[source: Pixel Free Photos] Words are like clouds; their forms and meanings are endless. I have always had a feeling that the word may not quite measure up to the object or experience it represents. Words only represent reality; only the thing, action, or event is reality. The representation may be accurate or not. Symbols and signs are real only as symbols and signs, not the reality they are used to represent.
The founder of general semantics, Alfred Korzybski, is often quoted as having said, “The map is not the territory.” I have experienced that directly myself, and not just in words; I have always been fascinated by cartography—the art and science of map-making. That eventually led to my involvement with the digitization of geographic information to create electronic mapping systems, which can illuminate all sorts of things. But some maps don’t look much like the territory they purport to represent. Look at the early maps of the first European explorers of “the new world” of the American continents and other territories.
I was once given a hand-drawn map by the owner showing the route to his depleted turquoise mine in remote central Baja, Mexico. He had some beautiful pieces displayed in the cafe he ran. I mentioned my desire to acquire some turquoise to inlay in some woodworking projects. He offered to guide me to his old mine—by drawing me a map—where I could pick up small pieces of turquoise left in the mine’s tailings when it was still active. Well, that map did not represent the territory very well.
It took a good deal of imagination to match his map, or the verbal description he gave me, to the route from near a certain marker on the highway where an obscure turnoff led several kilometers down sketchy dirt roads to finally find the mine. Once I found the location, I was able to pick up a couple of zip-lock bags full of smaller pieces of turquoise. When the mine was still active the miners found it not cost-effective to glean the smaller pieces so they ended up in the mine’s tailings piles. Neither the map nor the map-maker’s words adequately described the location of the mine. Only by speculative exploration was I able to find it.
Later, I got to experience the rich real-time information on ‘moving maps’ displayed on the instrument panel of the experimental airplane I built in 2008. They showed me terrain obstacles, airways, military restricted areas, and even approaching thunderstorms (with a slight delay of a couple of minutes due to data processing and satellite transmissions. The information appeared on my moving-map display driven by a Garmin 430w GPS navigation system) My ‘situational awareness’ thus included my geographic position and altitude—with accuracy within feet, not miles.. That was more accurate by many orders of magnitude compared to the map s drawn in the “Age of Exploration,” or even more recent paper maps—and in near ‘real time’ as well.
But when considering language, the nature of mental maps is a bit different. The relationship between words and things can be quite complicated. Words and deeds may involve even more subtle complications. A lot of factors come into play, some of them more emotional than empirical. Personal motives, social meanings, and economic interests are all at play. That is why what is real for one person may be imaginary for another. Then there are all the lies, damn lies, and unacknowledged misinterpretations, which blur into unfounded certainty with a controlling mix of emotional imagery.
What are Democratic Socialism, Corporate Capitalism, and Fascism?
In politics, sometimes names become more important than the phenomena they are supposed to represent. “Democratic socialism” is a current example of a term that means very different things to some people than to others. Some say, “I don’t want to live in a socialist society.” To them, “socialism” refers to an historical form of failed oppressive dictatorship such as those of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, or Fidel Castro, all icons of evil to the American right-wing politics, ready to be applied to Democrats and any policy not favoring the billionaire class.
But in the US today, the policies of ‘democratic socialists,’ such as Bernie Sanders, or some younger members of the left wing of the Democratic Party, focus on their commitment to democracy and the public interest, and opposing the nascent MAGA dictatorship. They oppose the dictatorial stance of the MAGA Republicans, who are attempting to install a white nationalist (neo-fascist) regime in America. Yet, the Democrats’ actual political program is more like that of the traditional American liberal center than anything else.
For the Republicans, their attempts to associate Democrats with dead dictators is an effort to cast an image of evil on a range of social policies that were once a normal part of the liberal center, once called by Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Deal.” Most “conservatives” would not give up their Social Security or Medicare benefits, even as they favor the Republican extremists who would abolish those programs in favor of pandering to the billionaire class, offering endless tax breaks to those few who control more wealth than the combined wealth of the vast majority of the nation.
Politics is not necessarily rational. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of the danger of stupidity applies here. Bonhoeffer was engaged in the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. He argued that stupidity can be even more dangerous than malevolence because it cannot be fought with reason or logic, incentives, or even force. In politics, strategy rules, often by emotional means.
Names are used to represent the political interests that the speaker holds. Often a name is associated with some common or popular value, such as patriotism, individualism, or even societal wellbeing, in order to curry favor with the voters. In the immediacy of today’s politics under conditions of irrational warfare and the stupidity of economic indifference, the word, “affordability” becomes a powerful representation of the people’s concerns, despite the large rises in prices. Not many political buzzwords have a direct personal measure to the extent that “affordability” does.
Even more importantly, some words are deployed specifically to demonize those who support policies disfavored by the speaker. The language of politics is rife with distortions of real-world events and conditions. It is almost in the nature of the beast.
Some Republicans like to brag about the Republican Party being “the party of Abraham Lincoln,” but that is a pretty meaningless claim in the context of the MAGA domination of the party’s politics today. The Republican Party’s political agenda is much closer to the agenda of the racism of white nationalists than one that would support equal rights for all citizens. It’s program of deporting any immigrant with brown skin, documented or not, is a tell, among others.
Back in Lincoln’s time, the Democratic Party was dominated by white southerners. Today, it is mostly made up of urban and suburban liberals and centrists, while the Republican Party is dominated by white southerners, rural westerners, and white workers with little education. So, in reality, the names of the parties have come to be associated with quite the opposite political ideologies since the civil war and Reconstruction. Democrats became Dixiecrats, then Republicans. Now, the Republican Party plays to both racist white nationalists and the corporate capitalists who fund their move toward fascism, with their suppression of voting and social programs as the first steps toward eliminating democracy.
Good Capitalism and Bad Capitalism: What’s Democracy Got to Do with it?
Well, everything. The capitalist ideologues equate capitalism with democracy, claiming that capitalism is inherently democratic, but it is not. The two are very different things, which may be found together, or very far apart and in direct opposition to each other.
When capitalism is democratic, it is because it is regulated by the government in order to restrain its tendency toward the concentration of wealth in a small financial elite. If required to contribute to the nation’s wellbeing, it will lean much more toward supporting the common good. In a true democracy, capital must contribute to maintaining social programs such as Social Security and in most economically developed countries, universal healthcare. When capitalism suppresses or overpowers democracy, it becomes increasingly bad for everyone except the capitalist.
China is an odd case, which demonstrates the distinction. Begun as a communist dictatorship, it remains a dictatorship, but dictates various social programs for social wellbeing, while enforcing its dictates from above. The political dictatorship manages a “command economy,” exerting pervasive social control, yet provides strong programs for social wellbeing.
The Chinese government fosters state corporations mandated to carry out economic programs and goals. It dictates its view of social wellbeing, with strict behavioral enforcement, but does not decide its policies by democratic process, except within the political elite. China has evolved a special form of state capitalism without democracy. It invests in whatever corporate structure it deems best to achieve its goal of economic development. There are markets, but most are tightly controlled by state edict. And China has its billionaires too, who run enterprises sanctioned by the political elite.
Today, in America, the old association of the word ‘socialist’ with communist dictatorships of the past is used consciously to demonize democratic attempts to make the economy work for everyone, not just the super-rich who now control it fully. Independent political scientists’ research has demonstrated that in most cases, legislation favors those who donate vast sums to the politicians. Now, the corruption is more and more direct,
Only corporate capitalists and multi-billionaire ‘tech bros’ can afford to financially influence legislation. And that is why they own America. As George Carlin used to put it, “America is a big club, and you ain’t a member!” In that sense, he also said, “They own you!” In an actual democracy, the people are full participants in decisions about how the nation’s wealth is to be managed and distributed. In a democracy, where the people own their nation, wealth must be moderated in order to provide for the wellbeing of everyone. Corporate capitalism’s priority–profit and wealth for the owners and financial elites–will not allow that, which is why their markets must be regulated,
In a democratic economy, money, goods, and services are circulated freely among all the people, not hoarded by an ultra-rich “Epstein Class,” whose members believe themselves to be above the law and morality, as well as the overlords of politics. Broad circulation of money and power is the essence of an economy that works for society, instead of the concentration of both at the top, which is inherently anti-democratic…
Democracy has everything to do with it. Democracy is the precursor and prerequisite to a healthy, equitable economy—and the wellbeing of the people—one that works for all because it works in harmony with Nature and is internally harmonious and focused on the wellbeing of all the people in society. The Europeans are not there yet either, but they at least recognize that healthcare and education are public goods, not a privilege for the few who are wealthy enough to afford them. More and more Americans are waking up to the fact that the corporate-controlled media have been lying to them.
Our problems are not due to immigrants, Black folks, the poor, or other vulnerable groups, or even imagined “enemies within”; they are the direct result of the domination of the entire society and culture by the ultra-rich “billionaire class.” The result is a “corporate state,” a nation ruled by the interests of corporations and the super-rich. Democracy exists in name only.
The terms, “democratic socialist” and “social democrat,” which are basically the same, are less and less terrifying to a generation not tainted by the era of Joseph McCarthy and the rein of terror in which Americans were arbitrarily accused of being ‘communists’ in the manner of a “witch hunt”— a term, interestingly, most recently deployed by a corrupt president to demonize anyone who objected to his exploiting the job and the nation’s wealth for his personal gain.
We are not likely to eliminate either irrationality or lying from politics very soon, maybe never, but we can look more critically at what politicians say in relation to what they do. It’s all about words and deeds.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 