"To control language is to control thought"

How to Be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative

Roger Scruton 

Only in a few places in Europe and America can a person call himself a conservative and expect to be taken seriously.

 The first task of conservatism, therefore, is to create a language in which “conservative” is no longer a term of abuse. This task is part of another, and larger, enterprise: that of the purification of language from the insidious sloganizing which has taken hold of it. This is not a simple enterprise. Indeed, it is, in one sense, the whole of politics. 

As the communists realized from the beginning, to control language is to control thought—not actual thought, but the possibilities of thought. It is partly through the successful efforts of the communists—aided, of course, by a world war which they did not a little to precipitate—that our parents thought in terms of elementary dichotomies. Left-Right, Communist-fascist, socialist-capitalist, and so on. Such were the “terms of debate” that we inherited. To the extent that you are not “on the Left,” they implied, then to that extent are you “on the Right”; if not a Communist, then so much nearer fascism; if not a socialist, then an advocate of “capitalism,” as an economic and political system.

If there is a basic dichotomy that presently confronts us, it is between us—the inheritors of what remains of Western civilization and Western political thinking—and the purveyors of dichotomies. 

There is no such opposition as that between Left and Right, or that between communism and fascism. 

There is simply an eternal alliance—although an “alliance of the unjust” who are always ready to violate the terms that bind them—between those who think in terms of dichotomies and labels. 

Theirs is the new style of politics, the science which has in truth replaced “politics” as it has ever been known. Theirs is a world of “forces” and “movements”; the world perceived by these infantile minds is in a constant state of turmoil and conflict, advancing now to the Left, now to the Right, in accordance with the half-baked predictions of this or that theorist of man’s social destiny. 

Most of all, the dichotomizing mind has need of a system. It seeks for the theoretical statement of man’s social and political condition, in terms of which to derive a doctrine that will answer to every material circumstance.

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