I am reading and thinking about the power of language at the moment.
That uneasy feeling? Cognitive dissonance: The terms public servant and public purse are used quite deliberately, yet we use the terms government and local authority in the same context, often without question. With talk of servants and public money we are given the illusion of control over this system of government and authorities, but if we buy into that view of the world and ignore the stink, then we are primed by language itself to blindly accept and obey our political masters:
Government: The act or process of governing, especially the control and administration of public policy in a political unit
Authority: The power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.
Something is wrong. We cannot simultaneously govern our servants and be governed by them. One thing is for sure: We are most certainly expected to comply with the rules and regulations of government and local authorities, whether we think that they are right - or believe that they are very wrong indeed.
We need to deprogramme. The sheer power of meaning contained within the barely conscious use of those words cannot be underestimated. A profound illustration of this could be seen in a recent spat on Facebook. A home educator's thread was hijacked by a group of schooled teenagers who believed that home education should be banned and all children should be "made" to go to school, presumably by the authorities. As one of them commented:
You weird people [home educators] should grow up and just deal with it. Government tells everybody what to do whether they like it or not. That's its job - it's what it's there for.
Which tells me that in some cases at least, school has indeed been incredibly effective at achieving exactly what it set out to do.
We have already seen how badly some of the people who desire this power over others have behaved with regard to their own expenses. Just over half, in fact. It is a poor argument indeed to claim that an action should remain free from scrutiny and criticism, merely because it is "within the rules". These people are responsible for the creation of "rules" by which they (sometimes) and we are bound. It seems to me entirely reasonable to expect a squeaky clean standard of conduct from those who make it their business to dictate standards of conduct to others, for as long as they continue to exist.
What this means is that whilst it's appealing to imagine that laws are nothing more than a formal codification of moral absolutes, in practice this is absolutely not the case. I for one would rather listen to my conscience than paragraph iv of subsection 4.2.
So what conclusions do I draw from all this?
1. The people who govern us can and do use language to control how we think - or don't think. And it's working.
2. The people who govern us are not necessarily decent, honourable or accurately representative of us.
3. The laws made by the people who govern us are not necessarily decent, honourable or accurately representative of us.
4. The laws made by the people who govern us are not necessarily necessary.
What do we do about it?
We use their language to our advantage. We make meaning crystal clear. We educate others. We ask the questions we want answers to, not pointless questions framed within a deliberately skewed representation of reality. We do not get sidetracked. We do not play the game. We equip ourselves with the knowledge and skills to understand how power hungry people manipulate others into doing their bidding. We share that knowledge and apply those skills. We are subversive. We try a million and one different tactics to see what works - as individuals, small groups, large groups, private groups, public groups, in real life and online. We do not give in or give up. We burn some incense for the hell of it. We make like pirates. We call a spade a spade.
We remain true to ourselves our families and our values, each one of us unique, unpredictable and ultimately uncontrollable.
They don't like that.
Excellent.
