In their surrealistic world, even language is pathologized. It mutates into a weapon of self-defence, a verbal fortification, a medium without a message, replacing words with duplicitous and ambiguous vocables.
They don't talk, or communicate. They fend off. They hide and evade and avoid and disguise. They lecture and hector and preach. In their planet of capricious and arbitrary unpredictability, of shifting semiotic and semantic dunes they perfect the ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like speeches. Their speech is impregnated with first-person pronoun density: it is saturated with first person pronouns ("I", "me", "my", "mine").
The ensuing convoluted sentences are arabesques of meaninglessness, acrobatics of evasion, a lack of commitment elevated to an ideology. They prefer to wait and see what waiting brings. It is the postponement of the inevitable that leads to the inevitability of postponement as a strategy of survival.
It is often impossible to really understand them. The evasive syntax fast deteriorates into ever more labyrinthine structures. The grammar tortured to produce the verbal Doppler shifts essential to disguise the source of the information, its distance from reality, the speed of its degeneration into rigid "official" versions.
Buried under the lush flora and fauna of idioms without an end, the language erupts, like some exotic rash, an autoimmune reaction to its infection and contamination. Like vile weeds it spread throughout, strangling with absent minded persistence the ability to understand, to feel, to agree, to disagree and to debate, to present arguments, to compare notes, to learn and to teach.
They, therefore, never talk to others - rather, they talk at others. They exchange subtexts, camouflage-wrapped by elaborate, florid, texts. They read between the lines, spawning a multitude of private languages, prejudices, superstitions, conspiracy theories, rumors, phobias and hysterias. Theirs is a solipsistic world - where communication is permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw others off the scent.
Their inability to listen and pay genuine attention stems from their overriding need to sustain their grandiosity and to rehearse their next lines, retort, or clever response while their interlocutor - really merely their audience - is talking. After all: why should they waste their precious time on listening when they are omniscient?
This has profound implications. Communication through unequivocal, unambiguous, information-rich symbol systems is such an integral and crucial part of our world - that its absence is not postulated even in the remotest galaxies which grace the skies of science fiction. In this sense, they are nothing short of aliens. It is not that they employ a different language, a code to be deciphered by a new Freud. It is also not the outcome of upbringing or socio-cultural background.
It is the fact that they use language to a different use: not to communicate but to obscure, not to share but to abstain, not to learn but to defend and resist, not to teach but to preserve ever less tenable monopolies, to disagree without incurring wrath, to criticize without commitment, to agree without appearing to do so. Thus, an "agreement" with them is a vague expression of intent at a given moment - rather than the clear listing of long term, iron-cast and mutual commitments.
The rules that govern their universe are loopholed incomprehensibles, open to an exegesis so wide and so self-contradictory that it renders them meaningless. They often hang themself by their own verbose Gordic knots, having stumbled through a minefield of logical fallacies and endured self inflicted inconsistencies. Unfinished sentences hover in the air, like vapour above a semantic swamp.
In every instance, language is used cruelly and ruthlessly to ensnare one's enemies, to saw confusion and panic, to move others to emulate them, to leave the listeners in doubt, in hesitation, in paralysis, to gain control, or to punish. Language is enslaved and forced to lie. The language is appropriated and expropriated. It is considered to be a weapon, an asset, a piece of lethal property, a traitorous mistress to be gang raped into submission.
Language is their lover. The infatuation with its very sound leads to a pyrotechnic type of speech which sacrifices its meaning to its music. Its speakers pay more attention to the composition than to the content. They are swept by it, intoxicated by its perfection, inebriated by the spiraling complexity of its forms. Here, language is an inflammatory process. It attacks the very tissues of their relationships with artistic fierceness. It invades the healthy cells of reason and logic, of cool headed argumentation and level headed debate.
Their Verbose and Florid Prose
Their writing is too embellished and ornamental. It is so cumbersome that it bothers on incomprehensible at times.
There are several reasons for such style of authorship:
1. Trying to impress and inspire awe rather than communicate and attempting to place oneself above the rest of humanity who are too inferior and stupid to truly understand one's depth, insights, and erudition;
2. An inability to separate the wheat from the chafe, giving every bit an equal weight (in extreme cases because of vanity and grandiosity: "every idea and shred of thought of mine ought and deserves to be recorded for posterity");
3. Perfectionism and fear of the imperfect and the imprecise;
4. Underestimating the readership and feeling the need to spoon-feed them rather than leave some space for free thought and own conclusions
5. "Stream of consciousness" recording (documentation) of every passing thought process in real-time and as it unfolds.
6. Feeling uncertain about the subject matter and disguising this deficiency with verbiage.
They don't talk, or communicate. They fend off. They hide and evade and avoid and disguise. They lecture and hector and preach. In their planet of capricious and arbitrary unpredictability, of shifting semiotic and semantic dunes they perfect the ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like speeches. Their speech is impregnated with first-person pronoun density: it is saturated with first person pronouns ("I", "me", "my", "mine").
The ensuing convoluted sentences are arabesques of meaninglessness, acrobatics of evasion, a lack of commitment elevated to an ideology. They prefer to wait and see what waiting brings. It is the postponement of the inevitable that leads to the inevitability of postponement as a strategy of survival.
It is often impossible to really understand them. The evasive syntax fast deteriorates into ever more labyrinthine structures. The grammar tortured to produce the verbal Doppler shifts essential to disguise the source of the information, its distance from reality, the speed of its degeneration into rigid "official" versions.
Buried under the lush flora and fauna of idioms without an end, the language erupts, like some exotic rash, an autoimmune reaction to its infection and contamination. Like vile weeds it spread throughout, strangling with absent minded persistence the ability to understand, to feel, to agree, to disagree and to debate, to present arguments, to compare notes, to learn and to teach.
They, therefore, never talk to others - rather, they talk at others. They exchange subtexts, camouflage-wrapped by elaborate, florid, texts. They read between the lines, spawning a multitude of private languages, prejudices, superstitions, conspiracy theories, rumors, phobias and hysterias. Theirs is a solipsistic world - where communication is permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw others off the scent.
Their inability to listen and pay genuine attention stems from their overriding need to sustain their grandiosity and to rehearse their next lines, retort, or clever response while their interlocutor - really merely their audience - is talking. After all: why should they waste their precious time on listening when they are omniscient?
This has profound implications. Communication through unequivocal, unambiguous, information-rich symbol systems is such an integral and crucial part of our world - that its absence is not postulated even in the remotest galaxies which grace the skies of science fiction. In this sense, they are nothing short of aliens. It is not that they employ a different language, a code to be deciphered by a new Freud. It is also not the outcome of upbringing or socio-cultural background.
It is the fact that they use language to a different use: not to communicate but to obscure, not to share but to abstain, not to learn but to defend and resist, not to teach but to preserve ever less tenable monopolies, to disagree without incurring wrath, to criticize without commitment, to agree without appearing to do so. Thus, an "agreement" with them is a vague expression of intent at a given moment - rather than the clear listing of long term, iron-cast and mutual commitments.
The rules that govern their universe are loopholed incomprehensibles, open to an exegesis so wide and so self-contradictory that it renders them meaningless. They often hang themself by their own verbose Gordic knots, having stumbled through a minefield of logical fallacies and endured self inflicted inconsistencies. Unfinished sentences hover in the air, like vapour above a semantic swamp.
In every instance, language is used cruelly and ruthlessly to ensnare one's enemies, to saw confusion and panic, to move others to emulate them, to leave the listeners in doubt, in hesitation, in paralysis, to gain control, or to punish. Language is enslaved and forced to lie. The language is appropriated and expropriated. It is considered to be a weapon, an asset, a piece of lethal property, a traitorous mistress to be gang raped into submission.
Language is their lover. The infatuation with its very sound leads to a pyrotechnic type of speech which sacrifices its meaning to its music. Its speakers pay more attention to the composition than to the content. They are swept by it, intoxicated by its perfection, inebriated by the spiraling complexity of its forms. Here, language is an inflammatory process. It attacks the very tissues of their relationships with artistic fierceness. It invades the healthy cells of reason and logic, of cool headed argumentation and level headed debate.
Their Verbose and Florid Prose
Their writing is too embellished and ornamental. It is so cumbersome that it bothers on incomprehensible at times.
There are several reasons for such style of authorship:
1. Trying to impress and inspire awe rather than communicate and attempting to place oneself above the rest of humanity who are too inferior and stupid to truly understand one's depth, insights, and erudition;
2. An inability to separate the wheat from the chafe, giving every bit an equal weight (in extreme cases because of vanity and grandiosity: "every idea and shred of thought of mine ought and deserves to be recorded for posterity");
3. Perfectionism and fear of the imperfect and the imprecise;
4. Underestimating the readership and feeling the need to spoon-feed them rather than leave some space for free thought and own conclusions
5. "Stream of consciousness" recording (documentation) of every passing thought process in real-time and as it unfolds.
6. Feeling uncertain about the subject matter and disguising this deficiency with verbiage.
