"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests"
About this Quote
Decadence, for Vidal, isn’t pearls and champagne; it’s the slow moral rot that shows up first in the mouth. His target is a culture that has stopped arguing honestly about power and started laundering it through euphemism. The line hits because it treats language not as a neutral tool but as an early-warning system: when a society can no longer justify what it’s doing, it changes what it calls what it’s doing.
Vidal’s killer example - “you liberate a city by destroying it” - compresses an entire playbook of modern empire into one obscene oxymoron. “Liberate” is a halo word: it borrows the prestige of freedom and drapes it over rubble. The subtext is that violence doesn’t just kill bodies; it also kills meaning. Once “liberation” can mean annihilation, words become weapons aimed at the public’s moral reflexes.
The election-time jab sharpens the diagnosis: decadent language isn’t accidental sloppiness, it’s a governing strategy. Confusion is not a bug but the feature that makes self-sabotaging consent possible. Vidal implies that citizens aren’t simply duped by a single lie; they’re submerged in a vocabulary engineered to make contradictions feel normal and cruelty feel pragmatic.
Context matters: Vidal wrote across the Cold War and Vietnam era into the age of permanent campaigns, when public relations, television sound bites, and national-security rhetoric turned politics into a battle over framing. His cynicism is calibrated, not theatrical: if you want to know what a country is becoming, listen to what it forces its words to excuse.
Vidal’s killer example - “you liberate a city by destroying it” - compresses an entire playbook of modern empire into one obscene oxymoron. “Liberate” is a halo word: it borrows the prestige of freedom and drapes it over rubble. The subtext is that violence doesn’t just kill bodies; it also kills meaning. Once “liberation” can mean annihilation, words become weapons aimed at the public’s moral reflexes.
The election-time jab sharpens the diagnosis: decadent language isn’t accidental sloppiness, it’s a governing strategy. Confusion is not a bug but the feature that makes self-sabotaging consent possible. Vidal implies that citizens aren’t simply duped by a single lie; they’re submerged in a vocabulary engineered to make contradictions feel normal and cruelty feel pragmatic.
Context matters: Vidal wrote across the Cold War and Vietnam era into the age of permanent campaigns, when public relations, television sound bites, and national-security rhetoric turned politics into a battle over framing. His cynicism is calibrated, not theatrical: if you want to know what a country is becoming, listen to what it forces its words to excuse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
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