pinkfloydpsw's Blog

If we reckon that the goal of good communication is to be understood by those we are communicating with, then what could possibly be the goal of bad communication? In this piece I will refer to the person giving information as the communicator, and the person getting as the receiver, if that makes it seem like a monologue then I’m okay with that because the sort of conversations that have power usually are one sided.

I assume, when I speak and write, that I have something to say that somebody might want, or need, to hear, that may not always be the case though. I feel a need to be clear in what I put out because I wish to be understood by my audience, conversing would be pointless otherwise. And so I try not to use fancy restrictive language, or too many abstract theories that would take too much work to understand.

I always wish to be argued with, for my words to be part of a process that enlightens others and myself, and to modify my ongoing thoughts through argument in its best sense. It is absolutely important, to me at least, that what I put on this blog, or say in person, is challengeable and that I can be held to account for it. That’s a responsibility anyone who blogs, or speaks publicly, or lectures, or leads, or tweets, cannot, and should not be allowed to, get away from.

Free Speech is a fundamental of a free society, but there is a caveat, some lefties (I’m an admitted and proud left leaner) seem to forget about, that you must stand over what you post. It is your opinion yes, but it is yours to defend and you must. Saying “well that’s my opinion” is not a defence when it comes to being factually incorrect, or having limited reason to hold the position you’re taking. Words are not things, and they do not do harm on their own, but intentions and meaning are inherent, and implied, and suggested, in language at a fundamental level. To communicate well is to be unambiguous, clear in what your intention is, and what must be recognised is that it is a power leeching exercise.

I’ll clarify what I mean by that; when we pass information we also pass power to the same person or group, this is because information is power, and holding it exclusively is power enabling. If you are the only person with the code for the safe then you hold the power of the contents of that safe, if you are the only person who knows how to read the ancient script then you have that power, if you are one of a select few that can do a thing then you will be in demand because of that power, this will lead to greater negotiating power and remuneration. All knowledge is power and power is an enabling force for influence, and the accumulation of things.

So who speaks so as to be deliberately misunderstood, and why? That’s an easy one to answer, those that do not wish to have the power of what they hold, their information, challenged or eroded. Now there is a multitude of reasons for this, but one of the most important, and most often encountered, is the dubious nature of their intellect, and their fragile ego concerning said intellect. The very most certain people are usually idiots, certainty and supreme confidence are mostly the hallmarks of the moron. Our moron often emerges from a position of power that they themselves has not built, usually they will be the beneficiary of an inherited wealth or base of power that has arrived through sheer luck, familial relations, and if all else fails ass-kissing sometimes works.

What almost never works is hard work and diligence, they usually just get you more work. Our moron will be unreasonable, there will always be a reason why what they are trying to achieve, which is exactly the same as what others that do the same thing are trying to achieve, is in their eyes somehow different, special, unique, as if they were a pioneer of it and they imagined themselves the leading light of it. This is hubris of course, most businesses follow models, the ones that don’t usually go under.

As an aside; it is much easier to display hubris in a monopolised environment as there is no actual competition to put you out of business, even if you are very bad, this means that government money often leads to colossal waste, inefficiency, a lack of productivity, and the unreasonable increase of bureaucracy. it is a simple result of not being able to fail rather than not being a failure (that’s not an argument for privatisation, this has been proved to happen more in that condition than its predecessor, nationalisation).

Smart people have doubts, really smart people know the grand scale, the colossal nature, the magnitude, of what they do not know and haven’t lifetime enough to study, they realise that they realise very little in the grand scheme of things, yet paradoxically they are often the ones that welcome disputation and argument most. This reminds me of the Amazing Randi, a magician, who debunked psychics, he said the professionals never take him up on his challenge ($1M prize to prove a psychic event) because they know they are frauds, whereas the amateurs haven’t realised yet.

To put yet a finer point on it, each thing known and applied, according to Hegel, is part of a Dialectic that goes something like this… the thesis is challenged and changed by what argues successfully against it, the antithesis, a union forms between these two positions and what does not hold solid is discarded, the synthesis, the synthesis is then a thesis that faces it’s own arguments, antithesis, and this process goes on again and again and so on. Really smart people know that today’s assuredness will be tomorrows shaky ground. That’s not to say we should believe nothing because everything will change, that would be just stupid as these things we know are both useful and applicable, just look what we have built using them.

Our information protector knows that to give over information in a clear fashion is to give power over with it, and that’s the problem. By employing the tactic of being vague, abstruse, obfuscating, talking in riddles and flying off at tangents, he/she/they/it/whatevs can, if they need to, position the receiver/s of said information, the audience we might call them, at a future date when the process that required said information has played out, as having misunderstood what instruction/direction had been provided.

This means that the communicator is acting as the Texas Sharp Shooter (a sharp shooter arrives in town and claims he can hit a bullseye, the townspeople challenge him, so he shoots a barn and then paints on a target where he had shot, with the bullseye right where his bullet entered the building”. By this method, painting the target on afterward, the communicator can take the success of the project as their own, but by the same token, and because the communication had not clarity enough, if the result is undesirable ,then the communicator can claim it is as a result of not being properly followed and having their directions, which they will claim to have always been clear in, fully understood by the obviously inept receiver of their words.

Do you see just how beautiful this is? Imagine the attitude, towards themselves, of the person doing this, if they are not actually aware that this is what they are doing. Their ego will be immense, they will come to believe of themselves, through some narcissistic process going on in their mind, that they are some sort of genius, operating beyond the understanding of their subordinates, and through the sycophancy that power engenders always because the powerful generally only surround themselves with courtiers, that imagined falsehood of brilliance will be further bolstered. Imagine that these people get together, combining power and stupidity, and they form a politically motivated object… well don’t just imagine, turn on the news….

We must take a moment to consider the plight, the constant dread, of our receiver, having to navigate the choppy waters of not having the autonomy to succeed, remember we are talking about communicators who hold power and have no intention of distributing it, being lead to think they are stupid. They are also rather unlikely to have been granted autonomy (I think I can assume that), yet will face the result of their efforts as responsible for them if they do not succeed, regardless of the fact that they have not been burdened well enough with the tool that they might need to get anything done, information!

Working, existing in a structure, in this fashion, would be like guesswork. We’ve all watched many many dramas based on the reigns of kings, emperors, dictators, conquerors, chieftains etc. The thematic that runs through them all, what the writer captures if written well, is the changing nature of favour. For the courtiers, those close to the leader, being so close can be a very dangerous position.

The capricious nature of the powerful individual seems to be greater depending on the power, as one increases the other follows. Thomas Cromwell was Henry VIII great ally, then he was a threat and had to be beheaded, before him it was Thomas Wolsey, and in the interim Thomas More was done in too (history has not been kind to Thomas’s). Kim Jung Un kills his own family members on a whim, Donald Trump goes through lawyers like I go through butter (a lot), Caesar after Caesar destroyed the positions of their own supporters and one even murdered his own mother, Pharaohs had the people that looked after them buried alive with them when they died (the servants weren’t dead yet though), Vikings sacrificed their own warriors to their gods to ensure victory, it goes on, power is brutal and almost never benevolent.

We must keep in mind that power is fragile too, unless it is financial power. Relative power, in a social sense, the sort of power that is derived from mass adherence, is fickle, and fades as circumstance changes. Political power knows that it is a constant battle of persuasion over a power that will always be greater than it, with a people that will ever be required to think a certain way. We have a king in Britain now, but the big eared moron is not the same animal as (I was going to say his ancestors, but I’m not sure they are) his distant predecessors, I don’t think he can have anyone locked up in the tower. Monarchy may still be rich, and the aristocracy may yet own lands, but those conditions were allowed to remain so by the power that came after them, the merchant class, a class that did not allow the same thing in France or most of Europe. The latest power is the financial class, their position is the strongest we have seen so far, they completely own the means of information, and by implication they get to define what can, and more importantly cannot, be said.

The fragile nature of the better argument, when doubt is a factor as it always must be, leads to masses of people adopting counter arguments that are not even remotely plausible because of the simple fact that those inclined to grab at opposites often use skewed logic and are too easily persuaded by the exceptions in the, well we’ll call them almost-proved, truths. I would argue also that it is often the case that the counter culture is part of the culture, not so removed from the desires of the power base, and in any case will in time become a fashion within it and subject to the same strategy of marketing. But I’ve digressed away from the topic, forgive me…

What purpose does it hold to communicate badly? It’s a power play plain and simple, a person using this ploy is insuring against the challenge of equal or greater minds, whether that be the guy in the pub spouting out nonsense about governments trying to sterilize us with deodorants, or the politician making a simple argument more complex when needs be and doing the opposite when it suits a different agenda on a different day. Maybe we could assume that bad communication is a structure of power, one that needs to be worked against, for if we look we will likely find it at every level. Of course there are those that don’t converse well naturally, but dialogue can still be had, you can know the angry neighbour has become angry by the anger and not the words, and likely you can figure out what he is angry about with a little further thought. So when the CEO or the Colonel or the manager or the supervisor doesn’t make things clear enough, it’s not that they cannot, it’s maybe because they just don’t wish to..

Paul S Wilson