Shooting Ourselves In The Semantics

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



I cringe every single time I hear people vehemently arguing over whether our public deficit is good or bad.

At the start of debate, wouldn't it help to at least jointly define the terms being used?

The present debate is useless for our 315 million citizens, precisely because there are too many examples of self-defeating Semantics displayed, in front of too many diverse audiences, all used to their local and discipline-specific jargons.

We can never catch up in the task of recruiting enough of our 315 million (and growing) people - in thousands of distinct and diverging sub-audiences - to adequate situational awareness ... until we AT LEAST cease, forever, calling self-investment a "deficit" in fiat.

What the hell does a deficit in fiat even mean? (And yes, policy arguments are full of other examples of broken semantics. This isn't the only one.) Best I can come up with is that it means a deficit in Public Initiative. We can digress from that point, but in doing so we may as well discuss how many pinheads can dance on an angel.

Meanwhile, this is rather like converting Priests to be atheists, by constantly telling them there is no God, there is no Devil, there is no Heaven, and that they won't go to Hell.

At the end of the day, all you've done is reinforce the exact, limiting concepts you want them to get past, and free themselves from.

Semantics and propaganda: Every word you utter INSTANTLY triggers an emotional impact in audience members, long BEFORE the concept delivered by the full sentence is even partially, let alone fully parsed, eventually, after some subsequent thought (aka, extended neural processing). There are diverse circuit latencies in the human brain. Their latencies range from fast, for ancient, underlying, hardwired circuits, to slow, for those conveying associative learning, including indirect pattern recognition - the kind it takes to traverse unpredictably changing contexts. Live with it, or see your group dynamics fail.

Broken semantics is like running in quicksand. It's self-defeating. Long before the neocortex engages to consider new concepts, you may have - by sloppy word selection - mobilized the brainstem emotional circuits to fully oppose the logical explorations you ostensibly desire.

That condition is the simple price we pay for having a lean vocabulary and language structure that lowers our adaptive burden by easily adjusting word meanings for altered contexts. Call it slang, jargon or whatever you want. The words we use ALWAYS have context-specific connotations that change as fast as local contexts do, and we ALWAYS have different people steeped in different, local contexts which dominate their instant perceived implications of words and phrases which are not yet logically interpreted as a complete sentence - or more. That's the basis of oratory, semantics, politics, sophistry and propaganda.

What part of shooting ourselves in the semantics don't we understand?

If you want people to explore new options sooner, quit referring to the old impediments in the very words you use for the new recommendation! Refer ONLY to the new, CONSENSUS Desired Options that embrace and extend all local contexts, so that people can engage their brains WITHOUT actively recruited prejudices in the form of past baggage.

If carefully practiced, appealing to some form of "a more perfect union" usually does the trick, since the return-on-coordination it triggers always swamps all other returns. Yet people appreciate that ONLY if your semantics and wording doesn't recruit their old gut reactions to oppose the purely local costs they'll think of. The difference between triggering a cooperative "win-win" versus a hyper-competitive "lose-lose" response in different audiences is entirely dependent upon how carefully you choose your words to entice them all WITHOUT triggering their social auto-immune responses.

If you're are NOT careful, you can easily end up triggering a Cultural_Auto_Immune_Social_Disease.

When herding cats ... or humans, it helps to know your audience. How difficult it is to entice a given audience depends on how much practice they've recently had at coordination, and at benefiting from it.

If you start talking to Russians right off the bat about the benefits of cooperating ... it's a lost cause. That is NOT in their recent, cultural DNA.

Similarly, if you start talking to Jane and Joe Sixpack in the USA, and open with something about increasing the deficit ... you've already shot the conversation in the semantics. You'd make faster progress by trashing moms, apple pie, pick-up trucks and country music before asking for cooperation. Don't expect a warm welcome with either approach.

How's this for a pick-up line?

Hey, Bay_bee, yer mom's apple pie stinks - & yer dad's truck too!
                    How 'bout a date? :(

Yeah, that might work for some rebels, but do you really want to limit your message to that audience alone?

Depends on whether you just want to be RIGHT, or actually make your country successful.