ひろゆきから始める言語哲学 #478

Distance on the Battlefield Erodes Resistance to Killing

Continuing from the previous episode, the hosts draw on Dave Grossman's *On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society*. In World War II only about 20 percent of soldiers actually fired their weapons; by the Vietnam War that figure had risen sharply, partly because of conditioning-based training. Beyond training, Grossman identifies four kinds of 'distance' that erode the psychological resistance to killing.

**Cultural distance** means emphasizing racial or ethnic difference so that enemies are perceived as fundamentally unlike oneself. **Moral distance** means instilling the belief that one is the righteous party administering just punishment—which is also why defenders of their own soil tend to have an advantage. **Social distance** means categorizing a group as subhuman. **Mechanical distance** means using night-vision equipment or screens that hide the enemy's face, making it harder to register their humanity. One host drew a laugh by noting that his own habit of pushing harder in price negotiations over Zoom is a self-diagnosed case of mechanical distance.

The Rwandan Genocide—How Language Remade the World in Three Stages

Drawing on a paper by a philosopher of language who studied the 1994 Rwandan civil war, the hosts explain how language made mass murder possible. After independence from Belgium in 1962, tension persisted between the minority Tutsi, who had been the ruling class under colonial administration, and the majority Hutu. Language operated in three stages.

**Stage 1: Labeling.** What had originally been a fluid distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was linguistically fixed as a difference between two separate ethnic groups, then allowed to permeate society over forty years. The hosts compared it to spending forty years insisting that people from the Kansai and Kanto regions of Japan are different races.

**Stage 2: Dehumanizing metaphors.** Expressions calling Tutsi 'cockroaches' (*inyenzi*) and 'snakes' spread widely. The conventional image of cockroaches as creatures that swarm at night and multiply rapidly fused with the image of Tutsi 'appearing from all over in the dark,' framing them as vermin to be exterminated.

**Stage 3: Euphemistic incitement.** The genocide was called for with phrases like 'let's exterminate the cockroaches'—never the direct word 'kill'—which lowered the psychological threshold for action. The hosts noted structural parallels with the post-French Revolution slogan 'string them up on the lampposts' and with the Aum Shinrikyo term *poa*, a euphemism the cult used for killing. Rwanda's Tutsi were also associated with a coming-of-age ritual in which a boy cuts off a snake's head; combined with the 'Tutsi are snakes' metaphor, this made atrocities easier to carry out. The episode also mentioned that the same structure appeared in Japan during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when rumors that 'foreigners poisoned the wells' spread and triggered violence.

Austin's Speech Act Theory—Language Does Not 'Describe'

This section opens the episode's underlying theme: speech act theory. The dominant view in early twentieth-century logical positivism held that sentences describe facts about the world and can be judged true or false. But daily life is full of utterances—apologies, namings, promises, oaths—that cannot be evaluated that way.

J. L. Austin reconceived these as 'utterances = acts' and founded speech act theory. When someone says 'I name this ship the *Elizabeth*,' the physical world does not change, but social reality does. An apology is not a description of a mental state but an act performed by the words themselves. The hosts explained this with a Doraemon analogy: just as the 'Copy Crayon' gadget makes reality conform to the drawing rather than the other way around, language does not capture reality—it remakes it. They illustrated the idea with personal anecdotes: Mizuno (水野) has been told he resembles the Tibetan sand fox and now apparently does; Horimoto (堀本) was nicknamed 'Nasu' (eggplant) and subsequently started wearing purple.

Hiroyuki's Remark and a Pre-Austinian View of Language

The hosts turn to Hiroyuki's well-known line: 'Message boards are difficult to use unless you are someone who can spot a lie when it's a lie.' The assumption embedded in this statement is a view of language as neutral, with responsibility resting entirely on the receiver's ability to detect falsehoods. Under this view, a liar has merely 'said something that does not correspond to reality' and bears no further accountability.

In Austin's speech act theory, however, the lying utterance itself is already an act that has reshaped the world—the effect is complete before anyone has a chance to detect it. The introduction of community notes on social media as a countermeasure to misinformation was read as evidence that platforms have in practice shifted to an Austinian worldview. The 'personal opinion' disclaimer on green-juice commercials, and the move of calling an investment recommendation 'merely expressing a personal view,' were both identified as attempts to evade responsibility for the performative force of speech—attempts that speech act theory exposes as insufficient. The episode's thirty-minute message is this: if words are acts, then every utterance, however trivial, carries responsibility.