We speak, we write, we connect. But what if the very words we use are subtly dictating our reality? Language, often seen as a mere tool for communication, possesses a hidden power — a power so immense it shapes our thoughts, beliefs, and even our understanding of the world. And its true complexity is almost always ignored.
The Hidden Burden of Words
What are words? They’re a bunch of syllables that are attached to an object or idea. Words have complicated meanings and carry the burden of context and historical usage. Anyone who engages in any kind of discussions must have realized the amount of semantic gap there is between people and the idea you are trying to convey. This leads to subjectivity.
Language is almost never interpreted as you actually mean it, and you don’t even know how the person you are debating with is actually interpreting your words.
Some people say you must follow the Oxford dictionary to avoid semantic misunderstandings. This has use and is helpful, but with words like “society,” “religion,” “god,” “evil,” “woman,” “man,” “intelligence,” and “consciousness,” the contextual burden these words carry is so great, it is only a brutal simplification to reduce them to two-liner definitions. So being ignorant of this fact is a crime.
I think that when we hear a word, we form an image in our minds, from our own lens which is made of our emotions, past experiences, and personal values.
The Subjectivity of Words
To understand this phenomenon better, let’s take the word Palestine for example. If you look at the Wikipedia definition for this word, you would get something pretty simple referring to it as a geographic location in the Middle East or something. But when you hear that word, even though it just refers to a fixed objective geographic entity, different people — let’s say a guy who knows nothing about Palestine, a Jew, a Muslim, a person who just read Palestinian history, someone who knows the culture of the place — each person would have a different idea of Palestine in their head, and this is the subjective burden is ignored in conversations.
So to an extent, there are 1000s of different versions of the word Palestine, but in conversation, they are clubbed into one word. I have seen this happening countless times in debates related to complicated topics such as “What is gender?” and religious debates related to scripture. This simple phenomenon causes so much confusion and gaps in communication.
Language Forms the Boundary of Your Thought
Building on this understanding of how words carry subjective meaning, I believe the impact goes even deeper. In my opinion, the language you speak can ultimately influence even how you think about the world.
To highlight how much language you speak dictates how you think about the world, let’s explore an example. When I first heard about the 9/11 attacks, along with the deep shock and grief, one thing I couldn’t understand was how is it even possible for a human being to do such a thing? What possibly could motivate them to not only take the lives of 1000s of innocent people, but that too while committing suicide?
So I think I now have an answer to that question: let’s explore how ISIS brainwashes children and how language plays a big role in it.
But first, let me explain the foundation that led me to this understanding. Ask yourselves, where do all your beliefs come from? Where does all your knowledge come from? Where do the skills that you have acquired come from? Either you discover them yourself, though this is quite rare — only a few people are creative or skilled enough to create knowledge from nothing — but the bulk of our knowledge comes from society, other people, books or resources created by others, your parents, etc. Right?
This is what separates humans from animals fundamentally, not only our ability to reason about information and gain insights from it but also pass it down to the next generation. This is what drives civilization’s progress ultimately; without this, we wouldn’t have been able to advance at all.
And what tool do we use to pass down this knowledge? Well, language. So essentially, everything you know, you have somehow acquired from the external world.
Doubting My Rationalism
This realization led me to question everything I thought I knew about myself. I used to always think I am a rationalist, that all beliefs have a rational and logical basis. But this line of thinking now made me question everything about what I know — an existential crisis of sorts, lmao.
For example, religion. I thought, what if human civilization started from scratch again and no one was taught about Islam or Christianity? Would they emerge exactly in the same manner? Probably not. The things that would be true in the real sense.
I thought if humans started from scratch, people would again, through the process of hit and trial, discovering things, passing that knowledge to the next generations, things like mathematics, concepts like numbers would probably still be invented, and they would look exactly the same. But religion also probably will be formed (this is a whole discussion on its own, so let’s leave it for later), but they would for sure look entirely different. Islam would not be formed exactly in the same way, same for Christianity or Judaism or any religion for that matter.
This is because it was formed as a complex byproduct of a lot of human interaction throughout the course of history, which for sure wouldn’t play out exactly the same.
An Interesting Thought Experiment
This insight crystallized into my go-to thought experiment to distinguish truth from falsehood. If something would look entirely the same if humanity restarted from scratch, it’s towards the truth; if it looks different, it’s made up.
Objective truths: mathematics, logic, physical laws — which would likely re-emerge.
Constructed truths: religions, social norms, ideologies — which would look totally different.
Armed with this axe, I started cutting down all trees of my understanding of the world: the concept of countries and their existence, the concept of family, power structures that exist in society, the role of government, police, basically everything that fails the litmus test of that thought experiment.
In our society, these things have become so deeply ingrained in our psyche that most people wouldn’t ever question them or just can’t even imagine a world without them. Well, voila! There it is. This was the answer to my original question.
This is what makes you vulnerable; this is when I realized how vulnerable each one of us is. And in a sense, how brainwashed each one of us is, actually very similar to how ISIS fighters are brainwashed.
I realized it wasn’t my rationality or logic stopping me from becoming a soldier of the caliphate; it was sheer luck. I was luckily brainwashed with Western ideals of freedom, democracy, liberty, individualism, mixed with Indian nationalism, Hinduism. Now, if that is objectively better or not is a topic of debate for some other time.
ISIS and the Power of Language
Now let me show you, with this background, how ISIS indoctrinates people.
I would urge you now to put yourself in the mind of a young Muslim. You have to consider all the stuff that he has learned from his childhood; that is what will form the core unchanging basis of their understanding of the world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said,
“The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e., it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeable fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.”
I know it’s hard to do, but let me help you. Put yourself in the shoes of a young Muslim. Forget, for a moment, your own background — whether you’re Hindu, Christian, secular, liberal, or anything else. Try to see the world through the mental model of a Muslim raised in a conservative, religious environment, one where belief in God is not a question — it’s the starting axiom.
If you are born as a child in Raqqa at the heart of Syria, you aren’t even allowed to look at any other language except Arabic. This is some vocabulary used by ISIS:
As you may notice, some of these concepts don’t have specific words for them in English directly; nothing directly translates exactly into English. Bay’ah, for example, which means allegiance to one’s leader, or Istishhad, which means seeking martyrdom, shows the society this language belongs to must value these concepts or they have some higher significance, either positive or negative, than Western or Indian counterparts.
So a child living in such an environment doesn’t even have the words to think about certain things; this clearly shows how your language limits your capability to reason. Your language is the literal boundary of your thoughts. Again quoting Wittgenstein,
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
A Multilinguist Perspective
This understanding becomes even clearer when you examine multiple languages, as I’ve experienced personally. I am bilingual; I can speak English and Hindi, and these languages have been developed in such different environments with rich histories of their own. I can myself notice that the concept of untranslatables is very real. I have seen a lot of Western people who read Sanskrit texts be completely ignorant of this fact, and they end up not actually grasping the contents of the texts by assuming stuff like Atman = soul, Brahman = god, Moksha = liberation, etc.
And same goes for me trying to read and understand the Quran.
I see the amount of untranslatables as a good measure of isolation of certain cultures. As India was colonized by the Britishers, I see a sort of Abrahamization of India’s perception of whatever we call religion (note religion is an English word), and I would argue we didn’t have a concept directly mapping to it ever in India.
So when you examine Sanskrit texts, the amount of untranslatables to English is insane; this shows it was a culture coming up with original and unique ideas of its own. Post-colonization, you can clearly observe as Indians grow up to be bilingual in English and Hindi, without any touch from Sanskrit while still following the Vedic religion.
Due to lack of untranslatables, many Indians have started mapping ancient Indian concepts in Sanskrit to Hindi and English, but due to lack of those concepts in English society, they are losing the capacity to understand their own culture, causing Abrahamization of the Indian tradition, unlike Sanskrit and English.
This would be pretty hard for a monolingual person to understand. I would love to know what a polyglot thinks about this especially if they know languages from vastly different cultures, like ancient Egypt, ancient India etc.
Conclusion
Language is not just a tool for communication — it’s the scaffold of our thoughts, beliefs, and identities. From the subjective meanings we attach to words like “Palestine” to the way ISIS uses vocabulary to brainwash children, language shapes how we see the world. Understanding this power — and our vulnerability to it — might be the first step toward genuine intellectual freedom.
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