Aristotle himself advised us to distinguish between two categories of humans: honest ones and dishonest ones. For him, honesty was defined by knowing what you were talking about. That meant that an honest person talked about issues, rather than just emotions he had when thinking of something. Before indulging himself in emotions, an honest person defines what he is talking about. He distinguishes between knowledge and opinion.
Today, a closer look at people in politics, economy and culture often reveals that they prostitute themselves unscrupulously with the waste of their cerebral cortex. They expand on emotions while at the same time professing to talk about the issue itself. However, they are not saying anything on the issue. More than a few politicians, economic leaders and cultural figures seem to act according to the motto: “Why burden myself with knowledge, since I already have an opinion?”
Why is that possible without us sufficiently noticing it? Ever since George Edward Moore developed his emotivism in ethics in 1903, we have paid lip-service to an ethics of inclinations. Since Moore it is ethically correct for people to do what feels good to them. Instead of asking of what they do is also nice, more than a few find this perfectly acceptable. This emotional porridge is largely responsible for our dishonesty when we speak and act. The second aspect is the inclination towards an ethics of pleasure. If their attitude is honest, many people no longer ask if they combine their attitude with the competent behaviour that should go with it. What we get is a fatal pairing of pure conscience and incompetence. I am causing trouble and even feeling well doing so. Thirdly, we have developed a culture of feeling sympathetic in order to calm our conscience. To some people, it makes more sense to join chains of marching lights than actually do something. Some people feel more pity for the misery in Africa than for the misery of their neighbours. Thus, we suffer from love for who is far away; while there is no place for love for the neighbour next door. To me, these seem to be the basic, general characteristics of our new dishonesty.
What remained unattended are the meanings of our socially important terms. Be it democracy, social justice or freedom, all those terms cause emotions that are not backed by knowledge about the meaning of the words. The most important words of our society are thus no longer defined by their semantic, but only by their emotional meaning. Consequently, semantic crimes and incompetent actions prevail, both of which we hardly notice any more. Let me give a few examples taken from how words are used in our society.
Politicians talk about freedom while depriving us of it by seeing to it that the state carries more and more responsibility for our well-being. The fact that our state goes bankrupt in the process is apparently irrelevant. I used to believe that freedom means you can take responsibility for your own life, rather than someone else telling you how to do so.
Politicians and unionists demand social justice and forget that justice is the firm belief that everybody should have what is his due. Nobody seems to notice any more that the adjective “social” runs contrary to exactly this firm belief. Thus, we have more “social palaver” than social justice. Economic Nobel price winner professor A. F. Hayek called adjectives like »social« weasel words. They are characterized by making the meaning of a word vague and giving it a new direction that no longer has anything to do with the original noun. According to John Rawls, social justice is a principle that is supposed to regulate the relationship between basic freedoms, social and economic discrepancies, unequal chances, restriction of basic rights and consumption limitations for those who are least privileged. The problem is: how to determine who belongs to the group of least privileged and where is the upper limit? And here comes a last remark on the semantic meaning of social justice: to this day, nobody has come up with a valid and universally accepted definition of social justice. Everybody uses the term very emotionally for their own goals, forgetting that social justice was invented by the ancient Greeks in order to fight jealousy. In those days, the fight was lost, the method was subsequently abandoned.
Something similar to social justice can be perceived in the use of the word democracy. We believe democracy to be the best of all governmental concepts and deny that this invention of the ancient Greeks, “democracy”, by the very roots of its morphology “demos” implied that it was a strong rule of the upper classes. Besides, it was only developed as an interim between two government systems. The ancient Greeks believed that an entire people should never be permitted to rule loner than absolutely necessary.
At the same time, we today mentally associate the term democracy with liberalism. Apparently, we no longer even notice that democracy and liberalism contradict each other. Liberalism always wants as much freedom as possible and will only tolerate as little force as is absolutely necessary. That means that democracy and liberalism are basically two different issues. Our mental association of the two has become so self-evident that we no longer think about the meaning of the words. We cannot imagine them separately. Seen with a critical mind, much of what we consider undemocratic is merely illiberal. Moreover, we have forgotten that freedom and equality contradict each other in a liberal democracy. It is all a polar opposite. All forms of equalization at the same time trims all forms of freedom. We are not similar. The vagueness about the semantic meaning of the word democracy eventually also causes our inability to critically ask if our constitution is upheld in our democracy. Actually, our constitution does not say anything about political parties being part of the government. All it says in the constitution is: “The parties are concerned with forming public political opinions”. It says nothing about ruling. That means the forcing members of the party to vote unanimously is basically unconstitutional. To be sure, nobody cares, but it is still unconstitutional.
And then the populist parties are surprised at the people starting to refuse them their vote. Before talking about democracy, our politicians would be well advised to learn what the term democracy means.
Unfortunately, our heads of economy are no better. The economy fights for a system where the principle of achievement should dominate, but it forgets that the achievement principle is an ideal type of socially oriented payment demanded and introduced by Karl Marx. In it, market and usefulness pay no role. The achievement principle is a concept where the employee is shown appreciation according to his achievement. An employee’s achievement is either measured by the extent to which he delivers what has been set as goals for him or the amount of work done in a certain time. That sounds pretty clear! But is achievement really the basis for our salary?
In former times, it used to be quite simple: if you wanted to work, you advertised yourself on the employment market. Your work got a market value relative to the work of others. This work was then bought by directors on the employment market. They did that because they believed your work would be beneficial to them. Work had a value by its usefulness. If the usefulness increased, the employee got a higher salary, because it was possible to hand some of the increased usefulness down to him. If the usefulness decreased, the director no longer wanted the work, so the employee was made redundant. The principle was that you got paid according to your market value and usefulness. To this day, the determining factor for how much your salary should be is the usefulness the director expects from your work! So it is the usefulness, rather than the value of the work, that determines what your work is worth. That means that, even though it is highly emotional, it is semantically incorrect to demand the achievement principle as a capitalist method of payment.
As the examples show, it is high time to demand semantic honesty. We should start talking about the issues themselves, rather than just the emotions triggered by certain words. It is worth the effort. Otherwise we would have to say Bernhard Shaw was correct when he said: Some people are only prepared to die for issues if they are sufficiently unclear to them.
UDP (translated by Evelyn Gemkow)
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