 Words are some of the most powerful things in the world. If you can control words, you can influence minds and change people's behavior. There's a particularly powerful technique that you see in politics, all the time that I call hijacking a word. And it reminds me of that scene in Indiana Jones where he's got to swap out the gold bag with the bag filled with sand really quickly. So words, as I spoke about in one of the earlier videos, elicit concepts in our minds, but that's not all that they do. Words also produce feelings on the inside of somebody who's hearing a word. So if I say something like murder, I'm not just communicating the concept of, let's say, the unlawful killing of one human being by another. You also have a feeling when you hear the word murder. It comes with the feeling of bad or scary or dangerous, that internal negative emotion that's associated with murder. If I say something like freedom, that's a word that has a very positive emotional attachment to it. What happens when a word gets hijacked is the conceptual definition changes while the emotional feeling stays the same. Here's an example that comes up all the time in the American world, violence. That is one of those words that has a very negative feeling. You can't support violence, everybody's against violence. Now what has happened just in the past few decades and even in the past few years is we all are in agreement that violence is bad, but what one segment, one political group has done is change the conceptual definition for violence. So violence used to be about physical force, physical aggression of one party onto another, and now they've changed. They said, well, that's one type of violence, but there's another violence that's verbal violence. If I'm speaking to you and I'm saying really upsetting things, very bigoted things, I say I don't like women, I don't like people with your skin color, that now they say is a form of violence. Now, if you're not aware of what's going on here, you might not care so much, but if you care about how the world works, this is an incredibly powerful and dangerous change to the common definition of violence because now everybody agrees. We have to try to get rid of violence in society and what they'll say is, therefore, we need laws to protect us from verbal violence, just like we need laws to protect us from physical violence. So in a matter of a heartbeat, we've gone from everybody agreeing it should be illegal for you to smack your neighbor over the head for no reason. Now they said, oh, well, for the same reason, it should be illegal to call your neighbor an upsetting word. Do you see what's happened? When you address this, you say, well, that's not violence. Calling somebody a mean name isn't violence. They'll say, what do you mean? You're supporting violence. What violence is is the imposition of a negative feeling onto the internal state of another. Now, if you let that slide and you just accept, oh, well, now we've got a new common definition of a word, you have essentially given up political power. Those who are able to define what violence is in society have a massive amount of power and control for how our society operates, precisely because we have a very strong emotional attachment and emotional feelings that are elicited by the word violence. That's just one example of the hijacking of a word. Let's make it even more extreme. Let's talk about the word terrorist. Now, what qualifies as a terrorist? Everybody agrees, terrorists are bad. It's not just an empty conceptual word terrorist. That word elicits very strong feelings and if we're not very careful, and our definition, our commonly held definitions for what terrorist means, you might find yourself someday on a list because your political enemies have said, what qualifies as these big bad things called terrorists is people who have your political views or my political views. I've been on the record for many years and calling myself a market anarchist. Well, that word anarchist has a bunch of emotions associated with it. Now, my version of anarchism is 100% explicitly peaceful. That's an essential necessary part of it. Other people use that word to talk about bomb-throwing hooligans that overturn cars and set fire to limousines. I'm not one of those anarchists and yet I might still call myself an anarchist and it's not a stretch of the imagination to think that someday in the future we might hear a political leader that says we need to cut down on domestic terrorists and who is included in the definition of a domestic terrorist? It just might be anarchists. In a very real way, words are a matter of life and death and they are absolutely a matter of political power. One word historically that has its traditional definition has been gutted is liberal. Being a liberal came with a source of pride if you could call yourself that and what that meant 100 years ago, maybe 150 years ago, is that you supported free markets. You supported toleration amongst people. You supported the separation of church and state. But nowadays being a liberal might still have that emotional appeal. Like a badge you wear on your chest, I am a liberal, but it means something very different in terms of what political policies you support. Maybe restrictions on free speech. You're anti-free trade. You want all kinds of regulations on the banking sector, on who can and cannot get jobs, at what price they can and cannot get their jobs. In many ways, being a modern liberal means being anti-liberal by the original definition of the word. And that I am suggesting is not a coincidence. Those who are aware of the emotional power that come attached to particular words have a very strong incentive to try to change the definition, change the commonly held definition, according to their political vision. Paint their opponents as irrational terrorists, or paint those who agree with their policy as those who are liberals or open-minded. Now like my earlier video said, I'm not claiming there are such things as objective definitions. Words don't work that way. It would be a lot easier if they did. Instead we have a much more difficult task, which is that words do have some kind of commonly held definitions if you speak a particular language. You have to be aware of what a particular word means, the concept that is brought to the mind of the individual who hears the word. So what I think is going on in many of the cultural and political battles, especially in the United States, is a battle over language. It's a very important battle. What is gender? What is sex? What is rape? What is violence? What is freedom? What is tyranny? What is oppression? If you don't play this word game and fight back about the definitions of words, you may find yourself losing power to those who control language. You may insist that you're not being violent, therefore you've not violated the law, but if you've lost the word game, it may very well be the case that in a very short period of time you could be considered violent, or a terrorist, or a threat, or a rapist, or a bigot, and you'll have a very difficult time persuading people that your definition of the word is the one that should be upheld in the court of law. The language wars are not something that is just restricted to eggheads that have too much time on their hands. It is very much a political battle to say, high stakes.