Why I Like The BFD
In many animal species, the marker of domestication is an increase in the number of visible spots or white patches on their outer coat.
Obviously, this doesn’t apply to every species with a spotted coat. Only an idiot would think a jaguar might make a good pet (after all, they have black spots, not white). And in my experience, gorgeous redheads with freckles are anything but docile. But the way humans display traits of domestication is in culture and language.
When Rome conquered Gaul, for example, Latin became the root for modern French and radically changed the local language over time, as it did for the Spanish, English, Portuguese, Romanian and Italian languages (the five major “Romance” languages).
Domestication is a bizarre thing. When a dog looks up at you, wagging its tail and looking overjoyed to see its master, you are being deceived. Dogs aren’t happy to be our pets. They have been bred over thousands of years through artificial selection to display a simulation of appearing happy to be our pets. This framing is hard to hear, I get that, but domesticated dogs are brain-damaged. They don’t even know why they’re wagging their tails. Yes, that’s a metaphor.
Language is an important component of human domestication because thinking with another culture’s words will inevitably lead to thinking like that culture. There’s no way around this. The outside influence will bleed over into your fantasies, aspirations, hatred, deference, spirituality and everything else until your mental coat is covered in spots.
That’s what initialisms are. They are the spots that point to the location of a master.
In the US, initialisms are a core part of the culture. The reason for this is that the US is run by the merchant class (as opposed to the priestly and soldier classes) so its entire structure revolves around categories, line items, spreadsheets and, of course, the good old US dollar, or should I say “USD.”
A culture dominated by the merchant class cares nothing for the aesthetics or practicality of an object, institution or system. It only cares about utility. Nothing in such a culture needs to be beautiful because beauty doesn’t fit anywhere on a spreadsheet.
Initialisms are the linguistic tool of a merchant class culture that not only refuses to think about the future (beyond perhaps 80 or so years), it cannot think about the future. To such a culture, the past is just a loot box to plunder for more things to commodify. The present is all that matters for the American.
The British were the first to use initialisms. For example, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was founded in 1922. But the Anglo-American empire was always more American than Anglo, and so the use of initialisms became an American-led cultural dynamic, not a British one, after the two conquered Europe in 1945 and then the world in 1990.
While Washington calls the shots in this “special relationship,” the US is still trapped inside the framework of the English language. Over time, it will probably develop its own language (should its empire last), but right now, the US can psychologically extract itself from this trap in little ways like using “z” instead of “s.” But a proto-language based on initialisms is already emerging.
Initialisms are a coded signal that you are dealing with something controlled by Washington, not London. More specifically, that Harvard and Stanford provide the intellectual foundation for a concept, not Oxford or Cambridge. Second-tier American universities have adopted initialisms (UCLA, MIT, etc) instead of names. The “UK” only came into common use after WWII (also an initialism) while the “US” was in common use since the turn of the 20th century.
The use of initialisms as a language base has a strange logic to it. Where the British called a class of warship the “ship-of-the-line,” the Americans might have called it a “broadside cannon carrack” – a “BCC” – or perhaps stuck with “SOTL.” American initialism has a German ring to it, which makes sense given how many Germans immigrated to the US. In German, if you want to know the name of something, just describe what you are seeing, and that’s the name. That’s how initialisms work.
New Zealand’s navy has multiple ship types that straddle the Venn diagram between the Age of British Imperialism and Anglo-American Imperialism. For example, we have two ships called “frigates,” which is a name that comes from the 17th-century naval nomenclature. But we also have two “offshore patrol vessels” (OPVs), which were developed in the early 2000s (in Australia).
And whereas the British would have said the role of a navy is to patrol its “territorial waters,” the OPV was equipped to monitor New Zealand’s EEZ (exclusive economic zone) using its GPS (global positioning system) and SART (search and rescue transponder) while following the IRPCS (International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea). Initialisms everywhere.
Acronyms (initialisms that you can pronounce using the rules of English, like NASA or AIDS) are not the same as initialisms. They are far worse. The use of acronyms reinforces the rule of the Anglo-American empire over your brain by forcing you to use the initialism as a real word. It’s not the real world. It is a series of words that signify only intellectual laziness and ugliness.
By seeing initialisms as the linguistic marker of an empire, a lot of things make sense. For example, every “revolution” in a tin-pot country is almost guaranteed to be led by an initialism-wielding group of rebels. I mean, look at them all. Most of these groups have a few keywords in common. Can you guess which these are?
It would be a fun exercise to trace the funding for these “revolutionary” groups. I suspect only a few would have truly grassroots beginnings. The rest will have well-hidden puppet strings leading back to one of the “alphabet” intelligence agencies in the US of A.
However, searching for CIA funding is a fool’s errand. The connections are certainly there; make no mistake about that. But to figure out who is pulling the strings, all you really need to ask is if Harvard ever spoke negatively about an initialism’d “revolutionary” group. If it didn’t, then you have your answer. Policy flows downhill, and at the top of the mountain sits Harvard.
Another interesting experiment would be to compare the number of initialisms used by the US government with the number used by the Chinese government. My suspicion is that Beijing uses fewer because of the mechanics of Mandarin. But then I’ve seen many initialisms used by the Chinese government, so I’m not sure what such an experiment might show.
But there is another semiotic marker for gauging the domestication of the Chinese government. That marker is the two-piece business suit. Sartorial signals are just as powerful as linguistic signals. What a person wears to formal meetings, high-class events, or photo-ops tells you a lot.
Are you worried about China “taking over the world”? Well, check what clothing the CCP leaders wear. Is the two-piece suit a Chinese invention or a British invention? (As an aside, it’s worth asking about the recent trend to wear a suit but not the tie. Is the tie-less suit the sartorial version of the initialism, another display of American power over Britain? I suspect it is.)
Under this model, what can we make of the Saudis?
The Saudi Arabian leadership rarely wears a two-piece suit to any occasion, formal or casual. Instead, they wear a thwab, a bisht and a kufiyah. Maybe it’s the heat? Or, perhaps, having a stranglehold on the lifeblood of the world economy offers Saudi Arabia a significant amount of practical power, and therefore a sense of cultural confidence. But notice that no one else wears Saudi fashion.
Of course, domestication isn’t all that bad. Being in a state of nature, wild and free, can be an existentially terrifying experience. Far easier to wear the clothing and adopt the language of your masters, even if it means the world becomes uglier, less imaginative, grey and more close-minded.
That’s why I like the BFD. The initialism doesn’t mean anything. Its existence mocks the Ivy League, and aristocrats hate insults. Only the feral can get away with biting the hand that feeds. The domesticated don’t even know they’re domesticated; they just wag their tails like robots.