Now it seems to be fashionable to imply that the unemployed are all a bunch of lazy people who don't work because they don't want to.
A few months ago, it was Prime Minister Passos Coelho who said more or less that, in other words.
In more recent times, examples of this kind of thinking and the practical consequences of measures taken by the government are increasingly frequent.
In such a way, that it seems that a whole new language is being constructed, made up of euphemisms, to demonize the unemployed and all people who, due to life circumstances, have to receive benefits (or subsidies) from the State.
For this reason, there is now a bet on the destruction of the value of work and the cut in social benefits, but this is called “job-search incentive”.
They make us believe that unemployment is voluntary and is rooted in a lack of personal ambition or in sheer laziness. And that's why we cut unemployment benefits and want to push the unemployed to a the golden which goes by the name of "entrepreneurship". As if the country's salvation and the answer to the loss of thousands and thousands of jobs were for us all to become entrepreneurs and, more than that, “entrepreneurs”.
George Orwell, in his book «1984», written in the 30s of the last century, spoke of newspeak and described it as a mechanism producing doublethink.
Orwell wrote about it as fiction, science fiction, but the truth is that what he imagined nearly 100 years ago is coming true, even in Portugal
This is how, before our eyes, every day we are informed that attacking the welfare state is to save the welfare state, to destroy jobs is to create jobs, to impoverish the country is to readjust the country. Or refound it.
As there are no ideas, true new and productive ideas, words are played with, euphemisms are invented. What if they were all to be recast?
Comments