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Richard Bergson's avatar

Language is indeed a very important element of communicating ideas and the feelings that go with them but they don’t exist in isolation. The phrases of the right you mention are part of a narrative that is based on a truth that people experience but which is twisted to stoke division. The great irony is that it suits the twins - wealth and power - and resonates with the dispossessed building resentment not against the austerity imposed by the twins but hapless scapegoats. The left, meanwhile, inhabit a semi-utopian world that as you point is characterised by intellectualism and jargon with few - if any - bridges from our current reality. This is of course the difference between the certainty of the lie and the complexity of the truth. If we don’t want the devil to have all the best tunes we’d better learn how to make the complex palatable and rock it!

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