Language has its purpose

Some days ago i read the last six chapters of Michiko Kakutani's "The Death of Truth: notes on falsehood in the age of Trump". A big part of the book is about anti-intellectualism, and post-modernist deconstruction and how these two, along with nihilism have prepared America for Trump and his political cohort. Two important writers who identified the evil banality of Soviet socialism (communism), and fascism are Hannah Arendt and George Orwell. Those two systems made no distinction between truth and lies, so power could be executed for the sake of power. To-day we have a regime that creates 'alternate facts'. Kakutani mentions a writer i am not familiar with, David Foster Wallace, who wrote about post-modern irony in the 1990s. She sees his mention of the advertising fictional Joe Isuzu ["You have my word on it"], and Rush Limbaugh [and his dittoheads] as precursors to Trump.

I suppose when i was in college was about the time the post-modernist deconstruction writers and disciples were about to switch on the political spectrum. Those in books at the time were far leftists, and those for more than a generation have been far rightists. Then i thought them pretentious bullshit artists that only existed in their circle of effluvium and flotsam; now they are a fascist peril. 

If i were to write that book, yes i would have used some of her sources and historical episodes. But i also would have used "2 + 2 = 4", this is Aristotelian logic; it is also mentioned by Dostojevskij and Orwell. A rational, and a free man can say this. You have freedom if you can say this without penalty. Dostojevskij also had Fr. Zosima say in "The Brothers Karamazov": 

"...The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offence, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill -- he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness. ...". 

I also would have quoted from Solzhenitsyn's Nobel speech: "...Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. ...".