At the risk of being rude, I’ll ask you to reread the bit that I quoted. It reads very much like a description of how an intelligent agent might consciously manipulate the entire system of language. It doesn’t sound figurative at all to me.Edited to add: what you said—essentially, that true conspiracies are rare and that confluence of interests can often give the appearance of conspiracy—is something I wholeheartedly agree with. I commented because in this case it sounds like the author is claiming the existence of a rather implausible large-scale conspiracy.

Not everything has to be purposefully designed by a conspiracy. Just picked up and used to the benefit of domination structures. These structures can well run independent from each other but find and employ the same mechanisms, narratives being a central one.Nothing in the book suggests it’s one coordinated “cabal“.

&gt;You can control people’s minds to a large extent by the language you put in their heads. So, it’s very important that some of the first words you want to get people to hear are the words good, bad, right, wrong, normal, abnormal, should, shouldn’t, have to, and can’t. If you want people to be controllable by authority, the key unit of education is language.So, what--there is a cabal of ultra-powerful sociopathic geniuses that design the language used by lesser mortals? That seems highly implausible.

First you need to teach people a language of domination