Among Warning Signs On The Road To Serfdom – Change The Meaning Of Words

“… The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before. The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretence that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed …”

– From “The Road To Serfdom” by F. A. Hayek, first published in 1944 by George Routledge & Sons, pages 161-162 of Chapter 11, “The End Of Truth”.