‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

In today’s post-truth world, language has been weaponised. And, as Humpty rightly observed, some words can be made more powerful by redefining their meaning to control our thoughts.

For example, the American Civil Liberties Union recently celebrated International Men’s Day by proclaiming its support for ‘men who get their periods’ and men ‘who get pregnant and give birth’. This venerable organisation used this annual awareness event to redefine what a ‘man’ is, asserting ‘There’s no one way to be a man’. Who knew?

What criteria the ACLU uses to determine who is and who isn’t a man is unclear. Patently, its assertions are scientifically false, but, as the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland observed, ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast’.

Today, Marxist White Queens are ubiquitous, all busy re-educating us into believing impossible things are true. And, if not us, our children.

They use positive-sounding words calculated to disarm. Words like ‘progressive’, ‘indigenous’, ‘socially responsible’, ‘inclusion’, ‘equity’ and ‘fairness’. They identify others as so powerful they can cause instant distress and need ‘trigger warnings’ before use. When looking to blame, words like ‘capitalism’ and ‘climate change’ are first resorts.

So the Tiananmen Square massacre was not a brutal communist crackdown, but a capitalist-inspired fictitious narrative. Venezuela’s epic humanitarian and economic disaster was due, not to the collapse of its internationally-acclaimed model of ‘21st Century Socialism’ but to free markets in oil and American sanctions. Arch-capitalist Donald Trump’s election as US president, reflects not the will of the American people but collusion with the Russians.

Australia’s bushfires are not the result of forest mis-management and prolonged dry weather, but global warming due to human CO2 emissions. It matters little if 8,000 years of Greenland ice core data reveals that carbon dioxide does not drive temperatures or that models intended to prove such a correlation don’t work.

Only in a post-truth world, could a troubled 16-year-old schoolgirl truant suddenly become a leading authority on climate change and Time magazine’s Person of the Year. The woke ABC applauds ‘The kids are right. The world is now dangerously close to tipping points… This is a climate emergency. That’s the message from scientists writing in Nature…’.

But why should Nature magazine be taken as an authority? It published a peer-reviewed article saying, ‘There are no corals at this place’, yet, recent filmed evidence shows them in abundance. Nature magazine also published a major scientific paper claiming rapid warming in the oceans is due to man. The paper had to be withdrawn after an amateur climate scientist found major errors in its statistical methodology.

But so oppressive is the climate change cult that rather than lose social credit points most find it easier to go with the flow.

Australian author Bruce Pascoe, who has more trouble tracing his aboriginal roots than Elizabeth Warren has proving hers to Pocahontas, convinced the national broadcaster he’s the real deal. The ABC favours his progressive narrative that Aborigines were farmers in ‘towns’ of one thousand people complete with pens for animals and where ‘the whispering of whirring grain mills made a captivating sound’, to what the early explorers actually wrote. Already Mr Pascoe’s intuition has won him many honours, including the 2016 NSW Premier’s Prize for best indigenous author. The ABC plans a two-part documentary to be shown in schools, so children can learn what the lived experience of the early explorers and settlers clearly missed.

Unless it fits the prescribed narrative, economics too can be stood on its head. Reckless central bank intervention, and unprecedented levels of government, business and household debt are nothing to worry about. Emerging market debt which has risen 54 per cent to US$55 trillion in a decade, is simply business as usual. Cutting interest rates at a time of full employment is indicative of a robust economy.

But then free-market capitalism is an out-dated concept, deserving of scorn, while Karl Marx, who recently celebrated his 200th birthday, is avant-garde. It is right to hobble business with harsher penalties and increasing red tape. Indeed, according to Marxist doctrine, business should concentrate on political and nebulous corporate social responsibilities, not profits. In this post-capitalist world, equity and fairness are priorities which only big-government can achieve. Jobs and growth are a given — until they aren’t.

No one wants to be a Humpty Dumpty and fall off the wall, so modern business leaders spend their time appeasing their regulatory masters during the year and shareholders at annual meetings. They choose virtuous words as carefully as a teenager chooses clothes for a formal. They look to the collective for approval. It is, as Ayn Rand feared, ‘in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing’.

Perhaps the bounties delivered by Western civilisation and free market capitalism have dulled the senses and allowed alchemists to take control? In our complacency we have descended into an Alice in Wonderland world of suspended beliefs and values. Where facts and learned experience count for little unless they conform to today’s deluded script. To quote George Orwell, ‘Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it’. But a world that worships the wisdom of a 16-year- old and is built on fiction, is neither more intelligent nor wiser and will one day be mugged by reality.

Let’s hope all the kings horses and all the kings men can put things together again.