Large Fierce Mammal

Source: https://www.lawyer-monthly.com/

“Growing up, I was always ahead of my contemporaries in my skills with the written and spoken word. To my great fortune, that gift was recognized and cultivated by a succession of exceptional Teachers. While I can’t pin down the date beyond the certainty that I was still in elementary school, I remember a day of epiphany. One of many I’ve had so far, this one respecting the power of words, and the awesome responsibility they place upon those who wield them.

“On that day, and in a flash of insight that made itself felt both mentally and physically, I came to the realization that, at my whim, I could influence the way another person felt or thought, in the short or long term, with the mere placement of a punctuation mark. The choice of one word over another, or their simple juxtaposition. When speaking, to one person or a group of any size, I could conjure even greater effect by combining words with the supporting expressions of intonation, body posture, gestures, and eye contact. As my understanding grew, so did my power, and with that the Spirit of the Thing Itself revealed new secrets to me in the form of timing, rhythm, the use of humour, and the all powerful pause.” ~ Worldly Wisdom Wednesday – The Way of Communication

Taking my words as quoted above, the average bloke might think I’m referring to something politicians and bureaucrats understand and wield entirely too well.

And that bloke would be wrong.

You see, Goode Reader, for Communication to be real, its crafting and utterance must contain one vital ingredient — CLARITY — even when the purpose of the message is subterfuge.

The Fencer understands the purpose and intention of a well executed feint — a threat that draws an opponent’s defence to a place that is not the intended target — and yet Clarity is neither lost nor subverted, for the ultimate purposes of the encounter are never lost in the conversation.

The charge of the Bear may be real, or a bluff — impossible for the one being charged to divine, and unknown even to the Bear until the last moment before contact. Even then, Clarity is everywhere.

One in pursuit of knowledge, and who finds a Teacher, has every reasonable grounds to expect that all messages conveyed therefrom will converge on sometimes dimly lit trails leading to a desired outcome.

The point to grasp from this is that for Communication to be Real requires that the sender and recipient come to be in possession of the singular, accept no substitutes, INTENDED message, whether they like it or not.

So, returning to politicians and bureaucrats, we find a culture that never stops messaging, but at the same time never actually Communicates, for to do so would necessitate commitment to a demonstrable Truth. Better to speak with faux conviction couched in terms that will leave an audience of a thousand people nodding their heads and stroking their chins, each believing they possess a total understanding of the message, but unknowing theirs is different from that taken away by each of the other 999.

In this, we get something that’s more stage magic than Communication.

This outcome requires a willingness on the part of the recipient to disregard all but the most superficial, feelings based, “evidence” of how things “must” be, and look no further. I once wrote here of an illustrative lesson I had cause to deliver to a deserving young woman back in the April of 2015:

“Mrs. LFM was there, at the time so pregnant she was ready to pop any second. We knew well before then that we were expecting a boy, and I finished with this — ‘We’re having a little boy soon. Let me use that to illustrate how the mere presence of an object is not necessarily a representation of intent. Let’s say you visit us after he’s born, and as you’re leaving you notice I’m filling the baby size bathtub. Nothing positive or negative about the event, I’m just doing it, but the filling tub and the naked baby, are in plain sight as you leave. Now enlighten me — can you tell from my possession of a baby and a filled bath tub if my intention is to give him a bath or drown him?'” ~ Stupid Is as Stupid Sees

While no one can be hypnotized who is unwilling to be, the complication of progressively more urbanized society creates a propensity for large segments of the population to be nose blind to the scent of bullshit. For comparison, those living in more rural settings thereby internalize a much closer-to-the-bone and visceral understanding of what food security, return for labour expended, quality and dependability of telecommunications, and the “timely” arrival of emergency services really means. In short — self-sufficiency, warts and all, in favour of a self-deluding, “They’ll take care of it,” 911 mindset of willingly infantilized dependency on the sugar daddy of government.

We need look no further than the current state of the nation as it strains under unprecedented stress to see the Truth in that.

Returning to methodologies and first principles, here’s the Esteemed Officer Crabtree to flesh out the matter for the still confused.

I’ll sing myself out today with this reminder:

“Communication is at its most powerful when all extraneous noise is stripped away. Think on this.” ~ Worldly Wisdom Wednesday – The Way of Communication