Oh Brother, it's Big Brother (Again)

I’ve always been proud that my book, The Web of Inclusion, published in 1995, is credited with having brought the language of inclusion into business. Yet it looks as if from this day forward, I may only be identified as the author of The Web of –

That is, unless I can find a suitable euphemism, the new administration having banned “inclusion” from public discourse.

The problem is acute and the stakes matter for everyone. But as a writer, the impact approaches censorship. And not just for The Web of Inclusion but also my most recent book, Rising Together, which uses the adjectival form of the verboten word in its subtitle: How we can bridge divides and create a more inclusive workplace.

I will never shy away from advocating for inclusion as key to organizational success. It’s been my passion in life. But in the interest of not being canceled or censored, I’ve begun searching for a term less likely to be blacked out.

Thesaurus.com is no help, suggesting admittance, formation, incorporation, and involvement as the strongest matches. To which the Collins adds merger, federation, and blend, while Merriam-Webster offers augmentation and increase.

How could any of these possibly work? Incorporation implies that I’m writing about the technicalities of registering an LLC. Augmentation sounds like a story about getting implants.

Try as I might, I cannot come up with any workable versions. Incorporationism?

You see the problem.

It’s the same dilemma that many in the Leninist and Stalinist eras faced, when words disappeared or were changed overnight.

• Child baptism became known as Octobering, to honor the month of the Bolshevik coup.

• I and me were replaced by We, which caused a endless confusion in both official documents and day-to-day conversation. (It seems that pronouns have the perennial power to irk).

• The honorific Gospodin (Mister) was viewed as class-bound, and replaced by the fiercely egalitarian Comrade.

• This led to complications as Stalin tightened his grip, and Comrade became a way to mock the regime. Gospodin remained verboten, so, in one of the great non sequiturs of history, honored guests at official functions came to be introduced as Lords or Ladies– hardly a less class-bound alternative to Gospodin than Mister.

George Orwell ridiculed these absurdities in his novel 1984, which satirized life in a future totalitarian state. The authorities began changing the established language to Newspeak, which removed vocabulary and eliminated subtleties. In Orwell’s depiction, there was only badthink and goodthink, which left no room for being thoughtful.

The purpose of such language mangling is of course to disguise meaning. As with the less-than-subtle Newspeak slogan: Slavery is Freedom!

In The Politics of the English Language, Orwell sums up the essential problem: “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

For now, I have not found a suitable alternative to the word inclusion. But the administration’s shambolic approach to language-purging gives me hope. Scrubbing words like inclusion and equity has eliminated such innocent phrasing from government websites as “investments in equity markets,” “inclusion of your tax ID number,” or “inclusion of a self-addressed stamped envelope.”

As history teaches, zealousness is often undone by the functional stupidity following in its wake.

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