In the neutral context of a fictional future society, Poul Anderson neatly demonstrates how a loaded word acquires layers of meaning, including some that are merely emotional:
"'"Chaotic" is a broad cussword. It covers the few maniacs who do exist, along with everybody else who seriously wants to be rid of the Avantists.'" (p. 149)
When I visited Lisa, a Polish friend in Manchester, she mischievously told an older Polish couple, "Of course, Paul's a Communist." I was immediately subjected to a tirade on the wrong assumption that I was a Stalinist. When I was asked whether I had read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, I tried to answer "No (true at the time) but I have read Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed and Cliff's State Capitalism In Russia." However, I was interrupted after "No..." on the wrong assumption that I knew nothing of dictatorship, tyranny or oppression in Russia. I should have answered "Yes." That would not have been a lie in the circumstances since the question just meant "Do you not know that there is oppression in Russia?" When I managed to present some sort of coherent reply, Lisa, rightly, said that I sounded as if I were merely reciting a rehearsed argument to which I replied that she had put me in a position where I could do little else.
This same couple knew, as far as they were concerned, that no black people were any good. The degree of their entrenched prejudice was frightening. I suppose that I learned something from the experience, first, how deep prejudices can be and, secondly, maybe how to respond more effectively in future. Incidentally, Lisa pulled the same stunt again in the presence of another Polish guy but this time even she wanted to stop his passionate monologue, addressed to me, about Communist evils. While he was still speaking, I had to leave to keep another appointment so I began to make my apologies at which point he, seeing me getting up to go, switched to apologizing and simply did not hear me saying that I had to leave at that time for other reasons. There are times when dialogue is impossible. Obvious lessons: listen to, and respond to, what the other person in fact says. Learning is possible.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Are you STILL incline to think well of Trotsky? Everything I've learned about him says he was no better than Stalin, the only difference being that he lost the struggle for power after the monstrous Lenin died.
Sean
Sean,
I accept his and Cliff's analysis of Russia under Stalin. But my point here is that one word, mischievously applied by my otherwise good friend Lisa, triggered an emotional reaction, a set of erroneous assumptions and an inability to hear anything I tried to say. Anderson safely represents this sort of situation by showing us how the word "Chaotics" is used in this fictional future.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I certainly agree on the necessity of avoiding offense and that Lisa should have been more careful about using words that would cause an extremely strong, even irrational reaction from certain persons.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
If my first comment here seemed too heated, I can only offer in some extenuation that too many millions of murdered innocents died at the hands of Lenin and his associates (INCLUDING Trotsky) in the name of their Marxist ideology for me to ever have anything but scorn and rejection for them. Lenin and his successors destroyed a great nation which, in 1914, had so potentially much that was good open to it. The Russia of today is a broken, exhausted shell of what it was once was in 1914. And I put the blame for that on the fanatical Lenin, who began what Stalin merely extended and completed.
Sean
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