pinkfloydpsw's Blog

We witness interactions between persons all the time, every minute of every day, but we do not see them for what they are. We understand the words but conversation is about more than mere words. I find myself listening more and more to not what is said, as if it is written on paper and merely interpreted by the reader, but to how words are delivered and what way language speaks our intentions of power within the interaction. Imagine this conversation…

• Hi, can I book one of the laptops from the library at 12.30 today please?
• I’m sorry but they are all booked up until 13.00, would you be able to wait until then?
• Yes
• Okay, I have booked that to you for 13.00 then, what is your ID number?
• 01234567, Kimberly Janet Mikado
• Okay, all done, see you at 13.00 then
• That’s fine…….

Can you spot where the dynamic changes from where the requester becomes the granter and the granter becomes the requester? It’s subtle but it’s there… Our requester gains the power within this interaction by responding to the request of the provider of the laptop, they received a counter offer to their initial request. There is nothing intrinsically wrong at this point in the discourse, the error occurs later and it is even more subtle than the switch. We continue with the provider seeking certain confirmations from the requester (in bold) and then upon receiving them confirming that the request can be met successfully, it is at this point that the requester should recognise that fact but it is not recognised, the dynamic should switch back but it doesn’t, it continues with the requestor acting as though they have the power within the discourse and here is how – they respond, as the last part of the interaction, with a confirmatory, rather than an appreciative, sentence, they respond without the recognition that something has been granted to or provided for them, “that’s fine“ is not the correct response to having had ones request fulfilled, it’s cheeky and arrogant and it makes the assumption that whatever we want we have some right to have that is recognised by the simple fact that it is our desire to attain and that should be enough to deserve, and when we deserve a thing we have no need to thank anyone for getting it. This is the circumstance described as supererogatory, the position where we ascribe to ourselves that the things we desire are not merely requests but it is the duty of others to provide them. It’s like using “correct” as a response that indicates agreement – the problem there being that correct indicates validity rather than agreement, almost as if the person in agreement has the power to grant the validity of the speakers postulate, correct is reserved for certainty but any statement within a conversation that is not scientific in nature is almost certainly subjective in nature, and nobody has any authority to assert that a subjective position can be validated any further than to say that it is correctly the position the person has taken, in essence I may agree with what has been said but I cannot deem it correct by that agreement.

Whence does this arrive? It is in youth and perhaps before where we find this feeling of entitlement nurtured in modernity. As I recall, my father never requested that I be quite or that I went to bed, he demanded it, he legitimately expected that I would not assume his word as a request and in doing so he handed no power to me to consider them so. Things must be a little different now because I think we have all been in the supermarket standing witness to a young mother in negotiations with her own offspring, how awkward is it to see an adult pleading with a child for that which was once expected, and punished if found lacking? The modern way is obviously to compromise with the young and to recognise in them that they are valid even if they have not earned their validity, to start from a default position, a right if you will, where young confused desire holds an equal position to experience. I am no fan of this, as I grew up I recognised the errors of youth and came to appreciate more the guidance of parents who acted for a good that I now realise I could not hope to recognise in my younger days.

Maybe the youngster of today has been mollycoddled so much and treated as a special snowflake so much that they no longer can develop that necessary appreciation, maybe our attempts to make life easier for them than it was for us has backfired and maybe we have spoiled them in many ways with a kindness and consideration that they should have been made to earn as we had to. Whatever the answer, the outcome must speak for itself – we have created a generation of overly confident, underdeveloped youths whose validity is self-assured and whose sense of entitlement knows no limits, time will of course tell what mistakes we have made, I wait with baited breath.

Thatcher did this to my generation, and all the generations that will follow, in many ways, I do not claim perfection for myself and my contemporaries, and we may be the last of the hard-nosed generations. What happened in the 80s was a shift from the collective social sense of self to the conceited and desire-driven individual self, buy your own house, pay individually for only what you utilise and recognise that only contribution based entitlement is fair, that’s what Thatcher made us into, that was her biggest victory. So we started the ball rolling and we can hardly blame the young of today for what we have made them, we are to blame. We are not the victim rather the perpetrator, we brought this upon ourselves as the generation before us brought their own misery, in what we had become, upon themselves. We bribed and negotiated with our children when we should have laid down the law instead, a request has the peculiar function that it first hands the ensuing power of the discourse to the person hearing it, it is not merely a transference of information, whereas an order holds power by not being optional. When I request that my son empties the dishwasher I can almost guarantee that this means he will not do it even if he answers in the affirmative, so I find myself emptying the appliance before I go to bed, because these things simply must be done. If I had not given him the option then he would be at fault for not doing it but I didn’t I requested that he do it, so I was effectively offering him a clause whereby he didn’t have to, something he must have recognised because of the fact that he didn’t do it, my mistake.

Take your child to the nursery or to the minders where those supervisors of childhood have an even lower position of power and there the child will learn that to behave well is not rewarded because it causes no negotiation, in my day it was the avoidance of punishment that drove behaviour rather than the hope for reward but in this time the reward is not present until the negotiation is over so the child will learn to act up first and then compromise to attain what it is they desire, punishment would seem to be no longer a deterrent of bad behaviour because threats are now empty and the simple warmed ear of yesteryear is mooted as an abuse now. This dynamic puts the power firmly in the hands of the child; the least able person to recognise the instability and future manifestations of this problematic relation. Where is this leading? If we look to later in the development of the child, we can base this analysis on the youth that has been through this process because they are the college students of today, we find that relationship just as skewed, we see tutors pleading with students just to do anything that resembles what is expected of them, no punitive measures and no rewards to give nor sweeties to bribe with, we see a disinterested student guided by a disgruntled educator who is being crushed under the jackboot of institutions that further validate the special snowflake and make a multitude of excuses for his/her indifference; including the ridiculous inference that their lack of engagement is somehow the fault of the educator rather than the parent, who is surely the first educator and therefore the most culpable one?

We took away the necessity for this generation to earn respect; we instead taught them that respect could and should be expected. We were far too successful in removing the bully, we engaged in overkill with the term allowing it to become an umbrella to anything critical; bullying once meant to unfairly oppress a valid position or to engage in unjustifiable or unreasonable amounts of violence to gain something, but now it may merely mean to take a contrary position with conviction and armed with truth or experience. Nobody would contend that things didn’t need to be fixed, remember I am of the generation of the sadistic and alcoholic educator, the generation of smacking and I have no wish to defend that time completely, but put in the terms of a game of darts – we aimed at the bulls-eye because we kept hitting the double twenty but so successful were we in lowering our aim that we now regularly hit the double three instead – we missed the middle ground we sought. We protected these children from reality, responsibility, violence and criticism to the point where they now have no sensitivity or understanding of these terms, we taught them to see a world where anyone who struggled could be labelled in such a way that they were the problem rather than the victim. We taught them to worship affluence and praise the affluent as if wealth validated action or the laws of the wealthy insured morality. We eliminated radical thought so effectively that any divergence from the narrative we know as our uncodified culture (a culture none of us can actually put into words) is now labelled as harmful or offensive. We taught them how not to think, how not to protest, how not to be political actors beyond a social media campaign click, how not to revise history or challenge orthodoxy, how just to go along to get along, how to believe the wildest nonsense from the least qualified sources, how to be overly and inappropriately cynical, how to argue trivialities yet avoid important issues, feel and assert prejudices without the slightest shred of expertise and how to voice an opinion without ever having assimilated a single morsel of knowledge, we made them the policemen, the judges and the enforcers of conformity by making them oppose change as if it were an evil, we taught them to be charitable with their time and money instead of realising that they are duty bound to their fellow man, we did this and now we must pay the price of it.

But that’s fine….or maybe it’s correct…

 Paul Simon Wilson