Something is happening in conversations at dinner tables, at parties, in break rooms, when friends and family come by these years.
Someone begins to say something about the city they live in. Or about a street they walked down the other day. Something different about a holiday they were on. Something they heard in the news. Or a new pattern they've noticed in their social media feed.
It starts quite ordinary - as it always has - but halfway through the sentence it catches. The person hesitates. Chooses a different word. Chooses again. Tries to explain themselves. Finally lands on a formulation 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 real.
And it's happening everywhere now.
Many barely notice it, because the form has been massaged in so gently over a couple of decades through the television.
What you're experiencing is not cowardice. It's not self-censorship in the classic sense either, where you pull back what you knew you weren't allowed to say. It's something more unsettling.
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 you grew up in 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 quietest. 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 doomed before she begins. She has no neutral language to return to. Each time she uses the word, she confirms the interpretation she wanted to contradict.
That's where we are.
Just writing this out loud as I do here will be read by many as all sorts of things it is not.
That doesn't concern me much, I'm not here to serve those who are deepest struck 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 it 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 the politics that's 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.
There has never been an open question 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 restrained about or ashamed of your own history? Do you want to hand over the very language about reality to those who wish 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 everyone who tried to name it was driven out of the conversation with words that carried a stamp from outside.
Obstinate. Backward. Out of step. Wrong!
We were told we had become better. Bigger. More open. That we had rid ourselves of an earlier time's narrow-mindedness.
But what we had actually rid ourselves 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', cannot say 'ours' either. Or 'we pass on'.
A people without common words to describe reality no longer has a common space for action.
And a people without space for action no longer governs itself.
So I repeat for everyone 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 read all month.
It can be taken back.
And WHEN it's taken back, then there is nothing that can withstand 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 the shoulders are lowered and the feet are propped up on a garden table.
You should not accept that someone steals 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.
☀️
