Dialogue Deficiency: The World's Most Insidious Disease

A few thousand years from now, sociocultural anthropologists will understand something immensely profound about us here at the beginning of the 21st century, something that we are so immersed in that few of us recognize it, let alone understand it.

More than climate change, pandemics, wars, trade wars, or corrosive politics, the world is suffering from dialogue deficiency.

Later on, I will offer my reasoning to justify the argument that dialogue deficiency is more serious than the others. But for now, let's look at what dialogue is and where the word comes from.

Merriam-Webster defines dialogue as, among other things, a conversation between two or more persons, an exchange of ideas and opinions, a discussion between representatives of parties to a conflict, a discussion that is aimed at resolution.

The etymology of the word is interesting and pertinent to this discussion and its intentions. Stemming from the Greek dialogos, conversation, its roots are dia, which is through, and logos, which is speech or reason.

We trace the term to Plato, in whose works it is closely associated with the art of dialectic, the dialogue between people holding different points of view with the goal of arriving at the truth through reasoned argument. And that last phrase should indicate where this is going.

As long as there have been alphabets, Egyptian hieroglyphs approximately 5,500 years ago, and then springing up in Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, Sumer, Anatolia, Greece, and so on, we've had the ability to record history and current events using language rather than and drawings like the ones we see in the caves at Lascaux, France.

The problem, and it is an innate one, is that along with the ability to record history comes the ability and opportunity to misrepresent it.

In the larger sense, along with truth, comes a distortion of it. it, sometimes innocently and inadvertently, but more often than not, by design and for ulterior purposes.

Unchecked by dialogue, this results in exactly the opposite, the lack of dialogue.

Keeping that in mind, let me bring you to a modern day case study.

While the absence of dialogue is usually the result of authoritarian suppression or skilled exorcism, it can also be achieved strategically with the long view always kept up ahead.

Such is the case with the political and social climate dominating the United States, as well as other places around the world. Since I can speak with some familiarity with the United States' state of affairs, I shall. Now, I want to talk about the beginnings of the dissolution of dialogue.

Until 1990, American politics and government was always a raucous and contentious, how do you do?

But ultimately, a cooperative venture to one degree or another. honor.

Famous for that was the cordial and convivial nature of the relationship between Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democrat Speaker of the House Thomas P. Tip O 'Neill.

As front men for the two parties, they certainly led from the front in many, a bloody battle. But at the end of the day, there was a chord, usually anyway.

O 'Neill stepped down in January 1987, and Reagan left office in January 1989.

Their larger-than-life departures leaving huge voids.

At the same time, Representative Newt Gingrich from Georgia was already in assent, assuming the position of House Minority Whip in March 1989.

While he went on to the powerful speaker position in 1995, it was in 1990 that he first had a powerful impact. fact. Gingrich issued his now famous, or should I say infamous, pamphlet, Language, a Key Mechanism of Control, which was sent to Republican candidates running in the 1990 midterm elections, therein making the non-negotiable point that carefully chosen language can win a point saying nothing about advancing the truth.

So he listed two categories of words which candidates were to learn, memorize, internalize, and use whenever needed. The first category was, in his words, optimistic, positive, governing words.

30 words like common sense, courage, family, fair, freedom, liberty, moral, peace, prosperity, truth, and vision.

And in his first example of using language advantageously, Gingrich entitled the second category, contrasting words, not negative words. Using the word negative would have been negative, as one would expect, but Gingrich was one step ahead of the rest of us. Here he used 36 words, including anti-flag, betray, crisis, disgrace, failure, incompetent, liberal, radical, shallow, taxes, traitors, and welfare.

It's clear that these lists weren't intended to promote dialogue, and we're living in the world resulting from it. The Republicans didn't gain control of the House that year or in the presidential election of 1992 Clinton swept in that year But they did in 1994 and Gingrich assumed the speakership And with it, all the influence of the third most powerful position in the United States government if we are so committed. On the other hand, dialogue is, for all intents and purposes, extinct and must be recreated before we can attempt to initiate and ultimately institutionalize it.

The paradox here is that there will be more disagreement than agreement arising from superficially sound but intellectually dishonest arguments in support of a far-gone conclusion of what dialogue is, precisely the reason we have lost dialogue to begin with. In other words, its own detritus will likely serve as its own resurrection, making it so insidious.

That will require us, all of humanity, to call on all the great thinking that got us out of the dark ages into the renaissance through the enlightenment and the industrial revolution and into the modern age dialogue deficiency will take many generations to cure but there is no choice imagine the world 75 years from now 2100 or 2101 to be exact if we let the disease go unchecked and run its course.

But let's set that weighty thought aside for a moment and turn to something a little more personal. In my very long career, here are a couple of inescapable truths I've discovered along the way, aphorisms.

And I'll share them with you the way Ben Franklin shared all of his in Poor Richard's Almanac Franklin didn't explain them he just gave them to you and I'm going to share more with you each episode after these we'll see some great thoughts from great minds in the past including some thoughts from my mind notice the lack of the use of the word great two that I think are comfortably fitting in with what we're discussing today day.

Before saying anything, ask this, if this were to be the last thing I utter before I die, and history were here to record it, would I say it?

And aphorism number two for today, no matter who you are or what you do, what matters most is if at the end, of the day you are proud of yourself for doing something to make someone else's life better now as promised let's check in with a couple of history's greatest thinkers and this is a combination of from great minds and what if nelson mandela Nelson Mandela recited the poem Invictus every morning for the 27 years that he was imprisoned on Robben Island. Every morning.

So who was this person that influenced Nelson Mandela? One of the great minds and great leaders in history.

In victors, which translates to unconquerable, was written by William Ernest Henley in the middle of the 19th century.

Unconquerable.

Henley was besieged by a very difficult life. He lost one leg to amputation and almost lost a second to amputation until the great Joseph Lister jumped in and was able to save Henley's other leg.

But Henry was besieged also by one disease after another. He lost a five-year-old daughter to one of those diseases. He had a rough life, but he wrote Invictus, a four-verse poem, which he writes in the fourth verse.

It matters not how straight the gate, nor charged with punishment the scroll.

I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.

I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul Nelson Mandela who had much bigger things in his imprisonment in mind took to that poem and recited it to himself out loud every morning for 27 years it doesn't need to be said what Nelson Mandela achieved what would have happened here's my what if.

Had Nelson Mandela never read that poem, how self-motivated would he have been?

My guess is that he would have been self-motivated by something else, but he chose Invictus.

In that sense, Invictus and William Ernest Henley live on through Nelson Mandela and through us.

And if we can expand our thinking a little bit, beyond Mandela and us, what if the United States concept moved to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s?

Albert Einstein always imagined a United States of Europe long before he became famous here in the United States he imagined it because he said it would unify the economies of all the countries it would prevent war and it would promote research, development, education, etc a United States of Europe didn't do that and beginning in 1933 took off in its own direction under the Nazis and Hitler and there was a war that ravaged Europe and I don't have to tell you the rest what if there was somebody like Nelson Mandela imprisoned in Robben Island who had said what if we had a United States of Europe?

Well, we do, almost.

And it was brought to us by the European Union.

What if is always an important question to ask, not just proactively, but retroactively.

That just about does it for me for this episode. So, coming up in the next few weeks, we're going to be discussing writing and continuing to write, critical traits for the 21st century, and the first spotlight of a great mind, Nicolaus Copernicus, one of the original critical thinkers. anchors.

Furthermore, I want to talk to you about what made Sandy Koufax great and how it can work for you too.

So thanks for listening. Thanks for your interest in Vantage Point.

And thanks for your time.

See you on the next episode. Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep thinking critically.