Quote:
Originally Posted by yossarian  You can't control people's opinions by changing language.
Darkwork* will always have a negative stigma to the uneducated no matter what you call it. Society has always considered it immoral to put your own interests above the interests of society.
*aka evil, sinful, bad, wrong, narcissitic, egotistical, ungenerous, immoral, wicked, devilry, satanic, left-hand-path, vamachara, selfwork, selfishness, negative polarity, service-to-self orientation |
You make a good point; if you just said the arrangement of letters that makes up "negative" had its position swapped with "positive", there would still be some stigma attached.
However, "darkworking" is a new word. To say darkworkers are evil gives a false impression: evil has connotations of objective morality, that somehow it's "wrong", etc. To use the term "evil" without further qualification then communicates those connotations. "Darkworking" is a new term, and so is free of such associations.
What I'm trying to get at here: the concepts of lightworking and darkworking are tightly bound. To understand one, you have to have an idea of its opposite. If you just used the word "good" and "evil", it would be far too easy to just dismiss the ideas without understanding them: we all know what evil is, right? I want to be good! By using the term darkwork as an opposite and equal word to lightwork, we challenge such perceptions. Sure, conscious people will already understand the nature of evil, but using the term "darkwork" means that less-than-conscious people (i.e. the vast majority of us) will not just be able to dismiss the concept out-of-hand.
The words themselves challenge our perceptions. I think the entire post could have been condensed to that last sentence.