Manifesto 4: Headlines and Hot Buttons

Humpty Dumpty: “Words mean precisely what I mean for them to mean; neither more nor less.”

Kansas City Star, 2 April 2026, Headline: “New Law would criminalize unlawful approach to first responders”

Wikipedia on “Postmodernism”: “Some writers, including media theorist Dick Hebdige,[3][4][5] have suggested that the term is a meaningless buzzword, while others…”

I have known many people to argue that in fact all words are “meaningless buzzwords”; that speech can be (best) understood as nothing more than noises made between social animals to signal survival-related information or to mold and enforce social structure in the herd.

John Linnell: The words I’m singing now mean nothing more than meow to an animal.

In my observation, this argument usually comes joined with a general perspective of philosophical relativism and its hard-science common-law spouse, logical positivism. (Meaning the doctrine that we cannot say anything is true or false, only that some ideas allow us to achieve practical results whereas others do not. One is tempted to draw a comparison to the rather Nietzschean dictum articulated by Lord Voldemort to Harry Potter [through Professor Quirrel in the book]: “There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it”. That is meat for a future polemic.)

The newspaper headline which spurred this essay may be taken in a number of ways, and I will not explore the legislation in question in any detail; what seems important to me is the headline itself. And by taking the word “crime” to mean “that which is against the law”, I find it reduces to “This law will make it illegal to do a particular thing which is against the law”. One might find this a congenial launching point for a discussion of the politics involved, but again I turn my attention to the words themselves, and what they show about how words are used. A newspaper headline has a function: to capture attention. In this example, one presumes that the interplay between “criminalize” and “unlawful” is calculated to accomplish this. “Unlawful” tags some activity as one with which we will not sympathize, and “Criminalize” sounds like we are taking harsh decisive action against “bad people” who presumably deserve to suffer. The emotional color of the words is what does the work rather than their literal meaning. Thus we have an absurdly tautological statement which nevertheless carries impact because of a completely different layer of language.

And while exploring and exploiting multiple layers of meaning in linguistic communication is a central principle of Antipostmetasemanticism as a poetic paradigm, it is important to retain an awareness that those different levels of meaning are different levels, and that they are ALL important.

The explicit reliance of a newspaper headline on the emotional noise level of communication, to the contempt of linguistic meaning is a phenomenon worthy of some concern; it is a symptom of an entirely unwholesome process that has been going on in these last twenty or thirty years (maybe longer; as soon as one tries to draw a boundary, it wiggles out of reach to some exception).

This unwholesome process is the elimination of one entire level of linguistic function by another. The elminated layer is the layer where words actually mean specific things, and join together through grammatical structure to create logic. The overtaking layer is the layer where familiar or unfamiliar noises directly trigger emotional reaction – unconsidered, unreflective, unchained by moral responsibility or by the consequences of actions.

When humans make decisions and act based on logic, there is hope that they will make good decisions with beneficial results – to themselves, to their neighbors, to humanity as a whole. No guarantee – our logic may be faulty, or we may reason from inaccurate data – but a hope.

When humans make decisions based solely on automatic emotional responses to words-as-noises (“meaningless buzzwords”), there is no such hope. Especially of the triggering signals are well-engineered, they become not a tool for discourse but rather a pure tool for manipulation, a way for power-holders to induce the masses to act against their own interests, even to seek and crave their own destruction, without reflection, without even questioning the actions they are driven to take. The mindlessness of a violent mob is the full fruition of unregulated emotion pushing reason out of its way.

As systems go, that of unregulated emotion has one special advantage over the system of reason and discourse: while it does take specific and careful training for a person to learn to think logically and reason clearly, absolutely no knowledge or training is necessary for one to submit to emotional manipulation. So if we want a sane, logical society, we need the masses to be educated (whatever that means) and committed to placing their brains in charge over their guts. It requires people who are capable of putting aside temporary or personal gratification for the sake of broader and greater values.

However, if we want to manipulate the masses for our own profit or amusement, no such effort is necessary; in fact, the ideal thing would be to neuter or eliminate education so as to minimize the number of people capable of realizing their own danger. Instead, what the would-be manipulators need is a new sphere of living in which most of the common people will invest much of themselves. The manipulators needed sphere where the common folk would spend much of their time, and make themselves vulnerable to all kinds of manipulative messaging.

So many such spheres have appeared and become enormous in their impact on human civilization since the 1990s. Internet chat, Youtube comments, Twitter/X, Facebook, and beyond have all created such forums to perfection: everybody can feel like their emotional noises are validated, no thought or reflection is required (or even tolerated), and the winners and leaders are always those who make the most outrageous (emotionally triggering) statements the loudest, and who most consistently shout down all logical criticism or evaluation. (“Prove me wrong!”)

It takes intellectual effort and real knowledge to disprove a false statement through reason; it takes nothing to mock someone. And it does not take much sophistication to mock someone in language that most people will mistake for a logical refutation.

To sell people products they don’t really need, or cannot afford, or which confer no real benefit to them, emotional button-pushing is the perfect tool. To recruit people to vote for a leader who will abuse power, lay waste to the people, and sow destruction and hatred everywhere, emotional button-pushing is exactly the winning strategy. And it is abundantly clear that the worlds of business and the worlds of politics have by this point thrown themselves wholly behind the project of destroying logic by driving it out with emotionalism.

What is the most efficient way to nullify people’s capacity for logic? By driving it out of language – by remodeling the language they hear, speak, and think in (not to mention reading and writing) so as to make verbal reasoning impossible. This is accomplished by stripping words of “meaning” and replacing it with “emotional impact”. This is accomplished by training people not just to accept a newspaper headline like “New legislation makes unlawful acts illegal”, but training people to accept and respect this way of using language. As soon as people are willing to defend this shabby kind of writing as valid, (or every bit as valid as “traditional” writing with all that grammar and spelling, and mean nasty boring old “rules”), the die is cast. If words are no longer thought to have meaning, only an impact on feelings, then their capacity for abstract logical connection is gone.

Much has been made in some quarters of the idea that language is a communally-shared fiction – a fiat currency of thought. People agree or are trained to associate the word “dog” with a certain sort of animal, and that’s all—nothing more to it than the way a cat learns the sound of a rattling bag means that treats time is coming.

While it seems impossible to refute this form of philosophical relativism without gross absurdity, the paradigm conceals (or neglects) a paradox: while the connection between word-noises and actual things may be arbitrary and random, language only works because mutual users somehow agree on its meaning and structure as if that connection were objective rather than random. Apparently, that connection absolutely has to be random, but unless we all pretend together that it is logical and real, we cannot talk to each other at all, much less make and share any scientific or philosophical discovery. And since the bones of knowledge are discourse with one’s own self, there is no knowledge without language – without words that mean things.

This is the deadly peril of solipsism. It is fun and easy at parties to deconstruct anyone else’s logical arguments or serious beliefs; but sustaining any real knowledge in that regime is impossible. No knowledge, no thought, no nothing. The words I’m typing now mean nothing more than meow.

And yet, while the miasma of relativism, solipsism, post-post-postmodern antiretrodeconstructionism, enlightened hipness and arch superiority can and does destroy the very capacity for logic or reason, it does nothing to weaken emotional reaction to noises, or the unquestioning loyalty to tribe and self-image. So all the heat and noise of marketing and propaganda have free rein*, and there is no logic or truth to stop them. And people can be kept swaying to the beat of nothingness until they are unable to remember this hard, tiny, shiny little truth: just because you think there is no truth does not mean there are no lies.

I repeat: just because you think there’s no truth does not mean there are no lies. Just because you think there’s no truth does not mean there are no lies. Just because you think there’s no truth does not mean there are no lies.

One day, somebody chooses to announce to the world a headline like “New law makes illegal stuff unlawful”, from a podium, as if something meaningful and important was being said. If anyone is left to notice the absurdity of this string of words, they can be shouted down quickly and easily, since the prevailing cultural dogma is that grammar and logic and words having meanings are all such last-century ideas, outdated by the new enlightment of nothingness. Try it and watch what happens.

It is impossible to disprove the dogma that all proof is meaningless. Nevertheless, either that dogma is false, or meow meow meow meow meow. Let us abandon it—not forgetting the caution it requires, but continuing to respect logic in language, and the structures of language that allow for it. That means accepting and preserving rules of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and the mechanics of language – not as a means to create a priveleged ruling class, but to empower all people to participate in the life of their community.

And it must be emphasized: this is not an assertion that every typo or sloppy misuse of a homophone causes the death of civilization. Rather, this is an argument against the modern dogma that no one should care about the mechanics of language, that anyone who speaks up for clear and responsible use of words is some kind of villain. (“Grammar Nazi”). This is an argument that language should be used thoughtfully – especially by those persons whose professional responsibility is the use of language, such as the writers and editors of newspapers and news media.

What of antipostmetasemanticism? It has been asserted that every level of language, from the nature and nurture of the noises of notions through the acropolis of association up to the realm of rhythm, rhyme, and ultimately reason. No single level is to eradicate any of the others – all are needed. This would include the emotional and reactive level just as much as the level of literal, lexical meaning. Our point is that all the levels are necessary, and worthy of exploration, but none are expendable. Emotional use of language remains, and it is well that we should recognize and understand it. But we can only do that by retaining the power of rational, abstract, and logic-disciplined language, and also by allowing ourselves to be attentive to the even lower building-block level of constituent sounds and shapes that make up the rhythm and timbre of talk.

And by all means, let us have journalists, authors, poets, and even political leaders who respect language enough to use it well, rather than slack-brained self-appointed poser-prophets too lazy to bother caring for the tool they hope to use. Let us have talkers committed to truth rather than noisemakers committed to their own narcissism.