This is one of many factors that precipitated the Soviet collapse.

Turn on the news and you know the language being spewed has no relation to reality. A society full of liars where people say the exact opposite of the truth. Now that LLMs can produce infinitely many words for free, trust in language is falling to all-time lows.

Eventually people just stop believing in words, the fundamental unit of human communication.

I can't recommend Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation more than ever.

> What emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real.

> Everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation."

Apologies for the naive question (because I haven't read the book). I grew up with the Evil Empire waiting to nuke me until Gorbachev provided a brief respite before the KGB returned. As I recall, they were presented as an enemy with almost but just barely not quite unlimited capacities. I still don't understand what happened in terms of global geopolitics in the last forty years.

Does the book suggest that the Soviet collapse was caused by rather than delayed by their Orwellian perversion of language?

Hypernormalisation yes!

Curtis is my favorite documentalist :)

All the others are great too but Hypernormalisation is the most relevant to this.

Watching that one and Yuri Bezmenov's masterclass and long interview are life changing