Wednesday 20 February 2013

Marriage (and other stuff...)


The most effective way make people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before. People are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretence at the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes all at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regime of expressed.

Hayek - The Road To Serfdom - 1944

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