Tuesday 4 December 2012

Over-promotion and euphemism: a lethal combination

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In a world where almost all leaders are over-promoted and cognitively incompetent, compared with previous generations, it become particularly important to be clear and concise; since nuanced or lengthy explanation cannot and will not be comprehended.

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Yet since the mid 1960s, political correctness has enforced euphemism on an increasing range of subjects, so that they may only be discussed in complex and qualified terms.

On the one hand, most people can only comprehend plain statement - yet on the other hand, plain statement is taboo.

The consequence is predictable - the mass of decision makers are clueless about issues and therefore necessarily make wrong decisions; yet are protected from awareness of their cluelessness and bad decisions by precisely the euphemism that led to the problem in the first place.

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Of course, this situation is ripe for manipulation by the intellectual elite who, if they cannot do anything useful, can nonetheless readily perceive the advantage in being able to communicate among themselves in a secret language in the public arena.

Intellectuals have generated and sustain a cult of sensitivity whereby clear and concise statement is seen as simultaneously naive, ignorant, dangerous, and fanatical.

The secular Leftist elite have made a world in which the nuance of enemies is translated into simple and bipolar terms that are ridiculed as incoherent and pointed-at with horror; yet themselves shelter behind what is, to the mass of their audience, impenetrable complexity; yet this impenetrable complexity masks simplistic evil and nonsense (nonsense being evil).

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Opponents to the secular Leftist order may be tolerated so long as they remain within the approved style of euphemistic, long-winded, ambiguous discourse - either in professional media, or in the public domain; but if they dare to clarify the underlying situation by revealing the essence of underlying reality in easily-comprehensible terms, or are perceived as being likely to do this - then they may be dealt with using extreme severity.

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Thus the intrinsic damage of an over-promoted society is amplified by euphemism.

An over-promoted society might be able to function reasonably well if the participants were honest about what they could and could not do, and if they took note of the results of their actions; but once societal expression, observation and evaluation are couched in euphemistic terms, then the possibilities for disaster become open-ended.

When what is apparent and obvious is taboo, and personal observation must be re-interpreted in terms of second order theories that purport to prevent 'dangerous' misinterpretation and remove offensiveness and hurt feelings, then even very straightforward causality becomes obscured, and permanently.

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The feedback loop of cause and effect is broken by enforced euphemism, and society becomes unable to learn from experience; because, unless a feedback loop between action and its consequences is conceptualized clearly and simply, then it might as well not exist.

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2 comments:

Kristor said...

Euphemism increases the noise to signal ratio, to the point of obfuscation.

Roberto Masioni said...

Modern liberalism = sin.

That ought to be concise enough to get them howling.