Words are tools we use to understand the world, interact with it, and manipulate it. Like fish in regard to water, we normally don't pay particular attention to words until or unless they become uncomfortable in some way or otherwise get our attention. But to extend the fish metaphor a bit, words can become a current carrying us to places we don't want to go if left unexamined.
Follow me past the Orange Omnilepticon for some musings on words and their effects.
In 2014, words will be tossed back and forth with ever increasing vigor as mid-term elections near. It's no secret that words have power, both in what they are explicitly understood to mean, and in the associations that go along with them. Then of course there is code speak, words that have special meaning for certain audiences, words that are used to allow members of certain groups to communicate with each other covertly, and reinforce their identity as members of the group.
Unraveling these meanings and their associated baggage is an exercise in lexicography and ethnography. It's an effort that is not without controversy - or vital importance. Another way of understanding the importance of this is by identifying a key use of words: marketing.
Marketing, among other things, is the select and careful use of words and their associations to manipulate people into desired courses of action. (Desired by whom and to what ends is the question that should always be kept in mind when dealing with such.) Marketing is not neutral; it's a deliberate effort to sway people into making choices for the gain of the marketer - and the interests of the person doing the marketing may be diametrically opposed to the best interests of their target. Like any other tool, understanding the motives of the wielder is important.
The most invidious form of marketing is that which goes under the radar, so to speak, bypassing critical examination because it's framed in terms the intended recipient has already incorporated into their view of the world. The trick is to shape that view of the world until it reflects the desires of the marketer; the world is made up of stories - change the story and change the world. Get people to buy into a narrative, and you can lead them where you want to go.
Marketing does have limits. At some point the discrepancies between the imagined world of the marketing vision and the actual world as it is can become so great, the target audience can no longer ignore them. This doesn't mean they'll reject the messaging though. They may engage in active denial of reality, may develop severe cognitive dissonance, may have become so fully invested emotionally in the desired view of the world that they can only overcome it with great difficulty.
It's important to understand just how difficult this can be. The more tightly ideas are bound up to a person's view of the world and their place in it, the harder it is for them to address them when they prove toxic - and even more so when those ideas are being deliberately invoked to manipulate them. As for example covert racism, used to get people to accept policies that are ultimately against their own self-interest - because they are led to see them as targeting 'those people' without having to say so explicitly. The message is understood, but plausibly deniable.
It's also difficult to deal with people when the Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play. In Idiot America, Charles P. Pierce lays out how modern America has become peculiarly susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect through the deliberate discrediting of reason and fact-based decision making:
The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.
How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable sentence: "They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."
A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got, he's not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.
On the front page.
Of The New York Times.
One of the cornerstones of Democracy is the concept of free and open exchange of ideas. Ideally, those that prove to be superior will prevail over those that do a less adequate job of corresponding to the world, where the relevant facts are both commonly understood and agreed upon by all. At least, that's the theory and many insist it's how things are actually working - chiefly those whose ideas are currently prevailing in the marketplace.
As we do not live in an ideal world however, that battle of ideas inevitably incorporates marketing as both tactics and strategy, as advocates seek to put their views in the best possible light while opponents seek to negate them. Further, the Overton Window acts to restrict which ideas are allowed to freely contest. As such, those with the most resources for marketing at their command will have the greatest advantage in such a struggle. The results are getting a bit too blatant to ignore.
We're talking about the power of money and the people who have it. In that 'marketplace of ideas' the Supreme Court has decided that money is equivalent to free speech. If only that money was distributed evenly through society, it might not be a problem - but that distribution is far from even. And, that concentrated wealth has created dedicated marketing organizations to promote the world view that makes that concentration possible, AKA foundations, think tanks, and astro turf groups. (Thanks to War on Error for this.) It's why they've created a media empire specifically to market their messaging, and dominate the rest of the media.
If you want to understand just how important words are, all you have to do is look at how much time and money conservatives have spent building up marketing tools. In Idiot America, being loud enough, repetitive enough, insistent enough, can be all that is needed to tilt the market in their favor. Never mind that their promises are empty, that their policies are disastrous, and their credibility doesn't bear close examination.
Just as important is the complementary tactic of suppressing countervailing views. This is done through projection - accusing opponents of one's own sins so that the uninformed can't tell the difference between one side or the other. (Especially useful when the 'free' press fails to distinguish between sides or critically evaluate opposing claims. Faux outrage is another marketing tool; the art of the Hissy Fit is to react so strongly to anything critical, anything in the least contrary to one's marketing strategy as to cause anyone who might take issue with it to keep silent out of fear of the reaction. The Permanent Rotating Scandal is another favored tactic - continually beat the drum over some manufactured Indefensible Act. This can be used to destroy the credibility of an opponent and distract attention away from real scandals.
These are the tactics of bullies, thugs, and those without shame. To respond in kind is to play their game. To ignore them is to encourage them. To fear them is to let them win. It's tiring and demoralizing to have to keep up with this deliberate rigging of the marketplace of ideas - but the alternatives are worse. No one said keeping our commonwealth functioning would be easy; 150 years ago we were at war with one another over just how to interpret the words of the founding fathers, and how to create a "more perfect union".
The intent of those who crafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was to create a government limited by checks and balances in order that "We the People" would remain paramount as full and equal partners in the great commonwealth they were attempting to create - even as those doing the drafting happened to be working largely in secret and as members of a white, male economic elite for the most part. Contradictions are an integral part of American history. Much blood, tears, and treasure has been consumed in attempting to reconcile them - and the process is not and can never be complete as we forget at our peril. It has to be continued on a daily basis.
The founding fathers saw the problem of controlling the power of government and attempted to find answers; they did not anticipate the power of vastly concentrated wealth and remedies have been less easily arrived at. The tyranny of money is no less a danger than the tyranny of kings, and no less dangerous because it uses words when it can - and force when it must. The power of words - in the right place, at the right time - remains immense, one big reason why those with power come down hard on those who contradict them publicly and punish those severely who contradict the message they market to the world.
Words are, ultimately, tools we use to cope with the world. They can be used to communicate, describe the world with varying degrees of accuracy, and enable constructive thought, or they can be used to build walls, deceive, block out inconvenient truths, and replace thought with dogma. Who gets to use them, and to what ends, is still one of the critical challenges we have to deal with if we are to maintain this commonwealth of ours with anything resembling justice and fairness.