The Black Speech of Mordor

The Enemy's language is even more mechanical -- and more broken -- than you think.

Artists are language developers.

Actually, all humans are language developers. But artists do that more than most, pushing the envelope of what can be said and understood. That’s because the artist is trying to communicate concepts beyond what’s readily observable in the superficial world.

Of artists, writers have a uniquely precarious gap to straddle between grammar (an underlying structure that is mutually comprehensible) and style (that which is individually devised and refined). The skeleton of grammar is necessarily a collaborative project, though primarily an intuitive one. Style, on the other hand, can include almost any combination of letters, morphemes and words a writer can dream up.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

— Lewis Carroll, The Jabberwocky

That means excessive style has the potential to disintegrate into babble. By this I don’t mean the comedic whimsy of galumphing heroes and vorpal swords, but the bad poetry of lunatics, obscurantists and con-artists. The anti-philosopher Jacques Derrida was an excellent example of all three:

This denial [dénégation] does not happen [to the secret] by accident; it is essential and originary. … The enigma … is the sharing of the secret, and not only shared to my partner in the society but the secret shared within itself, its ‘own’ partition, which divides the essence of a secret that cannot even appear to one alone except in starting to be lost, to divulge itself, hence to dissimulate itself, as secret, in showing itself: dissimulating its dissimulation. There is no secret as such; I deny it. And this is what I confide in secret to whomever allies himself to me. This is the secret of the alliance.

Wow, what an “originary” way to slay a Jabberwock, Jacques! Who would have thought the answer was, “Bore it to death with syllogistic bullshit.”

On the other hand, the abandonment of personal style drains writing of its artistic purpose, which is to bridge the gulf between souls. When used for that purpose, the reader also becomes an active party in the construction of meaning. Yes, there are different styles of reading, as the reader must complete his half of the bridge. When we read, we use the writer’s stylistic cues to reconstruct the sounds, images and concepts, which add up to an approximate portrait of that writer’s soul in the published moment. What the reader builds will never be one-to-one identical to the author’s, which would be a boring and useless result anyway. Struggling to reconstruct the soul behind the words is what expands our own, in the same way struggling with heavy weights builds muscles. The best writers are often the ones we wrestle the hardest with (R.I.P. Cormac McCarthy).

Compare this form of writing to the purely mechanical tongues of programmatic languages, in which utility is its sole purpose. When reading or writing a script in such a language, the human mind remains concentrated on maximizing efficiency of operation and result. This includes the efficiency of translation, if and when a programming project intersects with art.

For example, we might translate Lewis’s poetry into a simple game¹:

def jabberWock():
  actions = ["fight", "flee"]
  global vorpalsword
  print("And, as in uffish thought he stood, \nThe Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, \nCame whiffling through the tulgey wood, \nAnd burbled as it came!")
  userInput = ""
  while userInput not in actions:
    print("Options: flee/fight")
    userInput = input()
    if userInput == "fight":
      if vorpalsword:
        print("One, two! One, two! and through and through \nThe vorpal blade went snicker-snack! \nHe left it dead, and with its head \nHe went galumphing back.")
      else:
        print("You lost the fight! \nGame Over.")
    elif userInput == "flee":
      print("The Jabberwock caught you! \nGame Over.")
    else:
      print("Please enter a valid action command.")

vorpalsword = 0
jabberWock()

Doing so doesn’t require any reconstruction into the whole truths of Lewis’ poetry, a job which some neurologists ascribe to the right hemisphere of the brain. Coding in machine language marks a submission to the spell of reductive abstraction, with optimization as the only ethos. The actual outputs of text contained in the print commands could be any old nonsense, or even strings of random letters. A programmer is only concerned with getting the grammar right (and tight).

Of course that doesn’t eliminate the role of artist, because no one would want to play a game that just shat out random letters (or Derrida quotes, or the borrowed and bowdlerized dung of fancy chatbots). And the wall between artist and machinist isn’t unassailable. In fact, it’s essentially an illusion; what's really happening is something like the social phenomenon of hyper-specialization.

Most people tend to specialize, either due to their own preference or through the social encouragement and/or coercion of the marketplace. This is especially the case for the military-industrial neo-Dark Ages we grew up in. Our rulers don’t want us getting any funny ideas about crossing certain supposedly hard boundaries. including boundaries between left-and-right hemispheric work. Yet, if the “Jabberwocky Game” project was floated my way, I have a feeling I couldn’t help myself when I arrived at the dull “Game Over” commands.

    elif userInput == "flee":
        print("And in his froonish prade the boy /nFlew fast away in dizzled throes, /nThe Jabberwock flarged close behind n/And grunched him down from hairs to toes. /nGame Over.")

Crossing such boundaries is something we’ll need to be doing more of, as both readers and writers, in order to develop a language model that’s both mutually understood and spiritually enriching. This form of language is something we must build together and separately, to bridge the gap between Self and Other without losing the intelligibility of either. I’m convinced these kinds of projects will be critical tools in the spiritual war.

Our Enemy knows the importance of such tools, and has always known it. But like all knowledge within his domain, it inverts distant nodes of causality to its ultimate ruination. This is why something that sounds close to a “truth” can function as the most destructive and illogical of lies (Diversity is Our Strength; Believe All Women; Black Lives Matter, Transwomen Are Real Women, etc).

When we scratch them with our fingernails, these slogans crumble to dust. That’s why the servants of evil also take on the ruthless policing of language as one of their core missions. They fear competing language models, because deep down they know their own words are frail and lame. Garbage in, garbage out.

They also fear the spiritual growth that comes with the free exchange of thoughts. But because they can neither fairly compete nor build up their own spirits, their answer is to threaten, coerce, throttle, censor, jail and otherwise shut the competition up.

This is how a male eunuch can magically become a woman, in the hallowed halls of our scientific academies. Oddly, it’s also the reason that Rachel Dolezal can never become black, even though race is a “social construct,” yet also an essential and inherited property of being, except when it isn’t that, or is neither, or both. This maze of nonsense is dizzying on purpose, as is the absurd plasticity of its contradictions. The Enemy’s tongue is forked for a reason. All the better to speak from both sides of his mouth.

Depending on the species of servant, they might not even be conscious that spiritual suppression is their goal, because they were taught nothing of the spirit. All is Mechanism and Power to them, including and especially human language. Meanwhile their own spirits waste away inside the jails of their minds, which explains the ferocious anger and outrage they constantly exhibit. Much like the digital communication of hives, their language model is built solely to pursue and expand the ingroup’s power. But like all projects, this work requires some source of energy. Absent other resources, the poisoned nectars of Envy and Wrath are what primarily power their language dev (Greed alone can’t get them in that game, because by its very nature only the few can harness it).

To keep those Wrath and Envy engines humming requires a steady supply of scapegoats. Artists and their audiences are typically the favorite fuel, and not only because we dare to seek and tell the truth. For them, it simply can’t be the case that you (in reading) and I (in writing) are attempting to commune and expand our souls. It must be that we’re up to something else that’s highly suspicious — and probably very dangerous and misinformation-y, because after all we’re only pretending to not seek power. Since we cannot possible mean what we say we mean, ironically we come off like the sorcerers and thralls to them, instead of souls working to set each other free. They become even more suspicious when we say we want to free them too, because according to the perverse laws of Clown World they already are.

These suspicions are elemental to their upside-down faith, and the reason they seek to criminalize both reading and writing. They much prefer a formal, mechanical language devoid of style — or at least, they’ll claim to prefer that. And yet witness the endless torrent of baffling and inefficient language that pours from our academic and bureaucratic institutions. They’ve become factories of ornate, multisyllabic jargon, designed to obfuscate instead of enlighten. Even a word like “antidisestablishmentarism” seems downright folksy, when compared to the nonsense we read and hear today.

The servants responsible for this wave of arcane bullshit are wiser to the larger game at play. They include un-authors like Derrida or Foucault, who churn out the un-words and un-concepts with the goal of coercing intelligent and well-meaning people into adopting them as the lingua franca of elites. The tactic is carrot-and-stick: speak Sauron’s words and win fun prizes (grants, promotions, acclaim); refuse to, and your peers will call you stupid (or, worse, some kind of -ist or -phobe).

The results are often darkly comical, when you think about how much time, wealth and brainpower is being spilled into the void. These jokes occasionally get pitch black, as in when a peer-reviewed sociology journal absentmindedly republished a portion of Mein Kampf that was thinly disguised as a feminist academic treatise. If that doesn’t clue you in to who and what we’re up against, I don’t know what will.

For another example, here is the abstract of a research paper titled Shop sign as monument: The discursive recontextualization of a neon sign (Jackie Jia Lou , City University of Hong Kong):

Ethnographic studies of linguistic landscape have shed light on the complex processes in which signage is designed, created, perceived, and interpreted. This paper highlights the role of public discourse in such processes by tracing how the neon sign of a restaurant in Hong Kong ironically reached monumental status after its removal. Expanding the geosemiotic framework with the theory of recontexualization, it examines the shifting meanings of the sign as represented in four types of discourse, and suggests that it is their contradiction and divergence that has shaped the shop sign into an urban monument.

Is that enough light-shedding for you, pal?

Seeking further illumination, I battled my way through the rest of this drivel. Don’t hold me to it, but as best I can tell his argument was that some people like some signs, other people don’t like them, and still others misunderstand their intent. Signs can also somehow be “objectified” even though they’re objects to begin with. And of course, they are tools of oppression against The Poors, and other wretched of the Earth.

It’s perhaps too much to say this was the most singularly useless string of letters I’ve ever read (after all, I’ve read all the major French philosophers). But what’s instructive is how damned easy it was to find. All I needed to do was park the word “discursive” in front of something the postmodernists wanted to destroy (i.e. anything and everything). I probably could have done the same with “semiotics + (insert target of Envy/Wrath)” but how much abuse can one reader take? It’s like trying to commune with Legion.

The notion that a human being might be compensated for such noise-generation is often more mindboggling than the work itself. And yet, other times I totally get it. They promote a pompous and obtuse language model in service of sentiments no less childish than “Gimme! I want!” And by that they don’t mean shelter from the storm, but the storm itself. These are demolition projects, full stop. And from the ashes, Power (they hope). The fact that their word salads break every commandment of Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is therefore a feature, not a bug.

Still, every academic Nazgul needs his cannon-fodder orcs. So I’m sure somewhere a bunch of Antifa enthusiasts are plotting to tear down such “discursive monuments,” and use that fancy-sounding term to elevate them from the status of lowly, run-of-the-mill vandals. Even without it, they would instinctively destroy signs, statues, buildings, cities and nations. Orcs gonna orc. But it’s always nice to have some ornate justification at the ready, like a form of military camouflage.

And yet, I sense a new development on that side of the divide. Or rather, a new anti-development, since their authors deconstruct and deracinate in the same way we integrate and build.

Their preferred public language is becoming more blunt, simplistic and, most of all, efficient. Concepts that were once communicated through lengthy spells of jargon are being boiled down to words like “whiteness” and “pride.” Even the Nazgul are sounding more orcish lately.

What gives? And what could the Enemy’s new war footing tell us about our own language projects, and how we might improve their development?

---

In Tolkien’s legendarium, the Black Speech of Mordor was a constructed language, invented by Sauron for use by those servants who were capable of speaking. By “constructed” I mean it was not formed naturally over a period of time, adaptation and agreement, but was rather engineered by an individual for a specific use. Because of its unnatural development, Sauron needed to impose his language on his followers, just as a conqueror would impose it upon those conquered.

In that sense, we can think of it as a programmatic language like COBOL. Likewise imposed in top-down fashion by the the U.S. Department of Defense in 1959, it was intended to be used by the average military-industrial drone unschooled in coding. The result was rather the opposite; trying to structure the language in such a way to make it more readable to non-programmers yielded a confusing, verbose and unwieldy system. Worse, every attempt to improve it always backfired, eventually turning the code into a spaghetti mess that was almost impossible to maintain or port.

Yet because it was so deeply embedded in critical mainframes, it was equally difficult to abandon COBOL and start from scratch. It became a manifestation of the sunk-costs fallacy; generation after generation of programmers were imprisoned by this ill-conceived language, which in its quest for greater efficiency, comprehension and ease had instead generated the opposite results, but was so firmly entrenched that it still haunts some mainframes to this very day.

Perhaps it’s too much to say that COBOL is an “evil” language. On the other hand, the similarities are strong: an immoral conqueror forces his subjects to speak in his debased alien tongue, sowing confusion and misery as a result. While foul to the ears of good programmers, its peculiar syntax and poor scalability was deemed adequate for orcs to receive commands from Nazgul, and to report useful information back to them. It was similar to other kinds of “codes” in another way, in that it would look like gobbledygook to the uninitiated. To some of the more dimwitted Nazgul, this meant secrecy was built-in (unless you happened to have a l33t hax0r like Gandalf on hand).

In the Black Speech, I think Tolkien was also pointing to the all-encompassing mechanization of evil, which is apparent even in the words they write and speak. One reason that the good people of Middle Earth don’t speak them is they are infused with insanity and malice. Therefore, even using the Black Speech without ill-intent could prove spiritually dangerous to both the speaker and those who hear him, as the words might a leave behind a residue of darkness. Or, as Edsger Dijkstra said of its DoD counterpart, the use of COBOL “cripples the mind.”

To compare this to our current predicament, the Black Speech is essentially the mechanical and deeply malicious language of postmodernism and its descendants in Critical Theory, diversity duckspeak and other offshoots. It’s also the meta-grammar that underlies and unites these evil dialects, such that the various field units can at the very least recognize the speaker’s war banner as their own. Thus, while a lowly and illiterate Snaga window-smasher might not savvy jargon like “microassaultive derogations” or “BAME” (black, asian or minority ethnic; i.e. “not white”), they are helpfully nested inside clouds of simpler words and symbols to clue them in.

For instance, a tweet from the Witch-King of Angmar might still be riddled with high falutin gibberish, incomprehensible to those outside his bullshit field of study. But staple on a few emojis and a bit of the ol’ gutter patois (“…and that’s why I say FUCK ALL WHITE PPL 😡😡😡”) and the signal still comes through, loud and clear. By this process, the uninitiated may even adopt some of the gibberish themselves. But over time, they see fewer and fewer reasons to do so. Some may see no need to speak at all, and add their voices mutely through retweets and upvotes. Again: mechanism, utility, efficiency, but all so poisoned by the cardinal sins that the standards can’t help but plunge.

This curve towards the lowest common denominator pertains to the way evil views efficiency. The goal of their language dev has never been “understanding” (and certainly nothing like the communion of souls). The goal is to stoke rage and transmit destuctive commands as widely and efficiently as possible. The Nazgul may therefore go on conversing with each other in their byzantine jive, which flatters their towering egos. Meanwhile the foot soldiers can simply tune in for the guttural notes, and retail the simplest and angriest of those into the ether. As long as the final output is unending resentment and accusation, it’s music to the Dark Lord’s ears.

---

That last bit is something that’s been on my mind, as of late.

As dissident brothers and sisters, tasked with no less a mission than saving the world, how much music do we contribute to that dark orchestra? When we fill our mouths with Mordor’s words — even for satire or as shorthand — are we losing more ground than we gain?

I’m no speech cop, to say the least. I would never demand someone modify his language to suit my tastes. For one thing, that’s a despicably evil thing to do (which is why it’s one of the Enemy’s favorite tactics). For another: how boring would our conversation be if you agreed to actually do that? How would that serve to nourish and strengthen either of our souls?

Speech codes are so utterly vile, I would never even impose one on myself. As in life, language requires flexibility and spontaneity. Even Gandalf resorted to the Black Speech in order to end the fellowship’s useless squabbling, and refocus them on the threat at hand. If that’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

But what I am considering doing is modifying my own language model to minimize whatever bits of the Enemy’s tongue are currently lurking there. On reflection, I realized that there are quite a few of those, and that in becoming fluent in the Black Speech I have risked jailing myself inside it.

I understand why we use shorthand like “woke,” or make comedy from various formulations of “LGBTQWERTY” and the like. But I’m starting to see some of these words and conceptual frameworks as hopelessly cursed. The specific curse is one of reification; to repeat them at all seems to me like a tacit admission that they have any power whatsoever, that they’re anything but the mechanical babbling of a poorly written program. Let them run it, exhausting and bewildering themselves in the process.

Observe as this goblinoid cretin almost swallows his own forked tongue, trying to keep pace with its latest broken code update:

Or more recently, check out pop ditz Demi Lovato describe the enervating anguish of having to constantly school us all on how to apply her D- phonics.

“I constantly had to educate people and explain why I identified with those pronouns. It was absolutely exhausting,” the “Cool for the Summer” singer told GQ Hype Spain in an interview published Tuesday.

“I just got tired. But for that very reason I know that it is important to continue spreading the word.”

So she’s not using they/them anymore, since we’re too stupid to understand. But she’s also gonna keep “spreading the word.” Got that?

Yet, I find I also exhaust myself, even when I’m mocking their language of grammatical death traps and nonce words. For that reason, I’ll be trying to dial back on speaking it in the future. And because I’m not as good at neologisms as some of you, I think my strategy going forward will be to reach more deeply into the past for my language, into that which is ancient and mythopoetic and enduring. I will call heroes and monsters by names that suit them, with a provenance rooted in the Artist’s way of seeing and knowing.

In other words, I will follow Tolkien’s path, Milton’s path, as well and faithfully as I can. The Babbling Machine of Babel never tires, never sleeps, never dreams. But it also never makes a goddamned lick of sense, and never says or hears anything remotely beautiful. This is to the Enemy’s extreme detriment over time, because these are what the soul craves most of all. I think whatever’s to the Machine’s detriment is to our advantage, in this time of great tribulation, divergence and war.

So, sense and beauty it is. Grammar and style.

I’ll give it my best shot.

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1. To my chagrin, some friends noted that my code snippet wouldn’t compile as written. I amended that, so feel free to duel the Jabberwock at your leisure by copying and running my lame code here.