ABSTRACT
If we think of Newspeak—or of the languages of Cogitant, Technicant, and Valiant—as pointing the individual outward, then the extraordinary language of social science can help us learn to point inward no less than outward. Just as those languages invented by Orwell and Vance—as presented in Chapter 2—teach us to stay at a low rung on the ladder of abstraction, the extraordinary language enables us to shuttle far up and down that ladder. And such shuttling enables us to integrate the knowledge to be found at all of the rungs of that ladder, just as the language of Pastiche enabled Beran to communicate with the Cogitants, Technicants, and Valiants on the planet Pao. Our extraordinary language can help us do much the same with respect to the bits and pieces of knowledge of human behavior that are now buried in our libraries. That language enables us to expand our present understanding of the scientific method so that we can put that method to work on our enormously complex and highly threatening problems. And the result can be movement toward our evolutionary potential, leaving those problems far behind.
