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.

Avoiding Cultural_Auto_Immune_Social_Diseases

 (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Bill Mitchell dredges up the proverbial question ... begging a non-ideological answer.
If we can mobilize to consensus outcomes imposed from the outside ... then what keeps us from mobilizing to SELECT better/faster/leaner Desired Group Outcomes all the time?

If you can have full employment killing Germans …

At the weekend I watched Ken Loach’s latest film (documentary) – The Spirit of ’45 – which was a classic – interesting and disturbing. After watching it I cannot understand how anybody could not achieve a score somewhere well into the south-west quadrant of the – Political Compass. It emphasised how societal values have changed and undermined the collective will that emerged in the early Post World War 2 period which garnered the political process into delivering structures that would never again see the mass unemployment and hardship that the Great Depression created. It was a hopeful period and politicians reflected that hope and acted as a mediating force in the underlying class conflict between workers and capital. The film traces how that “spirit” has broken down and what is required to once again make economies work for people rather than subjugating the needs of people to the economy – which really means allowing a small proportion of people to extract the benefits arising from the hard work of the rest of us. The film influenced today’s blog.

The title of today’s blog comes from an oft-stated piece of wisdom from former British politician – Tony Benn. He regularly noted that if you can have full employment killing Germans why can’t you have it doing other socially useful activities.

Tony Benn was a champion for Britain’s national health scheme, which was introduced during Clement Atlee’s Prime Ministership. US film maker, Michael Moore interviewed Benn for his movie Sicko and to get things off on a good footing today, here is the interview.

Tony Benn also said he became more radical the longer he spent time as a Government minister. Please read my blog – One should become more radical as one grows older – for a twist on that theme.

Tony Benn was also interviewed by – PBS – (October 17, 2000) and was asked whether the Great Depression led to a “huge loss of faith in markets and governments”, to which he replied:

Well, before the Great Depression, the gamblers ran capitalism and brought the economies down. And what happened? The war followed the Great Depression. In war you mobilize everything. Governments tore down the railings in Britain and America to make bullets. They rationed food, they conscripted people, and they sent them to die. The state took over. And after the war people said, “If you can plan for war, why can’t you plan for peace?” When I was 17, I had a letter from the government saying, “Dear Mr. Benn, will you turn up when you’re 17 1/2? We’ll give you free food, free clothes, free training, free accommodation, and two shillings, ten pence a day to just kill Germans.” People said, well, if you can have full employment to kill people, why in God’s name couldn’t you have full employment and good schools, good hospitals, good houses? And the answer was that you can’t do it if you allow [overly local definitions of] profit to take precedent over people. And that was the basis of the New Deal in America and of the postwar Labor government in Great Britain and so on.

The sentiment expressed here was a major theme of Ken Loach’s current film and clearly is a compelling narrative for those who do not see the economy as a separable, natural entity from the people and the natural environment.

                                         ***
Lots to think about here.

"[In 1941] A local bank provided him with the necessary working capital and thus made possible the founding of Henry J. Kaiser Company, Ltd."

My how times have changed!
Today, banks "doing God's work" focus more on screwing their customers, and their communities, and whole municipalities, and the US Middle Class, and even foreign nations ... all with the active complicity of OUR supposed Public Servants. Oh, and we spy on anyone and everyone, ALL THE TIME!

Would it hurt to just get back to being VERY SELECTIVE about which, simplest choices increase our collective Adaptive Rate the most? Then maybe we could PREVENT ourselves from combating each others efforts so often, and battling ourselves so much. Just let easy happen ... instead of mobilizing to fight ourselves? 

How about we put some thought into selecting those things which make it harder for citizens to work in opposition to one another? Sure we need a cultural immune system, to protect ourselves from other agents blundering into harming us. At the same time, our cultural immune response has to be selective enough to avoid Cultural_Auto_Immune_Social_Diseases. That only holds to reason. So lets just use some of our vaunted reason.