Problematic Inarticulation

Nobody asked but …

I am now listening to the Judge Napolitano audio book, Lies the Government Told You.  I am drawing the same conclusion as I had when I took a course on the Bill of Rights, in the Fall.  Human language, as well as symbolic rationality, leaves much to be desired in terms of communication.  If it is trial and error, then it is 100% trial and 99.999 … % error.  Because we humans are stuck with language, we are effectively walled off from fact, we are effectively walled in by perception.

I also pointed out in Corruption, that we are stuck on an endless treadmill, approaching but never reaching exactitude.  It is because of the wobbly nature of language, logic, definition, and argument that we, the human species, are a failure in finding truth, fact, and order.  In the Judge’s book, he points out that we proceeded with a set of linguistically couched rules that were based on a circular “self-evident truth” (that all men are created equal), yet we have failed consistently to define the principle much less reach such an objective.

In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  Those of us who have some degree of facility in stringing words together give some appearance that we have our acts together, but that is a facade.  We cannot arrive at a consensus on anything.  For example, some people claim POTUS is smart, perhaps because he appears to have succeeded in business, but his vocabulary is that of a deluded child.  Vocabulary at the top end can fool the throng as to the intelligence of its user, but at the bottom end it is an anchor for the mediocre.

So we are both blessed and cursed by our way with words.  At best it creates an illusion of connectivity with reality, while in its usual appearance it reveals ineptitude.  In neither case, does language accomplish much of substantial value.

— Kilgore Forelle

Save as PDFPrint

Written by