Dear Friends,
It seems to me… language is such a poor means of communication, it is barely utile. Certainly you can grunt out that you are hungry, follow, look a deer and shoot it, and a few other concepts and philosophies have come into it over the years, but most words are so hard to define, even when consulting a dictionary, they are almost useless. This is never more true than when the words are political in nature. Politics is, by it’s nature mercurial, and the language of politics is mercurial as well. We think we know what terms such as left, right, capitalism, communism, fascism and oligarchy mean, but we don’t. Not you nor I. That is because those words have different meaning to different people. A white horse is not a horse so to speak. Without a stable definition a word means nothing.
Capitalism is just such a word. The word means something different to anyone who speaks it. To some it means cronyism, corporatism, oligarchy, company towns, tyranny and exploitation. To others it means free enterprise, free markets, limited government interference, freedom, industry, industriousness, wealth and opportunity. Yet these are not the only definitions of capitalism, there is every shade in between those two extremes. The word capitalism is so mercurial it is worthless as a means of conveying a thought. Better to grunt “hungry,” You will get the point across.
The left/right political definition has become utterly absurd. A national socialist who believes in the planned economy is on the right, and a communist, who also believes in a planned economy is on the left. Both sides are authoritarian, the definition rests on whether the faction believes in globalism, (one world government), or nationalism, (the nation state), a globalist being a leftist and a nationalist being on the right. The only philosophy not afforded any room in that definition… is for people who believe in freedom, free enterprise and free markets. Which highlights another aspect of political speech, that philosophy you dislike can be marginalized, by drowning it within other negative definitions.
Certainly there are people who believe in free enterprise, that also believe in a one world government, and those who believe in the nation state as well. Both parts of that faction, who believe in free enterprise, are separated by the left right paradigm, rendering that faction less potent than it otherwise would be.
The terms liberal and conservative used to have some utility but have long since lost any use whatsoever. A classic economic liberal is what today in the US is called a libertarian or conservative, and a classic economic conservative, is what today is called progressive or liberal. Meanwhile what used to be a classic social liberal is today a progressive or liberal, as a social conservative classically defined, is what we consider a conservative today. Most people are lost somewhere in between the definitions making those terms to be confusing at best and fraudulent at worse.
Politics doesn’t like hard definitions. Politicians like to have their words mean different things to different people. The best politicians are empty suits the people fill with their imaginations. Like Obama was all things to all people when he ran for office, once he got into office, he became something else altogether. Politicians therefore have an incentive to destroy the meaning of words, muddy their definitions and conceal their implications. That is just the nature of politics. It is in our own best interest however to try to understand what people actually think then.
Understanding what others really think is made nearly impossible by the nature of our language. How many times have you or I argued about capitalism with someone when if we had both defined what we meant by capitalism we would have discovered we agreed on ninety percent? He was arguing against corporatism and I was arguing for freedom. Both of us hate corporatism, and both want freedom, yet we argue past each other over a word we never defined! The only real disagreement was on our definitions. Politicians want us to misunderstand each other, they want the water turbid and the air foggy, to keep us in small factions and thus easier to control. We should endeavor to clear the air, let the water settle and actually take the time to understand each other. We might find to our everlasting horror… we agree on far more than we disagree.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
