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    21st Century Ideas: Re-framing Our Discussion

    Language underscores change, and therefore to create true change we need to first examine the language we use

    Started by: Horizon Raves:4 Badge Winner! Influency

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    In working deep and lasting change, the assumptions and language we utilize must be examined thoroughly. Nothing short of a global re-examination of humanities basic values and our common language will enable us to truly envision a future full of new and staggering possibility. Every time a new system comes to replace an old system, be it Democracy instead of Monarchy or Quantum physics in place of Newtonian/Einsteinian physics, language evolves to manage these shift in consciousness. What basic assumptions do we hold about our world evidenced by our language? Where is our language particularly weak in handling new and emerging phenomena? What day-to-day changes can we make in our language to begin to re-frame our world in a different light? As a note: Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse, did wonders in helping to re-frame my approach to life and may be relevant here. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games for an introduction)

    Good point, Horizon. Can you think of some examples? Eg. what words are missing to describe the current superthreats in a way that helps us understand them better?

    That's a good insight. May I suggest that in the face of actual, life-threatening changes, we ought to start using actual words that refer to real, concrete things, and try to avoid the meaningless pseudo-intellectual bullshit that was appropriate to our parents' prozac period?

    LOL Nitenurse...I have postmodernism post traumatic stress from my time in university. Honestly I think we have to come down to human nature, and the nature of anxiety. One of my children has Asperger's Syndrome - under stress he has access to very few words to describe his emotional state they are - bored, tired, upset, excited. I tend to think of him as a canary in a coal mine. Communication skills are seriously hindered by stress. Stress actually affects those parts of our brain. So the more we talk about these things as real - not circle jerk academic hypothesis the more anxiety there is and the ximpler the language has to get for us to infer any meaning. Fire bad, solar collectors good.

    An economy of language is part of the structure that got us into this mess. Thinks like "human nature", describing "actual things"and of course the good old "circle jerk" are all part of the language of modernity and advanced capitalism, they are a reaction to post-modernism's attempt to re-examine the structure of language in capitalism and modernity. I dont' think what we're looking for here is grasping at modernity (or what is typically conceived of as post-modernity), but instead we must take parts of both and synthesize them in order to transcend. We're going to need to shift paradigms in order to solve these issues, and an over-reliance on scientism isn't going to do it. Considering the question itself is already breaking down modern conceptions of language. Also- the inability to integrate conceptual discourse into the "real world" is part of what got us into this mess. The instrumentalization of everything (including language) is paramount to the advanced capitalist paradigm and we need to stop considering language an instrument to be wielded. Language is fundamentally creative and this sort of thinking will be fundamental to how we solve these problems.

    We need to reframe the way we think, and the only way to do that is through language. As a professional I work to help people reframe their experiences and roles so as to better adapt to day to day life. That role has changed since the days I went to school, with cybercounselling and decentralized services as the norm.

    I had an eye opening experience when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji. The Fijian language is very different from the American English I speak. They have many complicated pronouns that describe relationships such as a word for "you, me and NOT him" or "you, me and NOT them", etc. This concept of language frames an entire outlook in very subtle and all-pervasive ways and manner. It seems invisible until it's not, like in Fiji for me.




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