“Under certain circumstances profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
Mark Twain
One thing we do as meaning makers and seekers is sort our worlds into categories of the profane (the ordinary and mundane) and the sacred (set apart from society, that which transcends everyday life). Usually we use the term profanity for terms and acts that explicitly and directly denigrate or mock the sacred but profanity can also be used simply to describe anything that is normal, ordinary, or not sacred. We discriminate based on genetic predispositions and cultural traditions to determine that which is sacred and that which is profane. It could be an animal, a body of water, or a piece of clothing or really just about anything as long as a group of people imbue meaning and divinity into it.
During a heat wave in Las Vegas, I was reminded of the necessity of covering your head in such conditions. I pondered on the cultures that put such religious importance on head coverings, and it makes sense that the cultures whose religions and traditions made head coverings sacred also happened to be in areas where it was biologically imperative to do so. It is easy for someone who grew up in a shaded, cooler area of the planet to see head coverings as silly, while someone from the desert might find it useful
What we define as sacred has a large part to do with the culture in which we find ourselves and therefore plays a key role in the culture wars. I’m not going to reduce the western world into two camps, but if you follow some of the most prominent storytellers of our day you would assume that there are indeed two sides doing battle and each of those sides have drastically different views on what is and is not sacred.
The psywar tactic employed by both, or rather all sides of the culture wars is to make their opponent’s “sacred cows” profane. Take, for example, Pride. The symbol of Pride strikes in many a religious fervour and represents their deepest, most sacred values of love and tolerance. There’s no doubt that there are other people who see the Pride flag and it stirs up in them a sense of disgust and disdain for what it represents. The lines are drawn and the battle begins over whether the symbols of Pride are sacred or profane in the public domain. You are either with or against Pride. My observation however, is that most people who do not find Pride sacred feel this way for reasons far more complex than homophobia. There are people who find it too corporate, too anti-cop, too pro-cop, too exclusive ideologically, too focused on trans issues, not focused enough on trans issues, or there are those, quite plainly, who just don’t care one way or another. Like an outsider’s view on wearing a turban, they think, “it makes sense and I value your right to wear it/ celebrate, but it’s not for me”. Like Kramer not wearing the AIDS walk ribbon, they just don’t see the same magical significance that others do. To those who do consider it sacred, however, it is profane to think otherwise.
In a culture war, if you are not with either side, they will attempt to equate your indifference with being on the side of the profane.
I grew up religious, and we set Sundays apart as an observance of the Sabbath, a day of rest. I didn’t have sleepovers with friends on Saturday nights and I didn’t play sports on Sundays (although I didn’t play very many sports on other days either). I don’t remember judging anyone for not observing the Sabbath, but I know there were people in my faith community who did. It’s hard to hold something sacred only to see others treat it as ordinary. Like falling in love with a Bon Jovi song and sharing it with your friends only to find out that they think Bon Jovi is corny. But those people who decided not to keep the sabbath holy were not making any sort of cultural statement in defiance against my religious beliefs. Maybe there were a few people, especially those who had left the faith who were wanting to fight against the tyranny of no T.V. on Sundays but mostly, it was a war of which the population at large had opted out. It’s important to remember that opting out is an option.
Profanity is about making that which was set apart human again. Although often we take it another step further and devalue the once valuable. Being profane or vulgar is signalling to those around you that you don’t buy into this pompous mumbo jumbo. It’s brutish at times but there’s a level of humility in it. Men especially will use profanity with each other as a way to signal that they view each other roughly in the same social status. It’s sort of like saying, don’t worry, you can talk this way with me, we’re cool. Stand-up comedians show us that even important things are stupid from the right point of view, and they use profanity to drive this point.
Sometimes profanity is used explicitly to offend someone with as much force as possible. As kids we could tease each other ruthlessly, but we all knew mother jokes were off limits, or at least reserved for the ultimate offence. Your opponents know that whatever it is you find most sacred, they can disturb you, rattle you, and demoralize you with the most efficiency by denigrating that very thing. In Quebecois French, the most offensive words one could use are related to sacrilege against the Catholic church, which up until recently was the dominant culture. Other cultures, where cleanliness is so important, words associated with excrement or dirt are the most offensive. In most western cultures some of the biggest taboos are sexual so the dirtiest words have to do with the act of sex. Some cultures paradoxically elevate women but also masculinity, so it is both profane to insult women and to be called feminine (i.e. you think one should always open the door for women but you also think anyone who likes Broadway is gay).
In today’s world the most sacred and sensitive issues revolve around race and gender, so it follows that the most offensive words are racial and sexual slurs. Linguist John McWhorter writes about the history of the mother of all racial slurs and that it was at one point a value neutral descriptor for a black person, coming from the Latin word for black ‘niger’ or perhaps from the Spanish word ‘negro’. In common vernacular, fellow became ‘feller’, Old Yellow became ‘Old Yeller’ and the neutral word for black followed suit. But it also represented the casual contempt that white people had in America for black people who, at that time, were enslaved. So it evolved from a neutral descriptor to an impolite slur to eventually being unsayable. A more derogatory term for Black Africans 400 years ago was the term Aethiopes, where the name Ethiopia comes from, but no one gets cancelled for saying that now.
Don’t mistake this as a critique as if I were pining for the good ol’ days when one could hurl racial slurs without regard. This is just a sociological observation. A statement of linguistic fact. Most of the ‘four letter words’ I regarded as swear words in my childhood have now become so commonly spoken and heard that they no longer hold much offensive power. Like corporate executives with beards and skinny jeans, it’s just not shocking or out of place anymore. Slurs against races, genders, gender identities, or disabilities though, that makes my stomach turn.
Times change and with it so do social values and norms. Not a big deal. But in the world of psychological warfare, one effective tactic is to make your cause holy enough that any form of criticism will be seen as obscenity, blasphemy, or treasonous. In North Korea one does not tend to get very far if they blaspheme against Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un and so it is in many other social circles, organizations, or religions. These imposed blasphemy laws can change over time with new generations. During the Chinese cultural revolution it was often the youth who would turn their parents in for “political crimes”. Like Zhang Hongbing who, at the age of 16, turned in his own mother Fang Zhongmou for criticising Chairman Mao Zedong. She was then beaten and executed. It’s normal for each generation to have its own sets of values and priorities but it's a psyop when one generation is convinced that the values of the other are not just different or even wrong, but evil and must be stopped by any means.
Since the dawn of time young people have been using language that was meant to ruffle their father’s feathers and likewise the elders held on to their way of speaking and acting in stubborn rebellion to change. It’s expected. But there is a risk for a positive feedback loop that is anything but positive when one generation is led to believe that the other doesn’t just disagree, it wants to eradicate their way of life, their culture. Many ‘boomers’ are baffled when words they’ve used neutrally or even as terms of endearment have now been deemed the vilest form of profanity possible. I once interviewed a man of eastern european descent whose business partner was Indigenous. They worked together in harmony for decades and over the years developed a relationship so close that they could and would tease each other’s culture and ethnicities. Their ability to throw slurs at each other was almost an indicator at how safe they felt with one another. Until this individual’s daughter denounced him publicly for his racism in order to hold him accountable, regardless of the fact that his business partner had never objected to his language and appreciated their back and forth banter.
That being said, there are also many ‘culture warriors’ that get caught up in the psywars and blame cancel-culture for every negative review or setback. Got fired from work? Friggin’ cancel-culture at it again, despite the fact that you were caught sleeping on the job three times. Vladimir Putin himself tried to gain some babyface favour by claiming he was the victim of cancel-culture, equating sanctions against Russia with J.K Rowling getting flack from trans-activists. I have worked with many young guys who have given up on life because they are certain they will never get a job since they are straight, white, men, when in reality often they haven’t been able to keep a job because they don’t show up on time and consistently ask for time off to stay home and play Halo. They try to make social justice terms like critical race theory taboo. With the hopes that anyone that does talk about social justice or systemic racism would look like a fool. Florida and other states passed vague laws making it illegal to teach certain concepts about gender to children. And in a more recent psyop against teachers, they are trying to equate the teaching of gender identity with being a groomer, or someone who tries to manipulate a child in order to sexually exploit or abuse them.
Profanity, or any utterance for that matter, has meaning in relation to the context in which it was uttered. Philosopher Ludvig Wittgenstein argued this with his theory that the meaning of words depend on how they are used in a given language game. To illustrate this point, instead of Wittgenstein I will invoke two different 20th century geniuses, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. When George Costanza, while working for the New York Yankees, meets the reps from the Houston Astros he discovers that as a term of endearment everyone is either a bastard or a sumbitch. Used in other contexts later in the episode however, those words aren’t as endearing. Profanity is in the ears of the beholder.
Being woke once meant that you saw systemic racial injustices where others didn’t. It meant that you ‘got it’ and were somewhat elevated intellectually or morally because of your insight. It’s not hard to see why it didn’t take long for people to set their targets on changing the meaning of the term as a psyop. Being called ‘woke’ today is most likely an insult. It means you're pretentious and self-righteous and extreme with your views on identity politics but at first it was an insult only used by one side of the conflict. You don’t hear Ilhan Omar or Justin Trudeau complaining about people being too woke. Right wing people have always had a problem with the ‘woke’ but now there is a large portion of ‘liberals’ in the Sam Harris or Bill Maher vein who saw it as another manifestation of the same religiosity that the New Atheists had been railing on for the last 20 years. Thus, an unholy alliance arose around 2016 when popular public thinkers across the political spectrum joined together as the Intellectual Dark Web in the battle against illiberalism. Former adversaries Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson found common ground. Prominent atheists like Michael Shermer sat down with Jewish thinker Ben Shapiro. From Ayaan Hirse Ali to Claire Lehmann they collected the brightest cancelled academics, writers, and comedians and showed us how diverse opinions can find real world answers to difficult problems if they just talk and listen to one another… And then the pandemic hit and we were reminded that diversity and difference can lead to contention as well and now barely any of them are friends. Out of the ashes of the defunct IDW grew an ‘antiwoke’ movement and instead of being named for what they were against some of them came up with a moniker very apropos to their ideology; ‘based’. Being based meant you were not woke, but you were based in reality, you were solid, you were rational, and you were somewhat elevated intellectually or morally because of your insight. Being based might have been cool for a few weeks but now it has also become an insult and it’s associated more with being obsessed with Joe Rogan.
Thank you for reading so far. Here is the outline of the manuscript for the book so you can keep track of where you are.
Introduction
Defence against Psyops
What are PsyOps?
What makes us marks?
The power of narratives
Who is behind it?
Kayfabe
Psychological Operations
Propaganda
Diversion of hatred
Character assassination
Re-education
Cults
False flags/agent provocateur
Totalitarian regimes
Menticide
Drug Induced Mind Control
Defence
Principled insubordination
The Culture Wars
Ideological possession
Cancel Culture
Postmodernism and organizational decay(You Are Here)
Profanity (You Are Here)
MAGAstan vs. WOKEistan
Religious Zealotry
Heroes and villains
The Defence
The 21st Century Hero
The Responsibility of Freedom of Speech
Ridicule and Humour
Parallel Polis
Art and doubt
The Information Wars
Political Polarization
Corporate Media
Big Tech and the Post-Truth World
Noise vs Signal
“Woke”Journalism
Hate Hoaxes and victimhood
Collective ADHD
Advertisers
Defence
News/Media Diet
Critical Consuming
Rhetoric
The Slow burn
The Psychological Wars
Bullying
Gaslighting
Shame and isolation
Social contagion/Moral Panic
Safetyism
Social Media and human downgrading
The Meaning Crisis
Defence
Know Thyself
Be Wise
Stoicism
Psychological Immunity
Antifragility
Be Kind
Live Well
Conclusion