Have you ever actually tried to communicate with someone? It's borderline impossible. Sometimes things fall out of a person's mouth, and leave me stunned. Other times I'll say something I figure is completely innocuous, and the person hearing it assumes I said something completely unrelated. To paraphrase some dead guy I'm not going to bother to look up, "Words are meager things."
There's this notion that floats around among philosophical types; Wittgenstein's Lion. The premise is as follows: If you met a lion who was completely fluent and able to speak in English, you still wouldn't be able to understand them. The idea here is that the frame of reference a lion is coming from would be completely alien to you; their concept of what's important and what flows from what is utterly separate from yours.
Is that a little hard to understand? If it is, it sort of proves the point. Think about it this way; look at Facebook comments. Rambling, baseless insanity, for the most part. These people are still trying to make some kind of point though, they just fail because they have no idea how to communicate clearly. Let's take some big buzzwords that people have bizarre Pavlovian responses to. How about the word "liberal"? The meaning of that word is going to be very different depending on the context it's being used in, as well as the personal context of whoever is using it. FOR EXAMPLE! Here in Canada, the two meanings that immediately pop into mind are a) a member or supporter of the Liberal party, or b) a person who has chosen a side in the culture war, as generally on the side of "progressiveness". Sometimes people mean both at once. The original meaning, however, merely refers to a person's preferred socio-economic system, which encompasses both people referred to as liberals, as well as their supposed enemies, the perfidious conservatives. Basically, they agree on nearly everything, aside from how rude you should be while you go about your business. To this end the word has lost nearly all meaning, so much so that now people often use it to mean communist, which is literally the exact opposite of a liberal. To quote a major historical figure that I refuse to name (you can look it up), "Don't trust the liberals, they will betray you."
Now, someone hearing me drop that quote could assume that means I'm a conservative, since their entire conception of reality has been hemmed in to these narrow definitions. "He said he doesn't like liberals, so I'm clear to spew unpleasant racist shit at him" or "He doesn't like liberals, so I bet he's a huge racist and a homophobe."
Or how about this; a few months back there was one of these exhausting social media circuit things. A professor made some comment about how "If someone says 2+2=5, the first thing you should do is find out where they're coming from." Insufferable *Logic and Reason*(tm) guys passed this around to generate click-based ad revenue, shrieking "OF COURSE 2+2=4, LIBERALS", but there was something to the guy's point; find out where that person is coming from, because hey, there are other ways of counting besides base 10! What if the guy saying this was coming from a headspace where the default method of counting is base 3? He'd still be wrong, since 5 doesn't exist in base 3, but fuck you, you're wrong too!
The reason this is so frustrating to me is that it can require a tremendous amount of effort to make my actual thoughts on something clear. Any so called "hot button issue" would need to be preceded by 45 minutes of me defining terms and historical contexts before I start actually describing how or what I think about anything in particular. Who's going to sit through that? How many tiktoks could someone watch in that time? So I suppose the major lesson here is, I should probably just shut up.
The flip side of this is, sometimes you understand someone's context so well that communication that looks meaningless to an outsider can do a huge amount of work. Take, for example, the title of this post. Yes, Wittgenstein sort of sounds like Win Ben Stein. It popped into my head as a reference to another thought I had one time. There's this comedian I sometimes watch on streams. On an episode of the podcast he's a part of, they were fucking around with extremely stupid jokes, and when someone was talking about Michael Keaton, he started laughing and said "What if his name was Michael Penis?" Then, on a later stream, he made some reference to Win Ben Stein's Money. Without thinking, I punched in "Win Ben Stein's Penis". He saw this, repeated it, and laughed. We were on the same wavelength, and in that moment, truly human.
Well anyway, I've done the first pass on the next part of the story I've been working on. Longtime sufferers of this blog might remember that the first pass is extremely simple; stick figures in basic poses, placeholder dialogue, and vague ideas of what the sets look like. Barely even worth posting, if at all. I've never let that stop me, though!
