Edulcoration: Trying to make something look good by referring to it with good-sounding terms.
Edulcoration refers to the accurate choice of good-sounding wording to refer to proposals that are useful to the elites.
Whenever institutions and corporations need to convince people to agree with potentially harmful or disempowering ideas/practices/technologies, they carefully avoid referring to it with anything that might suggest their negative impact and instead resort to terms with a vaguely similar meaning but are strongly positively charged, often alluding to vastly agreed-upon ethical values.
Typical examples of this operation:
"centralization" becomes "union"
"control" becomes "safety"
"expropriation" becomes "sharing"
"imposition" becomes "duty"
"intrusion" becomes "transparency"
"obedience" becomes "responsibility"
"propaganda" becomes "information"
"subversion" becomes "progress"
"technocracy" becomes "technology"
and so on...
Vilification: Trying to make something look bad by referring to it with bad-sounding terms.
The opposite variant of edulcoration, it refers to the accurate choice of bad-sounding wording to refer to ideas that are inconvenient for the elites.
Whenever institutions and corporations need to convince people to disagree with potentially liberatory or empowering ideas/practices/technologies, they carefully avoid referring to it with anything that might suggest their positive impact and instead resort to terms with a vaguely similar meaning but are strongly negatively charged, often alluding to generally despised moral disvalues.
Typical examples of this operation:
"autonomy" becomes "selfishness"
"criticism" becomes "hate-speech"
"democracy" becomes "populism"
"freedom" becomes "degeneracy"
"indipendence" becomes "division"
"inquiry" becomes "conspirationism"
"free-thought" becomes "disinformation"
"rights" becomes "privileges"
"skepticism" becomes "denialism"
and so on...