Language Manipulation

Since people are social, and that's how we survive in the world, is social connectivity, language is a major factor in how we perceive the world. Our worldview is, in the large part, shaped by language. Anything that's outside of our direct experience, we kind of rely on, you know, of course, video footage or whatever, but also language. That's a major factor. Language is not concrete, right? So we can get information that has been tampered with because somebody's tampering with the language. A manipulator uses language to manipulate people in a lot of ways. That's their main way of doing it, because language can be altered, and it could be 90% truth and a little tiny bit of manipulation, that kind of thing. There's degrees in which you can be manipulative with language. When I see words that are used that are out of context, and they're not appropriate, but they're leaning in a different direction, then, especially in recent years, things have changed. In recent, I don't know, five or ten years or whatever, words are being used in the place of other words that are more direct and more appropriate. One of the words I want to talk about today is react. So you see that word on TV and podcasts and news stations and everywhere. It's like, what is your reaction? They're asking for, really, what they're asking for is a response. But they've replaced that word response with react, a reaction. Now, the reason why I point this out is because reactions don't require your brain at all. A response requires you to think and then respond. A reaction is just your nervous system bypassing your brain and having an instant reaction, like you're walking through the woods or you're walking on a hiking trail, and there's a snake. All of a sudden, your body can, before your brain can even process it, you're already jumping back. You're already making a reaction that's not involving your brain. Your brain takes too long to think about it. So the reaction is to bypass your brain and get you to do something or say something without thinking about it. So a manipulator who wants you to bypass your brain and just react to what they say, and they want reactions and not responses. They want you to bypass your brain, outsource your thinking to them. And this is a subtle, very subtle, but it's like a brick in the wall of our perceptions. When we start changing words and changing just small things, then it reshapes our reality. Reaction is not the appropriate term, and you notice it's not in the other direction. It's not like you're saying reacting to a snake, right, or responding to a snake. You don't use it that way. It's always in the direction when these words are changed and they start using in normal discourse everywhere. It's always in the direction of the person or people in general not using their brain and outsourcing their thinking to other sources. And what's interesting is people, if you're a person, you say, hey, I want to think for myself. Who doesn't, right? But the problem is people think they think for themselves. They think that they are autonomous. They think they've got all the answers. But the problem is all their, a lot of their conclusions, they never sorted through and processed them themselves. They found a conclusion and then absorbed it. And then they think that's their conclusion. They never actually did the work to process that. So it's very easy. First of all, they don't know when they're right and what they're wrong. You know, if they, when they are confronted with a reality or argument that confronts that conclusion, they don't know how to react other than just getting emotional response, right? Because it's not really, they haven't thought it through. They didn't rationalize or use logic to come to that. It is a outsourced conclusion. So it's kind of like if you were to cheat on a test, right? You're sitting there, you don't know the problem, you don't know how to solve the problem, math problem, whatever, right? And you look over and you get the answer off of somebody else's page where you don't know if that's right or wrong. And if somebody confronts you and say, Hey, is that the correct answer? You'd be like, well, you know, I don't know. I mean, you would, you would hope because it's in your best interest that it's the right answer, but, but you don't have the ability to process and do the problem and fig come to a conclusive answer. And that's the problem with outsourcing your thinking and getting conclusions from somewhere else. And it feels right. It maybe looks right. You got convinced you got sold on it. You got, uh, you got your, um, you know, it feels good to have, be part of that, that, uh, that, that, that group of people that had that conclusion, but it's, it's not you being an autonomous person. It's not you coming to that conclusion is better off you saying, Hey, I don't have, I don't know anything about that topic. So therefore I'm not going to have any strong conclusions, especially if somebody is like really having a, uh, you know, a conniption or a, uh, like a total fit over defending a particular worldview or conclusion when they don't even like have no idea what they're talking about. They have, they've never looked into it. They lifted their head off from their, you know, um, you know, Tik TOK binging and look briefly looked at something, uh, they, they, you know, their, their, their social media, uh, stupor and they, they, they glance at something and they think they're informed. It's like, dude, people have, uh, looked, looked at these things for years. They spend their entire lifetimes trying to get to the bottom of things. Um, and you know, you just come along and, and, and thinking you're informed by just briefly looking at something, you know, it's just the Dunning Kruger effect, Dunning Kruger effect, where you think you're so ignorant on the topic that, that you don't even know what you don't know. So therefore you think you got it all down. You think you're the master, right? Um, so yeah, as an autonomous person, you have to realize what you know and what you don't know. And looking at, looking at language, like people don't even have a full, like it's hard enough, right? It's not really a criticism necessarily in this, this particular thing. It's hard enough to learn what words mean, right? And to understand a huge vocabulary and be accurate. And with that large vocabulary, it's not easy, you know, in, in, in English, especially, you know, like there's so many different words and there's so much meaning behind them and in different contexts, they can mean different things. So it's hard enough. So it's, it's real hard for, for people to just nail that down. So, and I think that's part of the reason why the term react came along and people just accepted it as the new term for response. They didn't really think about it because it's like, well, whatever, you know, it's the same to them. They might be thinking the same thing or it's close enough, whatever. But, but yeah, as an autonomous person, you want to pay attention to these things and process the information yourself. And because confirmation bias, it's just the thing people don't, they don't even know what biases are. A bias is a very common intellectual, like pitfall that you can, that, that everybody can fall for. It's very easy to the fall for these, these things that trip you up mentally. And it's, it's so common, they have names and the people list them out and you can look at all the different things and you can say, Hey, you know, here's things you might want to watch out for. And if you're not even aware of it, like somebody came up, somebody compiled a list of all the, you know, the quicksand on the trail and of life. And it's like, Hey, here's a map. All you got to do is to avoid these, these, these massive problems is to understand the, where the, where the quicksand is. Right. And that's the same thing with biases. It's like, people don't even look at them. They're not aware of them. They don't teach them in school that I know of. I haven't seen anybody teach him in school. And especially like, you know, grade school, it should be in every school every year and going through them constantly because they're so important to life. So if people aren't even aware of biases, then they're not going to be, they're not going to be, they're not even going to realize they're falling for, um, like a, like a confirmation bias or anchoring bias or Dunning Kruger effect. Uh, you know, these main, like very common. I mean, a lot of people know about it, but there's people that just head in the sand type thing, uh, that they're just completely oblivious. Right. So anyways, there's, there's so many things to say in this topic of guarding your autonomy and language and accepting language that's inaccurate is going to cause problems with your autonomy going forward in the future. Uh, especially when you're socializing with other people, you're talking to other people and their language has drifted away from reality so far that you can't even have a conversation with them. And that's what I'm seeing now that, you know, you gotta like define terms and stuff that, you know, people are talking past each other, like two TVs, uh, you put two TVs in front of each other, you know, they're, they're just talking past each other. There's no actual connection. There's no actual conversation. There's no meeting of the minds whatsoever. It's like, I'm right. And you're wrong. And you know, whatever, whatever it is, you know, it could be not even, could be a, it could not even be a, like a, um, adversarial conversation. It could just be a common conversation, but they'd still, they don't really understand what each other are talking about either, even though they're nice about it. Um, so yeah, you want to be able to stay grounded, have staying grounded with the rules of the language and, you know, have, you know, there's nothing wrong with like slang or whatever, but, uh, as long as you understand what it means, you know, you're like, I heard a word, so therefore I'm going to repeat it. Cause it sounds cool. It's like, well, you might want to look into what it actually means or what the context it should be used in or whatever. But, um, but yeah, it's, uh, the, the creep to the creeping of language into the weasel word territory or the manipulation territory, especially, you know, with the turning off your brain and accepting external information without question, air direction, uh, that that's the red flag that I find disturbing. And just want to kind of point that out and talk about it. Cause I don't hear anybody talks talking about these things that I know. I mean, I haven't heard anybody talking about these things and I think they're very important. Uh, if you want to be autonomous, you know, if you want to be a, a follower, a, uh, a sheep, you know, a person that doesn't think for themselves and you just want to go with the flow. Hey, I understand that, you know, there's, there's a lot of challenges in life to being autonomous. And if you got to go with the flow to survive, then I understand that. But, um, but yeah, if you want to be autonomous person, you want to think for yourself, do for yourself, understand things, understand every step that you take in your life and, uh, and, and make sure you're doing right. Not only for now, tomorrow, next year, and a hundred years from now, your family, your friends, your society is benefited by your actions today. You know, uh, you have to think about what you're doing, think things through that, you know, that's the common term. Did you think it through? Right. What does that mean? Well, you got to make sure that you think through everything, all the consequences of your actions all the way in the future, as far as you can possibly go. You know, some people are planning like some people, I mean, very rare. Some people are planning, you know, hundreds of years in the future, their life past their lifetime, way past their lifetime. And some people are just trying to make it through the day, you know, so, or the hour. So yeah, it's, it's the full spectrum of sophistication as far as thinking and understanding and all that stuff. But anyways, thank you for listening to this rambling rant. Hopefully it's been valuable and I'll see you next time. Thank you.