Language and Political Manipulation

By: Riva Julianto

As the most essential means of communication among various forms of artificially engineered communication media in modern technology, language can be said to be a part of human existence. This is closely related to the function of language as a tool for humans to express their feelings, thoughts, ideas, and actions in daily life. "Sprache ist ein Werkzeug, kein Spiegel" (language is a tool, not a mirror), as Ludwig Wittgenstein said, indicating that language is a tool for humans, not a reflection of human reality. Human experience and the meaning of life (read: reality) are shaped through language.

Because language functions as a tool, it can also be used for various purposes and objectives, whether individual or collective. Collective and individual interests and goals must be achieved by humans if they want to survive in the realm of competition. Of course, language is essential in the initial steps to achieve these goals and interests. With language, humans can abstract their desires into a "real concept."

Language and Politics

The connection between politics and language is the reality that politics is a speaking activity (read: language use). A political scientist, Mark Roelofs (The Language of Modern Politics, 1967), simply stated, "Politics is conversation, or more precisely, doing politics is talking." According to him, politics is not just conversation, and conversely, not all conversation is politics. However, the essence of political experience is the communicative activity among people.

Certainly, politics has its own moral-ethical dimension because politics is fundamentally the activity of people organizing their actions in conditions of conflicting interests and goals. Every political setting is always marked by disputes and conflicts.

Similarly, language has emancipatory, transformative, and open dimensions within moral-ethical judgments. Language can be good or bad. Language can oppress, restrain, and colonise an individual's consciousness, especially when used as a means of manipulation and indoctrination. Language becomes good when used as a means to improve human well-being and liberate human consciousness from the shackles of ignorance. The phenomenon of language has a socio-political scope. Hence, it cannot be denied that the phenomenon of language has a direct and strong impact on the reality of human political history.

Language and Political Conflict

Many political idioms and jargon, which were originally used as symbols of stable political conditions, have changed into symbols of political instability with the upheavals and changes in a country's politics.

Plato even said that if rulers become authoritarian, language will surely become chaotic. Chaos arises from the conflict of interests between rulers and opposition. Therefore, the source of chaos lies with the rulers and the opposition. To perpetuate the structure and status quo, rulers will engage in political manipulation through language. Conversely, the opposition, opposing such policies, creates manipulation that contradicts the rulers. This is where the chaos of language begins. Subsequently, language polarization occurs not from the language itself but from the reality of political upheaval, which is then reflected in the language.

This chaos can be observed in debates that use jargon and idioms between the ruling government and the opposition outside the government. Examples commonly debated include labor-workers, breidel-revocation of business licenses, price increases-price adjustments, women-female, layoffs-dismissals, and so on. In this case, the government and the opposition use their respective terminologies, jargon, or idioms as characteristic signs of their roles in the relationship.

Language as a Tool of Political Manipulation

Language is a means of uncovering personal and communal reality. Language can deceive, disturb, excite, and paralyze humans. Humans can be lost, defeated, victorious, and saved with or within language. Through language, people find harmony and peace by aligning with each other. However, language can also destroy peace and harmony through misunderstandings, insults, and even warfare. The use of language cannot be separated from human action.

In reality, political manipulation is also used as social-political control. Social-political control through language by rulers is done persuasively. For example, by creating development jargon and euphemisms that are vigorously pronounced by state officials on every occasion. Subsequently, mass media echoes and amplifies them to the public. The negative impact is the colonisation and restriction of the consciousness and thinking of society due to the indoctrination of language by the ruling party through mass media without reservation. With language uniformity, political stability is expected to be maintained because the language spoken by society becomes a mirror and indicator of "enchantment and deception."

If this happens, then society will be becoming like people with blinkers, submissive to what the driver says. In Herbert Marcuse's language, such people are called One Dimensional Man.