Babbling and Language

How our way of talking about things developed.

We live in times of irresponsible babbling. As a consequence, we prostitute ourselves totally shamelessly, wasting our cerebral cortex. It is particularly obvious if you look at famous persons. And we like listening to them, because the linguistic sub-standard these famous persons display gives us a feeling of superiority without having to prove that we actually are superior.

We live in a remarkable era. We no longer distinguish between linguistic symbols and mental symbols. Consequently, we no longer fill our linguistic units with mental symbols, but with emotions.  In return, we no longer have to take any pains: instead of quality, we get sentimentalism. We no longer painfully try to find the right term as Adorno told us to. We pretend to have enjoyed a good education, but in reality, we are no longer wise or intelligent. A person is intelligent if he or she is capable of concentrating, of identifying rules and of setting priorities. Consequently, there are actually people who have enjoyed a very good education, but still they are rather stupid in terms of intelligence.

This means that intellectual honesty is currently taking a rather prolonged bath, a pronounced time-out. It is something we must not allow to continue. After all, we do have responsibility, don’t we? So let us look for answers. And let us find them.

Here is what we need to take into consideration:

• Language can heal.
• However, language can also disturb and destroy relationships.
• Language can kill.

You have to be aware of this. And you should never feel saturated when having eaten from the tree of insight! Unfortunately, however, I sometimes get the impression that the tree if insight seems to have withered.

Language can be a very powerful thing. Five words suffice for moving the world:

• En arche en ho logos (In the beginning, there was the word).
• Ceterum censeo carthaginem esse delendam.
• Nevertheless, it does move.
• Unite, proletarians of all nations.
• Do you want total war?
• Nobody wants to build a wall.
• I give you my word of honour

Language can kill. It can ruin your dignity, especially if what you judge is the people, instead of what they did. And if you functionalize humans.  If they are no longer the final destination of what we do, but a means to an end. However, it seems that, for some, dignity is only a verb in the subjunctive form.

An ethical misunderstanding

Many persons, in particular professional speakers, also known as key-note-speakers, live according to the motto: what good will wisdom do if you cannot present it wisely? You just have to say it in the right way!

Well, this might be an ethical misunderstanding.

Why not look at the core of language together? Because if you want to understand the core of something, you need to stop just poaching the periphery.

Isn’t it surprising how inaccurate our language has become? We use the same vocabulary, but hardly ever mean the concept on which these words are based. We have become linguistically incompetent to a high degree. Basically, this is easy to explain. We live in a world of languages. But not right from our birth. First, we grow up in a world of concepts, in a world where, as toddlers, we often do not know the exactly fitting words for many notions. When we are small children, we hear many words, but we do not yet know their meaning.

When a human is born, he or she cannot yet speak. But from the very moment of entering the world, they are surrounded by notions. They know exactly what a pacifier is. The only thing they do not know is how it is called. Small children learn notions very quickly, they know exactly what the essence of an object is. They know without words. Slowly, they will then later develop language, which enables them to give a name to a concept. Now they can express what they have known for a long time. Why are parents surprised if the linguistic ability of their children explodes, usually with their second year of life. Mind you: this is not witchcraft. Some of the concepts have been learned by the children a long time ago. All that was missing were the corresponding words..

Initially, children grow up with mental concepts. They only learn the linguistic symbols around the middle of their second year. Why do I point this out? There is a simple reason: during our lives, we learn so many words from the world of linguistic symbols that many persons no longer care to actually distinguish between the corresponding concepts and the mental world. Consequently, we are happy to use words the content and meaning of which is no longer clear to us. We no longer compare them with the content of these mental symbols.

Since we lost the mental concepts regardless of still knowing the words, many people seek a substitute for said mental concept. Since humans are very creative, they will soon find what they have been looking for. Instead of mental concepts, humans use their emotions as a full surrogate.

More and more often, words are filled up with emotions. Consequently, humans swim on an ocean of emotions as soon as they say anything. The more this happens, the less they will actually be interested in the actual meaning of the word.

The consequence is almost tragic, or at best comical. We no longer know what words mean, but still we use them in order to justify what we do. Why do we do this? Because it is convenient. It is a lot less strenuous talking about emotions than taking all the pain of analysing what lies behind a concept, what actually is the meaning of a word or what is its underlying concept. Such intellectual honesty is not very comfortable.

So what we actually need to do is become small children and learn to fill words with their semantically correct content, giving them meaning.

Unfortunately, however, fewer and fewer people are interested in concepts, let alone intellectual competence. They rely on their emotions, following the motto: “Why would I accumulate knowledge, since I already made up my mind, anyway”. Consequently, they talk opinions without the substance those opinions should be based on and try persuading people. This is how they infect other persons with opinions that can hardly stand up to a critical test: words free of content will become convictions, and as soon as many persons share these convictions, we conclude that they must be correct. We no longer examine them – which means that the significance of an argument, too, will be lost.

If you have ever studied philosophy, you will soon have heard that this science basically is about two questions:

• Question Number One: Why is that so?
• Question Number Two: How do you know this?

If you are an honest person, you know that all those who strive after competence in knowledge will be able to answer to these two questions.
Consequently, what we are talking here is linguistic competence. It is the basis for decision competence – and it means:

• Before you make up your mind, inform yourself about the facts.
• Ask yourself if you can actually give the definition of a word.
• Ask yourself if all you have is a feeling or if you actually know something about the situation itself.
• Only comment on things where you know and understand the meaning of the word.
• Ask back if there is something you do not know or understand.
• Be delighted if someone wants to know how you mean something or what exactly is your idea of something.

Babbling and stupid talk

Why don’t we just shut up when all has been said? Some people suffer from Logorrhoe (talking diarrhoea). One millilitre of insight is embedded in one ton of words.

Isn’t it both amazing and embarrassing that, today, important and central words of our society are used exclusively for transporting emotions? This means thinking dies, assisted by the flowery phrase.

By now, thinking has come to drown in the language.

In other words: instead of thinking, you just talk. It is important for all kinds of communication in partnerships, in enterprises, and in politics to be aware of the fact that we, today, live in a world filled with flowery phrases with which emotions are transported between places, without any semantics (meaning) or responsible symbols of thought underlying this process. .

The culture of thinking is a pre-requisite for all forms of culture

Even Aristotle recommended to divide humans into two categories: honest ones and dishonest ones. For him, the honest person was the one who actually still knew what he was talking about.  This meant that the honest person talked about the things themselves, not just about emotions he felt when thinking of something. An honest person will first tell you the nature of something, before bathing in emotions. An honest person will distinguish between knowledge and opinions.

An honest person can tell you the characteristics of a matter and its semantic content. For the ancient Greeks, it was important to first clarify what they were talking about, before they came up with a decision. The means to this end was the definition. It helps to describe the use of something in such a way that the person who understands the description will be able to tell you what it is.

As late as Adorno, we were told about the hardship of words. I am sure he had realized that we have to accept said hardship if we want to treat the socially important words with responsibility. In a pleasure society, it seems that more than a few people just consider such extra hardship a nuisance. But, mind you, it is a necessary condition if we want to come up with decisions in our society in the fields of business, politics and culture which might actually enable us to solve a problem in an appropriate and professional way.

Why are we living with this state of affairs? When George Edward Moore developed his emotivism in ethics in 1903, we had definitely arrived in the era where ethics was dominated by appetite. Since Moore, it is ethically correct and good if people feel nice when doing what they do. Quite a number of people find it sufficient, instead of asking if what they do is actually good. This emotional mush is hugely responsible for the dishonesty in our language and behaviour.

The second aspect is the affinity towards an ethics of attitude. As soon as an attitude is honest, many people no longer ask if said attitude is coupled with the corresponding behavioural competence. This is how we get an unspeakable pairing of good conscience and incompetence: I am causing misery and even feel well doing so. And to top it, we also created a shock culture that soothes our conscience. It seems to make more sense to us to take part in candle processions than to actually do something. Some people are more moved by the misery in Africa than the misery next door. This is how we suffer from love of the farthest; the love of the neighbour has dwindled. To me, it seems like these are the basic, general characteristics of a new dishonesty.

What fell victim to all these developments is the meaning of the socially important words. Be it democracy, social justice, achievement principle, freedom: all these terms trigger emotions which actually are not covered by the understanding of the meaning of these words. Thus, the most important words in our society are no longer analysed with respect to their semantic meaning, but their emotional meaning. The consequences are semantic crimes and incompetent behaviour – and hardly anybody notices. Let me illustrate this with some examples of our society.

Politicians talk freedom, yet they take away our freedom by seeing to it that the country takes more and more responsibility for our welfare. The fact that this makes our country bankrupt apparently is nobody’s concern. Mind you, I used to believe freedom means you can live your life self-determinedly, rather than being made to do things by those who take the responsibility for your life.

Thus, politicians delight in minimizing our freedom, and they restrict us with ideas such as a vegetarian Thursday, the abolishment of firsts-class compartments in trains, a strict non-smoking policy, etc.

Politicians and unions demand social justice yet they ignore that justice is the strong wish to let everybody practice their own rights. You no longer notice that the adjective “social” counteracts precisely this strong wish. Consequently, what we get is “social whispering”, instead of social justice.

The Nobel Prize Winner for Business, Professor A.F. Hayek, called adjectives such as »social« weasel-words. Their characteristic is that they undermine a term and give it a new meaning which actually no longer has anything in common with the corresponding noun.

And here is a last comment on the semantic meaning of social justice. To this day, nobody succeeded in giving a definition for social justice that is both accepted by everyone and correct. Everybody uses it very emotionally for his or her own purpose, forgetting that social justice was originally something the ancient Greeks invented. Its purpose was to fight envy. At the time, the attempt was a failure, the application of the method was terminated.

I see similarities between the usage of the words social justice and democracy. We consider democracy the best of all possible governmental concepts, yet we deny that the very word “Democracy”, as invented by the Ancient Greeks, contains a strong reign of the ’Demos’, which were the upper classes. In fact, it was exclusively invented as a form of government that was meant to bridge the gap between one governmental system and the next. The Ancient Greeks believed the people should never be permitted to reign longer than absolutely necessary. Simultaneously, we today mentally unite the ideas of democracy and liberalism.

In doing so, we totally forget that democracy and liberalism are actually two opposite sides of a coin that exclude each other. Liberalism will always want as much freedom as possible and only as much force as is absolutely necessary. Basically, democracy and liberalism are two totally different affairs. Yet the combination of the two has become such a matter of course and so dear to us that we no longer think about the meaning of the words. We can no longer imagine them separated from each other. If you take a critical look, you will discover that quite a few of the things we consider undemocratic are only illiberal.

On top of this, we forgot that, in our liberal democracy, freedom and equality actually exclude each other. They are opposites. Any form of equalization will automatically limit any form of freedom. We are not equal. The lack of clarity about the semantic meaning of the word democracy will eventually end in us no longer seeming to be able to critically judge if in our democracy our constitution is adhered to. After all, our constitution does not state that parties should govern us. It says: ’the parties are part of the people’s process of finding their political opinions’. It does not say anything about reign. Basically, this means that the whip principle is against our constitution. Well, nobody is worried by this, but still it violates our constitution.

And then the big parties are surprised about the people starting to deny them their votes. Before talking democracy, it might be a good idea for our politicians to inform themselves about the meaning of the word.

Unfortunately, our business heads are no better, either. Here is an example: the economy fights for a system where the achievement principle should dominate and yet they ignore that the achievement principle is an ideal-typical socialist wage system originally demanded and introduced by Karl Marx. In this system, the market and usefulness play no role. The achievement principle is a wage system where the employees are paid for their actual performance. Achievement is either the degree to which pre-defined goals have been reached or the number of tasks fulfilled in a certain time. So far so clear! But is achievement really what our wage system is based on?

In former times, it was rather simple: if you wanted to work, you offered your services on an employment market. You work had a market value in relation to others who offered the same service. Now this work was purchased by enterprises on the employment market. They did that because they assumed the work they bought might be useful. Work had a utility value. If the degree of usefulness increased, the employee received better payment, because you could actually let him share the benefits of increased usefulness. If the usefulness decreased, the entrepreneur no longer wanted the employee; he gave notice to some of his employees. The wage system was the market-value-usefulness principle. To this day, the entrepreneur uses the expected achievement as a determining factor when it comes to calculating your wages! Which means that the usefulness, rather than the achievement, determines the value. Consequently, it is certainly extremely emotional, yet semantically total nonsense.

As the examples show, it is high time to demand semantic honesty. Let us, at long last, speak about the matters themselves, rather than about the emotions such matters trigger. It will pay. Otherwise we will have to admit Bernhard Shaw was right when he said: some people are only prepared to die for something that is sufficiently unclear for them.

Ulf D. Posé
(Translated by EG)