Let me get started and share with you those famous insights.
John the Evangelist said that before God created the world, in the beginning was the word. What he's saying is that it was the inherent power of words through which the world was created. This reminded me of an anecdote involving linguist and dictionary maker Noah Webster. When his wife came home to find him kissing the maid, she cried out loud, "Noah, I'm surprised!" To which he, as a good linguist would, replied, "No, my dear, it is I who is surprised. You are astonished!"
I've always been fascinated by linguistics, political communication, and psychology, so I tried to explore this area a little deeper. In the 21st century, something interesting happened. Words and language have become so accessible and useful that ChatGPT was born, while our own words and the meaning we attach to them have become cheap and devalued. Word distortion, obfuscation, deception, spin, and gaslighting are everyday realities.
George Orwell, in his book "1984" and his pamphlet "Politics and the English Language," describes how societies and public discourse are moulded by words. But I've also understood and learned that it is not just the outside world that words shape. The words that we use effectively create our own inner reality. Words are magical tools through which we interpret and filter the outside world. But words are often misused, distorted, spun, and abused.
In "1984," the "Ministry of Peace" was effectively the "Ministry for War," while today, a "special military operation" is *not* a war. Lies can just be "alternative facts," and since torture is banned, "enhanced interrogation techniques" are OK. Through words, we tap into our own personal and collective history, our biases, and our emotions. Words also create feelings and shape our own inner dialogue.
You might be wondering: What is the ultimate purpose of words? Every word that a person speaks and utters, consciously or unconsciously, reveals the speaker's true intentions. What do I mean by that? Words can sustain power. Manipulators, who have *their* own best interest at heart, will degrade, dismiss, and praise us so they can control others and benefit themselves. When a politician says, "Vote for me if you're a patriot," that is not persuasion but well-disguised manipulation.
Words are used to "minimize." When my pain is strong, when I'm intensely embarrassed, or when I'm extremely at unease, I'm going to use my linguistic toolkit to *shrink* it so I can cope. "Dying" becomes "departing." I'm not "in debt"; I just have "negative cash flow." And that breakup wasn't a big deal because, anyway, we were "just friends." Words are used to bend the truth. I'm not depressed, just "under the weather." I wasn't fired, just "downsized." Reality hurts, reality is painful, so I just want reality to go away so I can temporarily ease my pain. But reality always makes its timely return.
So let's see what is actually the goal with our words. Well, the goal is to *accurately* and *honestly* speak the *truth* and be *real*. When I aim to speak the truth and be real, I wonder: Do I want to describe *what there is* or imagine *what there should be*? Or, as Aristotle said, the actuality or the "potentiality." Is it a block of stone that I'm seeing, or the potential of a beautiful sculpture? The actuality or potentiality?
Also, when I see, describe, and understand the world, I want to peel off the layers that distort and blur my vision. A "friend" used to mean someone who would remember your birthday even when you forgot hers. But today, a friend is someone who shares a new conspiracy theory every day on her TikTok. The sudden death of a loved one is an emotional shock with long-lasting effects—a *trauma*. Failing your Accounting 101 exam, though unpleasant, is *not* a trauma. I understand the desire to stretch a word, to redefine its meaning. But stretching it so far and so much that it snaps is going to do a disservice to the original word, betraying it and devaluing it.
What word can I use then for an actual trauma if I need to? So you might be wondering, what is actually the *right* word? Well, the right word is definitely *not* one that describes the impossible, or the inflated, or the illusory, but a word that is real, accurate, and truthful.
Picture a scene: A man is talking to a woman in a room. It could be a podcast interview, a hostage situation, an escape room game, or the start of a romantic encounter. Whatever way I choose to interpret and imagine that largely depends on my *filters*—my perspective, my fears, my biases, conscious or unconscious prejudice, or my hopes. So, in short, my intentions.
Intentions are often very hard to find. They may not be obvious or right in front of us, and in political language, it's even more difficult. When a dictator says that he wants to "liberate" a country, what are his true intentions? For political language, we often need the lawyer's hat, meaning that we need to rely on "circumstantial evidence" or reasonable assumptions so we can peel back and try to find the true meaning behind those words.
When we manage to do that, something wonderful happens. Because we refuse to accept what we are being told at face value, we stop letting others mislead us. Now, doing that to *ourselves* is even more challenging. When I want to discover my own intentions behind my own words, which might be informed by fear because I'm deeply afraid of something, or informed by some unpleasant event that I want to explain away, and I try to look behind and see and decode the filters that I have applied, something magical happens. I no longer allow myself to be misled by those hidden agendas—agendas hidden in plain sight, even from myself, through distortion or self-deception—so I can ultimately get to the core, harsh, and *actual* truth.
A magic trick, once you know how it's done, will lose its power. In this case, it's a wonderful thing. Ultimately, where I hope to get, the place where I want to arrive, is to find a word without distortion, without obfuscation, without deception, without spin, and without gaslighting. Finding this is a sort of defence, a sort of immunity, which is not induced by a vaccine, but by something that you have discovered in yourself—a power that you may have never realised existed. It's an amazing thing. But unfortunately, it's not enough.
Because if you're aiming to create a better *outer* and *inner* world, you would like to find your true potential, and you would like to create the *potentiality* of change. That is not without dangers, because it has a lot of ethical and moral considerations. Ultimately, it comes down to the values—the values that you hold and the values that others hold. Values are somewhat hidden forces that inform our intentions, influence our message, shape our techniques, and guide our words.
Once all of this lines up, you have the potentiality to imagine and find a word for a more *honest* world. Now, values are so important that when you realise what *yours* are, and then you find a gap between yours and the speaker's behind their words, a *red alert* should go up. That's not right, that the person is so far away from where you would like them to be. But when you realise that you yourself may be misnarrating reality in a way that your words and your own values are in a mismatch, in my case, I get very frustrated that I've fallen short again with my big, lofty ideals.
But when I manage to reach that kind of integrity where my values, my intentions, my message, my techniques, and my words align, then I'm really proud to have presented that to you in a TEDx talk called "Your Words Will Shape Your World."
Thank you.