Favorable Redefinition

Progressives support education. There’s actually a double meaning to that sentence. One meaning is that people who are progressive support true education. The other is that people who follow so-called progressive politics support our so-called education system. These are two very different things.

It’s very easy for people to become confused when a word is used in different ways. With education, we frequently hear about how it’s a need. A lot of this discussions explain why it is viewed as a need. Most of these explanations are referring to true education. This is why a lot of people feel that they should support and fund education. People fail to acknowledge the difference between true education and the misuse of the term coming from the schools. Instead of funding and supporting true education, these people fund and support our anti-educational schooling system.

It’s the same thing with progressive. We should all desire a truly progressive society. A lot of people will support progressives because of the desire for progress. Like with education, people are mixing up definitions. Democrats refer to themselves as progressive despite maintaining highly regressive values.

In both of these cases, a new definition was created to sway public opinion. This is a form of spin. People who want to show support for education would rather show their support for education than fight education. People who want to support progressives are more likely to vote for the progressives than the non-progressives. If you don’t go along with these conventions, people will usually view you as against these things. The schools knew it (although most people currently involved are completely oblivious in regards to the true purpose of the process), and the Democrats know it.

This is what I’m talking about when I bring up favorable redefinition. People redefine words unrelated to their causes to refer to their causes. They are redefining words to make themselves look better. They hope that people will be too stupid to realize that supporting the word is not the same as supporting the original meaning.

I’m not like most people. I refuse to accept the validity of favorable redefinition. I do not like to refer to the schools as education, and I do not like to refer to Democrats as progressives. I support true education far more than pseudo-education. I am willing to support true progressives (do they even exist anymore?) far more than pseudo-progressives. I can live with label of an anti-educational regressive if that’s the consequence of supporting education and progress.