Accordingly, this is additional evidence that nonsense interacts dynamically with meaningful language. That is, nonsense sometimes acts synergistically with meaningful language to produce enhanced, combined effects. For instance, earlier we saw that this effect occurs in nursery rhymes like “Hickory Dickory Dock.” The nonsense line is placed at the beginning and end, and when the nursery rhyme is recited without its nonsensical part, it falls flat. Hence, in nursery rhymes, the nonsense energizes the meaningful part. In Nostradamus’s writings, though, the meaningful prophecies energize the nonsensical ones.
Other prophets employed this same technique of mixing nonsensical and meaningful language. For example, Robert Nixon was born in England in 1467. He was an illiterate farmhand who had a habit of talking nonsense to himself as he plowed the fields. One day he suddenly stopped plowing and began giving a blow-by-blow account of a heated battle. Everyone assumed that it was a battle in his own mind that was bothering him. Later, however, the bystanders learned that a battle that matched Nixon’s description had been taking place at the same time far away. So, thereafter, Nixon was regarded as a seer. Some of his recorded prophecies are displayed below. Here we see the same interweaving of vague but meaningful prophecies with others that are nonsense.
Vague but meaningful:
A great man shall come into England,
But the son of a King
Shall take from him the victory.77
Figurative nonsense:
The cock of the North shall be made to flee,
And his feather be plucked for his pride,
That he shall almost curse the day that he was born.78
Vague but meaningful:
Through our own money and our men,
Shall a dreadful war begin.79
Non-junctive nonsense:
Between the sickle and the suck,
All England shall have a pluck.80
Numerative nonsense:
Between seven, eight, and nine,81
Numerative nonsense:
In England wonders shall be seen;
Between nine and thirteen
All sorrow shall be done!82
In an exercise, my students wrote their own nonsense prophecies after studying those of Nostradamus and Robert Nixon. Often, the students’ nonsensical prognostications were indistinguishable from those of renowned seers. Completing the exercise enabled the students to reflect on how the mind processes prophetic writings.
Totalitarian Control
Nonsense has been used for enforcing totalitarian rule. The idea of governments using nonsense to repress people is better known as a literary theme than as historical reality. George Orwell wrote two novels in which dictatorships employed nonsensical formulas for political control. In 1984, an authoritarian figure known as Big Brother indoctrinated the public with meaningless slogans such as “War is Peace,” “Love is Hate,” and “Freedom is Slavery.” The nonsensical proclamations induced a mental state known as doublethink, in which people would assent to two directly opposite and contradictory ideas at the same time. Apparently, bombarding people with nonsense numbed their minds into submission.
In Orwell’s Animal Farm, barnyard animals took over after a farmer died and instituted a government among themselves. The liberated animals’ charter for self-government began by stating, “All animals are equal.” However, pigs gradually outmaneuvered other creatures and gained political control. They amended the charter to say, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Marxist ideology, which dominated the Soviet Union for seventy years, was built partly on formulaic precepts that made no sense. For instance, the slogan “Property is theft!” —coined by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon—became a popular slogan among members of the Communist Party, yet the words of the statement simply cancel each other out in a memorable self-contradiction. That is, equating property with theft destroys the meanings of both terms. Nevertheless, the meaningless slogan resonated strongly with fiery revolutionary sentiments that were prevalent at the time.
Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy used nonsensical chants at mass rallies to promote social bonding. People would recite a chant of nonsense syllables. The chant was unintelligible nonsense, but it supposedly helped bind Fascists to their leader and to the state.
Even in free democratic societies, officials may lapse into talking nonsense when they are under pressure to downplay embarrassing bungles. For example, after a seemingly senseless attack on a village in Vietnam, the United States Army needed to explain the action. A spokesman said, “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Mock Profundity
Nonsense has been used for projecting an illusion of profundity. Some eminent intellectuals had a knack for writing nonsense that sounds profound. For example, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) started an academic craze known as deconstruction, which was based solely on nonsense definitions and obscure, meaningless verbiage. Derrida gained legions of swooning followers who were impressed by his nonsensical pronouncements such as “Thinking is what we already know we have not yet begun.”83 He laced his lectures with enigmatic nonsense like “Oh, my friends, there is no friend.”84
Professors at major American universities fell under Derrida’s spell. Graduate students wrote profound-sounding dissertations to elucidate his incoherent musings. Pretty soon, aspiring students had to master this kind of nonsense writing to get their degrees. In other words, Derrida and his followers talked nonsense as a technique of intellectual posturing.
Purportedly, deconstruction invalidated all literary, philosophical, political, and historical works. Derrida explained that such works were devoid of truth or meaning because of inherent confusions and contradictions in language. Deconstruction got caught up in its own sweeping generalization, for Derrida’s work itself is a literary, historical, and philosophical text, such as deconstruction attacks. That means that deconstruction itself is devoid of truth and meaning. In other words, deconstruction invalidated itself.
Deconstruction was based solely on nonsense definitions, and Derrida and his devotees were never able to give a coherent, meaningful definition of it. For example, he tried once again in 1993 when he lectured at a law school in New York. He said, “Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible.”85
Pseudo-profound nonsense can also be created by capitalizing abstract words and putting them together into grammatical sentences. Words like “being,” “pure,” “absolute,” “unity,” “the One,” “transcendent,” “immanent,” and “essence” work well for writing this type of profound-sounding nonsense. Throwing in phrases like “in itself” helps, too. The formula results in sentences like “Being-in-itself is the pure essence of transcendent Unity.” Or “The Absolute is immanent in pure being.” Such sentences sound profound, but the sound of profoundness is all there is to them. Hegel and Heidegger are examples of philosophers who gained fame by mastering that kind of nonsense writing.