Words Are Not Small Things
On Cartesian dualism, Orwellian warning, and the people who think I’m being pedantic
There is an argument I keep encountering, and I want to address it directly because I think it reveals something important about how intelligent people have been trained to think.
The argument goes like this: yes, the Trump administration calling the Department of Defense the Department of War is technically incorrect. Yes, it violates the statutory name. Yes, it is, if you want to be precise about it, a failure of the Take Care Clause. But there are bigger fish to fry. People are losing their jobs, their healthcare, their legal status. Children are being separated from their families. Democratic institutions are being dismantled in real time. And you want to talk about what we call the Pentagon?
I want to suggest that this argument, however reasonable it sounds, is philosophically confused. And I want to suggest that the confusion has a name and a history.
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René Descartes published the Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641. The move he made — the one that has shaped Western thinking for nearly four centuries — was to separate mind from matter. Thought from extension. The inner world of ideas from the outer world of physical things. On one side of the Cartesian divide: the res cogitans, the thinking substance, the realm of language, meaning, representation. On the other side: the res extensa, the extended substance, the realm of bodies, actions, physical consequences.
This division has been enormously productive. It gave us modern science. It gave us the method of radical doubt. It gave us, eventually, the empiricist tradition that Hume perfected and that I have spent considerable time defending.
It also gave us a deeply confused intuition about language. If mind and matter are separate, then words belong to the mind-side of the divide. They are representations. Signs pointing at things. And signs, by definition, are not the things they point at. The word “fire” does not burn you. The name “Department of War“ does not, in itself, kill anyone. Therefore, the argument runs, to focus on the name rather than the thing is to confuse the sign for the referent. To be, in the clinical sense, unserious.
This is the intuition pump that produces the adults-in-the-room objection to my argument. They are, without knowing it, Cartesians.
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But the Cartesian framework is wrong. Or rather — it is incomplete in precisely the ways that matter here.
Language is not a neutral system of signs pointing at a pre-existing reality from a safe distance. Language constitutes reality. It shapes what is thinkable, what is sayable, what courses of action are available to us. This is not a postmodern observation. It is an observation with deep roots in the analytic tradition — in Wittgenstein, in Austin, in the philosophy of language that emerged from the very empiricist tradition Descartes helped create. Words do things. They perform actions. They open and close possibilities. They make certain thoughts available and others unthinkable.
Orwell understood this before he had the philosophical vocabulary to name it precisely. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a novel about jackboots and torture chambers — those are present, but they are not the point. The point is Newspeak. The systematic reduction of available language as the mechanism of political control. If you cannot say the thing, you cannot think the thing. If you cannot think the thing, you cannot do the thing. The Ministry of Truth does not primarily operate through violence. It operates through the patient elimination of the words required to resist.
Arendt understood it through the most catastrophic demonstration in history. The Holocaust was not primarily enabled by monsters. It was enabled by bureaucrats. By people filling in forms, following procedures, using the official language of the official system to process what the official system had decided to process. The banality of evil is not a metaphor. It is a precise description of how ordinary language, official language, the language of forms and categories and institutional designations, makes atrocity administratively thinkable. Eichmann did not think of himself as a murderer. He thought of himself as a logistics problem-solver. The language gave him that. The language did that work.
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So when I insist that serious people should not call the Department of Defense the Department of War, I am not being pedantic. I am not confusing the sign for the referent. I am saying that the sign is part of the referent. That what we call things shapes what those things become. That the executive branch of the United States government is engaged in a systematic program of renaming — the Department of War, the Gulf of America, the ongoing redefinition of who counts as a citizen, who counts as an enemy, what counts as law — and that this program is not incidental to its other actions. It is the condition of its other actions. It is how the other actions become thinkable, sayable, doable.
The people who counsel me to pick bigger battles have separated the word from the thing. They are operating inside the Cartesian framework without knowing it. They think the name is over here, on the mind-side, in the realm of representation, where it cannot hurt anyone. And the real actions are over there, on the matter-side, where the actual harm is being done.
But this is not how it works. This is not how it has ever worked. Orwell was not writing about the end state of totalitarianism. He was writing about this moment. This one. The moment when serious, well-meaning people decide that the name is a small concession to make in exchange for capital on the issues that really matter.
There are no small concessions of this kind. There is only ground given and ground held.
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I want to say something personal here, because I think it is relevant.
I saw this coming. Not in every detail — I was perhaps too conservative in my assessment of how much evil would get done, and how quickly. But the direction was clear, and I said so, and I have the writing to show for it. A year ago, two years ago, I was making arguments that people found alarmist. The trajectory of the Silicon Valley authoritarian project. The intellectual genealogy running from Yarvin through Thiel to the offices of power. The systematic contempt for democratic self-governance being dressed up as rigorous systems-thinking. I was told I was being hyperbolic. I was told to pick bigger battles.
I am picking the battle I am picking because I believe it is the battle. Not because the name of an institution is intrinsically more important than healthcare or legal status or the separation of families. But because the battle over language is the battle over what is thinkable. And the battle over what is thinkable is the battle over everything else.
For anyone to suggest they are the adults in the room by flagging this as pedantry — as the domain of the relatively unimportant — I would suggest there is a disconnect between us about what seriousness actually requires. Orwell and Arendt were not writing for peacetime. They were writing for exactly these circumstances. The warning was specific. The warning was this.
That people would counsel against pressing this point because there are bigger fish to fry speaks to cowardice in others. Not pedantry in me.
I am sorry. I must insist on this observation.
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Words are not small things. They are not signs floating above reality, pointing at it from a safe distance. They are part of reality. They shape it, enable it, make it thinkable or unthinkable.
The Department of War is not a harmless rename. It is the installation of a new frame — one in which the institution that commands the armed forces of the United States is defined by its capacity for destruction rather than its obligation to defend. One in which the executive’s preference overwrites the legislature’s statute. One in which the law becomes what power says it is, for as long as power says it.
Call it what it is. The Department of Defense.
Or explain to me — carefully, philosophically, with Orwell and Arendt in mind — why you think the name doesn’t matter.
Well Written Words! About the meaning of words.
And the term “Warfighter,” over “Service Member.”
In Fascism there is always a struggle. “Mein Kampf.” The Nation is always in peril from without and within. The peril requires unusual sacrifices, special powers to deal with the Enemy.
Loaded language is used to push a Narrative. Narratives create Mythology. Mythology leads to Iconization and Demonization. They can become a causus belli. Or a reason to commit atrocities.
Did you know that the people who invaded ancient India and set up the Hindu religion were secretly German? That’s why they were the Master Race. The Brothers Grimm proved it!