Magical Words
by Joseph Rowlands
The purpose of philosophy determines the means by which it should be expressed. If you think philosophy is to win arguments and crush your opponent, then emotionally-driven statements and a barrage of arguments are the standard formula. If you believe that philosophy is just a kind of mental game you play to show off your intellect, then you might go for complexity, ridiculously long deductive chains, and a vocabulary that makes you sound like you're speaking another language. And of course, if you believe philosophy is a tool of living, and is a means of understanding the world and your role in it, you go with clarity, clarity, clarity.
Confusion comes in a lot of forms. One particularly vicious form is the package-deal. A package-deal is when two different ideas are combined into a single concept. By combining two different class of things into a single whole and saying they are essentially the same, you produce all kinds of confusion.
A relatively easy example is the notion nowadays of "rights" that include such things as freedom of speech, but also includes welfare, medical care, and (state-run) education. By combining these two very different types of ideas, you obscure the differences between them. In the first case you have a freedom from interference by others. But in the second case, you enslave others to provide you with benefit. This is an example where the differences are ignored, and contradictory notions are combined in an impossible way.
There are a few other types of package-deals. The one I want to focus on is words that have an emotional connotation. These words aren't just understood as a concept, but they have some feeling associated with them. And that means they have a value judgment associated with them. Instead of letting you draw your own conclusions, they've got conclusions embedded in them.
A first example of this is the term 'family'. The word can have a couple of meanings, including shared ancestry. But the common understanding is the people you grew up living with. Siblings and parents, and maybe grandparents and aunts and uncles.
Most people associate feelings of compassion, taking care of one another, security, and love with that term. They may have these feelings from their own background, but by adding these connotations to the term, they generalize in an inappropriate way. They associate these feelings with families, and it blinds them to any particular facts. When this happens, you'll have family members who feel obligations to one-another. You'll have people insisting that they love their family, even though they can't stand them. By thinking that family and these positive feelings are necessarily linked, they don't make the judgment on their own.
You may also have people who can't understand a bad family life. If your family is cruel and inhumane towards you, these outsiders will insist that you should "forgive them" and try to make it work. The actual facts of the situation are ignored, and people automatically assume the value judgment holds true.
A second example is the term 'marriage'. Most people have an automatic association between marriage and a loving relationship. That "happily ever after" stuff. Again, the effect is that people don't look at the facts and draw their own conclusions. They say "I'm getting married!" as if suddenly their life is changing and is going to be so much better. And some people actually say "Yes, we've had problems in the past, but that'll all change once we're married".
The facts of the situation are ignored. They don't look at marriage as what it is, but what they want it to be. They don't see that it's just a ring on the finger, and some recognition from the government. They don't see that the person they're marrying is the same person they've been dating, and that the relationship is only different in that it's harder to break up. Instead, they only see the romance and love they associate with it.
In both of these cases, and many more, the word grows to have an almost magical quality to it. No longer do you have to worry about what kind of relationship (that is, interaction) you have with the other people. By naming it one of these magical words, you seem to automatically acquire the value which they symbolize.
And so it is that people blind themselves to the potential of two significant kinds of relationships they can have with another person. Two potential values in their lives are placed on a pedestal where they leave them untouched by their reasoning minds. And when you abandon reason in the pursuit of any value, you doom yourself to failure.
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