If you want to know what a society truly worships, don’t look at its monuments or its mission statements. Look at its forbidden words. Every civilization in history has had verbal landmines that trigger disgust, fear, or punishment, and the content of those taboos is never random. Forbidden words always reveal what a culture considers sacred, and when those taboos shift, it means the civilization has rearranged its moral furniture. We’re living through one of those shifts right now, and the change is far deeper than most people realize.
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How the West’s Taboo Center Drifted: Sacred to Hygiene to Identity
As religious authority weakened, the taboo center drifted. The West moved from sacred purity to hygiene purity, a worldview based on bodily cleanliness, public decency, and the belief that sexual and excretory words were polluting. Victorian propriety, Comstock laws, and social purity movements all fused sex, cleanliness, and morality. Language about sex or bodily waste became the new blasphemy.
This is the world George Carlin walked into in 1972 with his famous bit, “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television.” This is, of course, extraordinarily NSFW, but it’s also really funny.
The list wasn’t a personal ranking of offensiveness. It came straight from FCC obscenity standards, the last stronghold of hygiene-era morality. The FCC was terrified of bodily filth and sexual explicitness; they believed these words polluted the public sphere and eroded the social order. Carlin wasn’t mocking random prudishness; he was mocking a moral system obsessed with physical and sexual cleanliness.
Moreover, not one racial slur appeared on his list. That wasn’t because Carlin himself refused to say them. He used the N-word explicitly in other routines when analyzing racism and linguistic intent. The omission wasn’t personal morality; it was structural. Slurs were not part of the FCC’s regulatory framework. They weren’t considered “obscene.” They weren’t legally banned. In 1972, the cultural guardians of decency were still preoccupied with hygiene purity — sex, filth, indecency — not identity.
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Today, half of Carlin’s list shows up on Netflix teen programming without anyone blinking. Sexual obscenity no longer carries the moral weight it once did. Bodily terms are treated as crude but harmless. Blasphemy barely registers. The hygiene era is dying, and into that vacuum has moved something entirely new: identity purity.
The Modern Blasphemy Code: What Gets You Destroyed Today
The easiest way to identify a culture’s sacred center is to ask which words destroy people instantly. Not hypothetically, but in practice. What language ends careers on contact? It’s not profanity. It’s not explicit sexual language. It’s not taking God’s name in vain. You can insult the nation, the military, the Founders, or the faith traditions of millions and be rewarded with a book deal.
But say a single racial slur or a slur targeting a protected gender or sexual identity, even once, years ago, in a quote, or in a private message, and your life detonates. {snip}
These are treated not as insults, but as acts of blasphemy against the moral framework that undergirds our institutions. Identity is the new sacred, and slurs against protected identities function as violations of the holy.
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What Our New Taboos Protect
Taboos always protect the sacred. The question is simply: what is the sacred now? We used to protect the transcendent order: God, oaths, ancestors, the family line. Then we protected public decency and bodily purity. Now we protect identity categories and victimhood status.
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