the words controls the frame. And as long as that frame remains intact, meaning will stay something we talk about—rather than something we once again inhabit.
Thanks Ron. Exactly! Just like George Orwell's newspeak, the less we are able to describe in words and have ownership over, the less it will be for anyone of us step of it. And simply because we have, after long and endless iterations, no idea anymore what we were talking about in the first place 🤦♂️
Strong and precise, Wout. What you’re exposing here is not only a meaning crisis, but also a terminological one.
The deception rarely lies in explicit falsehoods, but in language that renders the underlying mechanism invisible. Dominant ideologies are most powerful when they become nameless—when they no longer appear as a choice, but as “the way the world simply works.” What is politically designed gets framed as natural law or common sense.
That logic runs straight through your essay:
citizens are reframed as consumers, democratic agency becomes buying and selling, responsibility is individualized while its causes are structural. Terms like investment, freedom, or reform often mask extraction and dismantling, yet sound like progress. An architectural problem is moralized—and therefore made untouchable.
Within such a linguistic frame, explanation cannot restore what has been lost. More awareness inside the same vocabulary only sharpens the friction and deepens the sense of exhaustion. Meaning does not return through better descriptions, but when people are placed back into conditions where language is no longer sufficient—where proximity, consequence, and responsibility cannot be outsourced.
This is why your insistence on embodiment and physical presence lands so clearly. Meaning will not re-emerge through scale, reach, or content, but through breaking the semantic membrane that has separated us from lived reality.
Whoever controls the words controls the frame. And as long as that frame remains intact, meaning will stay something we talk about—rather than something we once again inhabit.
Thanks Ron. Exactly! Just like George Orwell's newspeak, the less we are able to describe in words and have ownership over, the less it will be for anyone of us step of it. And simply because we have, after long and endless iterations, no idea anymore what we were talking about in the first place 🤦♂️