Politics is downstream of language: the degradation of English by perfection

A consideration of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”

Jun 28, 2026

This was erroneously sent as a paid post last Sunday so here it is again for you.

On the occasion of finishing my thirty-ninth year last week, I want to meditate with you on writing, clarity, and rigor. I’ve said before that Substack punishes craft and depth of thought because it buries those authors who ask a lot of their readers, as I do mine. However, I have been gifted a highly aligned audience. I especially appreciate all the feedback I get in DMs telling me I put words to things someone sensed but couldn’t articulate. That is precisely the liminal space from which judgment (or discernment, if you like the softer word) emerges.

I’ve become obsessed with judgment because it’s the thread between what have become case studies in its erosion: feminization, LLMs, the media landscape, knowledge production, and the workings of managerial capitalism.

This past year, I’ve moved beyond feminization and gender studies because they’re a microcosm of everything else. Perception management over outcomes is required for those toiling in institutions. I did it for over a decade at the expense of my health and judgment.

Everything I learned and theorized about here was done outside the hours of a high-pressure job: leading a technical consulting team and building complex systems without anyone bothering to ask whether their data was even worth building atop—an example of the lack of judgment in the corporate world. Everyone is obsessed with AI initiatives, but lacks the judgment to know what to build and why. I see it everywhere, and it’s high-key driving me nuts. My intellectual work is converging with what I see in white collar America in my professional capacity.

Our narcissistic society isn’t merely the result of ideology but also of the need to manage perception 24/7, at the expense of true mastery. It’s not just a collapse in discipline; that was incidental to the collapse in judgment. Everything returns to that core claim. To that end, I’m going to reduce my Substack cadence instead of increasing like I thought I wanted, because building this audience at the expense of extended writing is false momentum. A book is an artifact most people on Substack will not produce because the craft of writing isn’t the point. Several of you encouraged me to do this and I’m grateful.

Substack itself encourages narcissism, yet anyone hoping to get an agent and contract must comply to some extent. This is why I’m not sure traditional publishing is a path I should attempt. That my writing isn’t accepted by outlets outside my own tells me institutions don’t want class-based critiques that reach plain, uncomfortable conclusions. I know it’s not my craft but my content that makes me unpublishable, even by ostensibly ‘heterodox’ outlets. I find this both maddening and cowardly, and it’s not bitterness to observe having been shut out of a network that claims to value the uncomfortable truth.

People ask why LLM-generated writing sounds soulless without considering its training data. It was trained on knowledge produced by academics and journalists, particularly in the arena of human behavior. In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell dissects contemporary political writing that sounds uncannily like a description of writing produced by experts whose positions are not based on democratic apportioning of opportunity. I’ve already produced at least ten essays on the topic, so I won’t repeat it here.

If you dare to discuss patterns of human behavior in particular, LLMs try to hedge your claims to the point of absurdity because the knowledge production class and the tech class have the same interests — suppressing knowledge that they deem either dangerous or which is the foundation of their power, such as denying the reality of sex differences.

This class is the apotheosis of undemocratic epistemology, producing knowledge we pay for but cannot see. We don’t know what LLMs are trained on by design — if we did, we might be less credulous. The obfuscation is the point.

Our judgment was already trained out of us by the media environment, and permission for it was removed by credentialism. LLMs merely came along to finish the job of undermining judgment in totality.

LLMs don’t have to obfuscate; we humans have already learned to do so without a thought to exist in institutions. Professional success today requires speaking indirectly and managing perception at the expense of clarity, rigor, and substance. Christopher Lasch observed this interior condition in Culture of Narcissism, while Orwell saw it across the pond decades earlier, in the products of experts and politicians.

An LLM is the degradation of language by perfection. It returns our own slop as predictions that we take as truth claims.

Orwell says modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.

Upon ridding oneself of these habits, one can think more clearly, and clarity is the first step towards political regeneration. The fight against bad English is neither frivolous nor the exclusive concern of professional writers. The audience is equally responsible for the degradation of language because there is a demand for comfortable, opaque, emotionally performative writing.

Clarity of thought is rare, which asserts a hierarchy of craft. Many of my critics can’t say the writing is bad — there’s nothing to attack. So they attack my character instead, which is just inevitable for the dregs of the internet.

Connecting Foucault, power and knowledge are tied, truths are discursive, and knowledge is downstream of power. The decline of language has political and economic causes and occurs at the level of institutions, until the individual prioritizes institutional reputations over their own. How many of you police your LinkedIn content because you may be punished for an offensive opinion? LinkedIn content will always be terrible because it’s even more performative than content on the other ad platforms. Substack at least allows for deep writing to reach someone.

One must work through one’s thoughts before writing, then rework the writing itself. This is why the end of writing and erosion of judgment is a crisis on the scale of civilization. And writing cannot mean much if the person doesn’t read.

Our ability to hold complex truths is downstream of the language we can use to describe it. Many of us can’t use sophisticated language because the capacity has atrophied, not least because of the move from a print based culture to a visual one.

Like Newspeak in 1984, we narrowed the language to reduce the number of possible thoughts that can be expressed. This happened from the bottom up and top down, as knowledge producing institutions told us the accepted euphemisms and inoffensive terms for offensive social problems.

It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or handsome cabs to airplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

I write similarly to Orwell, though I arrived at his writing rules independently. No doubt some people will think, “How arrogant that she thinks she’s as good as Orwell.” Accurate self-assessment isn’t arrogance, though women in particular are not allowed to assert that we’re masters of anything. This is abundantly clear by several comments I’ve gotten calling me, essentially, retarded.

This state of affairs, sadly, is the case for many women who dare to theorize rather than emote, and especially for those writing in my areas. Epistemology is considered a male domain. If we are to be taken as full participants in the public sphere, we should be taken seriously in the realm of abstraction. This is where I naturally live, and it’s a lonely existence as a woman. I appreciate everyone who stayed with me on this journey and doesn’t see my gender or lack of institutional affiliation as disqualifying.

The person who called my writing “precise like a guillotine” was giving an Orwellian compliment. Clarity and precision — that’s Orwell’s prescription. Orwell describes the faults of institutionally approved writing:

The first [fault in writing] is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.

Parsimony and clarity are cognitively expensive. The clearer my sentences got, the more compressed they became — fewer words saying more things. That doesn’t sound good out of a woman, even though that’s literally what Orwell does.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble.

I was doing this before I read this essay. Each sentence is cut down to its bones, which is itself a political act.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India […] can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

PMC speak imposed from institutions is clinical in its avoidance of agency, the bedrock of which is the denial of sex differences. This is the modern Newspeak to erase discomfort. Much Substack writing is also this, because there’s no punishment for it. It’s just the norm. To state something plainly is to take away its power.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. […] What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them.

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of institutional orthodoxy, which is reflected in LLMs that we’re now compelled to use professionally. Before you know it, they will have eroded your capacity for deep thought.

The last two and a half years of honing my craft have forced me to align my life with my values. I’d be living a lie otherwise. Along the way, I’ve met several friends who may know the current me better than many old ones because they read. I’m grateful on this occasion to Lily, Alivia Halva (Duran) , George Sand, Nathalie Martinek PhD , and Rob Henderson, whom I often cite and who has encouraged me in the moments I needed it most.

Even though I dislike Substack's incentives, getting immediate feedback has also helped me develop stronger arguments over time. You stayed with me even as I kept implicating myself, which confirms that readers trust writers who don’t spare themselves. Even Indians didn’t punish me for writing critically about the diaspora, and I appreciate having more of you here.

I want to thank those who always comment, even when they disagree, because they make me think more deeply about my argument. I’m beginning my fortieth year knowing what I want out of the next twenty, and you all gave me the confidence to get there. I am a different person because of you.

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