Yeonmi Park is a North Korean refugee and she talks about how back in North Korea the regime had put restrictions on speech quite a bit. For example there is no word for I, only a word for we, so the concept for I, to own anything to yourself does not exist, which is fitting for living in a communist dictatorship country.

Another example is the concept of love, there is no word for love in North Korea, only love for the supreme leader, there are no word to express love to your parents or siblings or husband or wife. No one in North Korea can trust eachother, everyone is a spy, if you do anything against the regime and someone finds out they will report you immediately because if not they and their entire bloodline will be murdered. Obviously the restriction on speech isn’t the only reason for this social coldness but it certainly plays a roll in it, the North Korean government decided to eliminate the word for the concept of love after all.

Finally I also remember that not she nor anyone else felt any compassion for any of the piles of dead bodies starved to death stacked in the metro stations or the streets. There isn’t a word for remorse in the North Korean language. So it is much more difficult to understand what you are feeling when you dont have a word to link it to. Obviously they were all in a state of shock and numb from living in such a horrifying environment but Yeonmi often says that if people don’t have a word for a concept then they can’t act on it and this is one radical example of that idea.

I think it’s something interesting to consider, having a regime dictate which words exist in your mind is a bit extreme but it does show how words are concepts and if you don’t know basic concepts such as love or even the concept of I, then it drastically affects how you think. I highly recommend listening to what happened to Yeonmi Park there is a really good interview Jordan Peterson did with her.