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Notes -
-Frank Herbert
Though this is a quote, I believe that it is so precisely said that it is worth posting on the top level.
This could be fine with some commentary. As Incanto said below it would be good to enumerate some examples that occur to you, and ideally offer some additional insight beyond the quote itself.
Personally I think there's some truth to it. Arcane language certainly is handy for bamboozling the peasants. It even works on the managerial class, since they're often a particular combination of embarrassed to call the speaker out, thus admitting that they're ignorant of the subject, and unwilling or unable to go to the effort of educating themselves on the particulars. C.f. how few people have any idea regarding the basics of how the financial system works. It's just something for the professionals to handle, I guess. Hope they're competent, honest, selfless public servants!
One of my favorite words to hear in normie discourse is "the economy". It's fascinating to imagine what internal understandings people are referencing when they say that. Got particularly interesting during the covid crisis, which imo revealed some of the enormous gaps in popular understanding of such matters. Particularly frustrating to me was the notion that we need to prioritize "lives" over "the economy". One wonders what they imagine is responsible for producing things like modern healthcare.
So I guess the insight I want to add here is that higher-ups will throw such words around to keep their inferiors convinced that smart people are in control, sure, but also that those inferiors will do their best to bluff by mimicking what they've heard so as to bolster their arguments, all the while swallowing the fear that someone will call them out and force them to explain precisely what those words mean.
Try asking someone who complains about 'capitalism' exactly what that is, sometime.
Probably a much earlier antecedent would be religions, which were often founded on a model where the people in charge had access to special knowledge which justified their position and which would explicitly not be shared with the followers. Many exceptions, of course.
(EDIT to continue) Occurs to me that this dynamic is particularly troublesome in the sort of democracy-ish model most modern nations seem to be pursuing. How can an electorate be expected to make good decisions when the key to securing votes is a confident smile and the ability to plausibly throw out a bunch of power-words in pleasant-sounding ways?
Yeah this is the frustrating part, due to the polarizing nature of democratic societies these words inevitably lose their meaning, or their meaning becomes fragmented based on the tribe you happen to belong to. In my opinion this is why democracy works best when it is restricted to an educated elite, although there are lots of issues with inequality and representation etc there. At least people can know what they're talking about.
Your point on 'the economy' is well taken. I'd imagine if you take 10 people off the street they all have wildly different ideas of what that is, exactly. Makes having an intelligent and reasonable national conversation basically impossible.
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I think one of the big disillusionments that almost everyone eventually experiences is just how poorly the average person models the world outside of his own personal experience. I’ve read a fair amount of political theories, and it’s absolutely nothing like what most people imagine the system to be like. Most people assume that the president has power over inflation. He doesn’t really have the power to do much about it.
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Doctors and nurses, mostly. With a few scientists doing science to invent the medicine (this science may involve mixing brightly colored, bubbling things in beakers). And paid for by the economy, which is a blob of money which can be moved around to pay for whatever, but is mostly stolen by greedy people in finance and politics.
I don't think "the nanny who watches the kids of the banker who approved the financing for the construction of the hospital is an important part of the system which produces healthcare" is really a natural thought.
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