Something is happening in conversations at dinner parties, in canteens and around dinner tables when friends and family come by these years.
Someone begins to say something about the town they live in. Or about a street they walked down the other day. Something different about a holiday they took. Something they heard on the news. Or a new pattern they've noticed in their social media feed.
It starts quite ordinarily - as it always has - but mid-sentence it catches. The person hesitates. Chooses a different word. Chooses again. Tries to explain themselves. Finally lands on a phrasing that doesn't say what they actually meant. It lacks precision. Depth. Frequency. And nerve.
All that which makes a language and the word alive and relevant.
And it's happening everywhere now.
Many barely notice it, because the form has been massaged so gently in over a couple of decades through television.
What you're experiencing is not cowardice. Nor is it self-censorship in the classic sense, where one pulls back what one knew full well one wasn't allowed to say. It's something more disturbing.
It's the experience that the language is already gone, before you reach for it.
Because you can always say it. You can formulate yourself. But every single word you could have used has already been set to serve a particular interpretation of it.
Concern becomes hate.
Observation becomes generalisation.
Recognition becomes phobia.
To love the country one is shaped by is called patriotism in a tone that suggests a disease.
Even a simple sentence - "this is not the DENMARK I grew up in" - can no longer be carried, heard and received, without someone reaching for a word that stamps the one who said it.
And it's not an accident.
It's the most skilful form of control we've learned, and the most quiet. You don't need to forbid the thought or the utterance. You just need to ensure that the language the thought could be formulated in has already been taken into use by someone else.
If words like community, tolerance, diversity, equality, openness, progress are all bound in advance to one particular content, then the one who wants to say something else is condemned before she begins. She has no neutral language to go back to. Each time she uses the word, she confirms the interpretation she wanted to contradict.
That's where we are.
Just writing this aloud as I do here will by many be read as all sorts of things it isn't.
I don't worry so much about that, I'm not here to serve those most deeply caught by the hypnosis and the inversion. I'm here to serve the ordinary person who experiences unfreedom inside their thoughts and their words. But cannot explain why that is - or worse - directs the cause toward themselves.
And then I'm here - among other things - to point out that there no longer exists an honest public conversation about what a people is. What a border is. What truth is. What a child should learn, and who decides it. What a mother is. What a father is. What marriage is. What a culture inherits, and what it's allowed to pass on.
Because it's not politics that is locked.
It's the language.
And behind the locked language something else is happening. Quietly. Without mandate. Without public conversation.
A people's demographic, cultural and spiritual composition is being changed, while the process that should have made the change possible to discuss has been dismantled.
No open question has ever been put to the Danes about this. For example, it has never been said -
"Hey Danes (back when we knew what that word meant) - do you want to be fewer in your own country? Do you want to be divided? Do you want to be reserved about or ashamed of your own history? Do you want to hand over the very language about reality to those who want things here to be completely different?"
They refrained, because the language dictated what could be thought and therefore said. So what happened, happened. And keeps happening. While anyone who tried to name it was driven out of the conversation with words that carried a stamp from outside.
Obstinate. Reactionary. Out of step. Wrong!
We were told we'd become better. Bigger. More open. That we'd got rid of an earlier era's pettiness.
But what we'd actually got rid of was the language.
And a people (yet another word no one is allowed to know what means anymore) that cannot put words to what is happening becomes spectators to their own history.
A people that cannot say 'we' can also not say 'ours'. Or 'we pass on'.
A people without shared words to describe reality no longer has a shared space for action.
And a people without space for action no longer governs itself.
So I repeat for anyone who will listen and try to understand.
Language is the first border.
When it's taken, the rest is a question of time.
BUT.
And this is important. Perhaps the most important thing you'll read all month.
It can be taken back.
And WHEN it's taken back, there is nothing that can resist the movement - both inside yourself, in the life you weave around you and in the wider society - that is set in motion.
Because it is Logos in the eternal movement Home.
In you.
❤️🔥🪽
...
And let me just remind you - now that the sun is shining Saturday evening - and you therefore remember everything a bit better, because your shoulders are lowered and your feet are propped up on a garden table.
You shouldn't put up with anyone stealing your language from you.
Otherwise tell me who's doing it - and I'll go after them like a friendly rottweiler, until they let go of it.
☀️