In English-speaking cultures we have a language tradition in which people voice their exposure and contact with other cultures in xenophobic patterns. We are not taught to rejoice in meeting strangers. We are taught to beware, to be fearful. This language also provides a set of cognitive models and expectations which guide our cultural response to publicly articulated threats, threats often posed by politicians with self-serving motives, politicians threatening us with the supremacy or domination of us by another nation. A man says, “Do you want your children to live under the domination of Red Russia?” One must answer, “No.” The “No” is built into our language system. The question is a yes or no question. You’re going out of the system if you say anything else. If you say something else you’re a radical. Then the Man says, “If South Vietnam falls, it will topple all the staggering unstable dominos we support. If they fall your children will be in forced labor camps and communal farms with Red Guards. Do you want that?” Our response is built into our language structure. The politicians and the, news media are very aware of the predetermined patterns (though for different reasons—one for direct control, one for sales, equals $ equals a power of sorts).
I am proposing we break that conformity with a re-thinking, a total restructuring of our semantic network in a manner that the popular rhetoric of interpeoples differences and tensions reconstructs the experience of those tensions and then directs-our responses into alternate manners of eliminating tension. No more rhetorical questions. No more ‘Yes-No’ questions. Only questions which recreate reality, not lies, and ask us to answer in manners as complex as the reality.
Perhaps part of the problem is that words are only lineal. Western languages have lineal structure. Reality is not lineal. Therefore, words are inadequate to describe reality. According to Cherry visual imagery and spatial relationships are controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain while language is an exclusive property of the left hemisphere. Is it possible Western and Eastern cultures differ so greatly in perspective because the Chinese language is pictorial, is a non-lineal language in which symbols are built to portray reality instead of strung together to describe reality? Is it possible the inscrutableness of the Chinese is due to Western language-thought being founded in the left hemisphere and Eastern language-thought being founded in the right? Neurologically the right hemisphere (again according to Cherry) is the location of what we call the subconscious and also dream and spatial relationships. It is difficult for a man to communicate between his own conscious and subconscious. It must be near impossible for understanding to pass between Western and Eastern minds because it must be like one man’s conscious attempting to communicate with another man’s subconscious.
Western language tradition analyzes phenomena by breaking them down into components, into separately strung together parts. Preceding parts are considered to cause following parts. Everything is broken into cause-effect dichotomies. Is it possible our political tradition of left-right dichotomy is caused by our language tradition and that by using this descriptive model we structure our perception of reality and affect our reality by forcing it to polarize? (Ref. El Paso.)
Our perception of our political world role is affected by our language tradition. If our language-determined role model is skewed toward dichotomy, toward perceiving and establishing opposing parts, is that not the same as saying, the model causes tension? Our response to tension is also predetermined in our political rhetoric. Our language and thought patterns cause us to react to insecurities both aggressively and defensively. Our actions then cause others to react to us defensively and aggressively. The severity of conflict is heightened. This psychotic behavior propels us into divorce courts, into race riots and into war. Internationally this behavior is military threats and arms escalation. Why do we believe these will lessen tension? They increase it. Is it any wonder that the Soviet Union (its leaders also under the Western language tradition) maintains that if America builds a Safeguard system to protect its Minuteman ICBM force from destruction by Soviet SS-9 missiles, then they, the Soviets, must build a system that will destroy Safeguard. If they do not, the argument goes, they will be unprepared to deter an American assault. Then America says if we do not build a Safeguard system the Soviets may make a first strike against us and with it wipe our out ability to strike back. That will heighten their desire to strike. Each side says it desires to make nuclear war so devastating it will be unthinkable. No one would start such a war. America says do it by limiting your defensives. Russia says do it by expanding your offensive. Either way all the people die. It is a paradox—the more insecure we feel the more defensive we become. The more defensive we become the more we force those about us to be defensive. We thus increase the tension in an unintentional psychotic spiraling manner because of our inability to respond in any other way. Things often are not what they seem. (Minh.)
EXPLORATION TWO: Politicians, Political Rhetoric—How the system works. From the perception of the world in thesis-antithesis terms, more simply an us-vs-them mentality, rises the politician. In America, the pattern of government separated into branches with checks and balances is both an expression of conflict mentality and a cause of future conflict (institutionalizes the pattern—Egan). The political party system is an expression of the same thing. The politician is the tie between the two. It is he who elevates differences, purposefully creating conflict whether conflict exists or not.
It happens this way. A man saying he is the representative of many men about him declares his ideology and he declares his policy and he says his are the best for everyone. In order to defend his stand he must note the differences between him and others. In so doing he establishes conflict where only differences before existed. (There is nothing intrinsically wrong or conflicting about differences.) The man’s philosophy is self-serving to both him and the men supporting him. It must be. Politicians are a psychotic form unto themselves. They must gain power to serve. They live on power, by power, for power. They greedily accept it but it must be ‘sold’ to the masses. An effective ‘sales tool’ is fear, fear of differences the politician has just established and will now focus on selectively and accentuate. The policy becomes In The National Interest, or Manifest Destiny, or The Red Menace. The differences become conflicts, the conflicts are accentuated, the response to the heightened conflict is defensive and self-righteous. The interest of one man for the benefit of a select group of men has come to be the party or the nation’s policy. The party or the nation becomes aggressively defensive and forces the group who has become the ‘bad guys’ or the ‘political opposition’ into a defensive posture. The mutual perception of each other’s aggressive/defensive posture, the fear for one’s own security, results in a crystallization of differences, the establishment of obstacles to creative thought and finally to actions to eliminate the threat.
It begins with a dichotomy structure of rationality in our language, spreads to polarization of opinions with ever increasing tension. What we lack is a structure to drain off the tension. A country prepares for war and war is very unreal to those who prepare for it and who have never fought. Politicians make it noble to do your best for the men there. For the soldier it becomes his ‘Duty’ or his ‘Mision.’ (Ref. Pop R.) The men are often confused.
I enjoy some of the word games we play at war. Pacification. Vietnamization. Mechanical Ambush. Do I enjoy these because they stimulate me? Do I seek simulation thusly? (Ref. Cherry.) Those are the little word games the military machine has come up with. Perhaps there are others which are so buried in our language tradition we never notice them. ‘Some are big ones. By recognizing just what language is, we immediately recognize some of the more poorly camouflaged, some of the poor substitutes for reality. These are the words and phrases with extended connotations and denotations politicians and other leaders love to use. BEWARE: Servant-of-the-people; communist takeover; human rights; civil rights; self-determination; freedom. If someone threatens you with one of these or promises you one of these
, beware. Beware. Governments do not give freedoms anymore than they give taxes. Governments are in the business of restricting human action from unlimited freedom to parameters the people will find acceptable.
THE PEOPLE: That’s a good one. Who are the people? Why is it that whoever ever uses that phrase is referring to himself and the people he wants to control?
Let us develop a new mode of thinking which is more closely tied to reality than our present mode. A mode where every man is independent because his language allows him alternatives. This new way to think, to speak, will, should, allow greater freedom to participate in our culture’s therapy. Beware: political rhetoric is self-serving and self-limiting. In many instances it is, at best, irrelevant. The outcome of inter-peoples contacts often depends on factors totally detached from spoken words.
Using this manner of thinking in ref. to international conflict gives the individual person, the man-in-the-street, a new freedom to participate in the flow of history, in the direction of his nation’s policies, in the humanity of mankind. He need not have one voice with the president and only be able to express opposition in the form of a vote, one vote every forty-eight months. We can learn to become more independent of external pressures from politicians telling us that X people is trying to destroy us, from business trying to tell us we are not whole without their product, from race leaders telling us that every man from that other race is prejudiced against us and thus we best defend ourselves.
A common adverse effect of every organized system of thought, religious or governmental, is the encouragement of dependence. Governments make us feel that international and indeed even interpersonal relationships are beyond our comprehension and ability. Correct, relations can be achieved only through the augmentation of their system powered by our supportive backing. People today consider it impossible not to leave international affairs to the government. They consider it normal for the government to establish goals and quotas for racial and sexual harmony, equal-opportunity reinforcement. We have become victims of the establishment even as we have become part of it.
People who understand that conflict in interpersonal relations is a normal event, that it tends to come and go in cycles, that they are capable of dealing with others themselves without a rigid set of regulations directing them, these people will not wind up as victims, as automatons of the machine. They will not become dependent upon external sources for their security therefore they will not become defensive, then aggressively defensive forcing others into aggressive-defensive postures simply because X leader from Y country or B leader from C race says their security is threatened—says that because he needs that to keep him in power. People who understand will not become dependent on external sources for their security because they will be confident of their own competence to interrelate, to relate with all people of the world. They may consult professionals for information and advice when a problem seems beyond their own competence but they will accept responsibility for the routine management of their own relationships and extend them as far as they may go.
EXPLORATION THREE: Thoughts of Friends.
El Paso: With the exception of oil, world primary commodity prices dropped in relationship to the price of manufactured goods during the past several decades. The United States is partly to blame. During the 1950s the US produced vast quantities of inexpensive, exportable rice through a farm subsidy program. This resulted in an over supply on the world market and it destroyed the export market for Vietnam and it caused increased poverty in this land. (Incredible, how we are all tied together.) The industrialized West controls the price of manufactured goods because it alone is capable of producing such goods and it has the ability and wealth to control the price of raw materials. Poverty, need, causes conflict.
Egan: There are two ways to solve the problem of poverty and wealth between the haves and the have-nots. One, the poor can increase their wealth through increased production so that simply there is more wealth and everybody lives better and has a better standard of living; or two, wealth can be redistributed so the rich don’t have so much and the poor don’t have so little. Here the amount of wealth stays the same.
The first view is capitalistic, the second communistic or socialistic. Now, I ask you, under what systems in the world do we see people having the best standard of living? (Note rhetorical Q? Eg asks.) Empirically, is there any doubt?
Doc: The wars of the 20th century may be due to population pressures caused by longer life expectancy. In Vietnam, the introduction of Western medical practices caused the population to increase from sixteen million in 1900 to twenty-eight million in 1950. A 56% increase. Doc says he is not sure of his figures but that is what they tell new medics in San Antonio.
FO: If you think our society is sick maybe it’s because we are catering to the illness instead of promoting good health.
Cahalan: Critics and English teachers tend to see all stories as conflicts between antagonists and protagonists. In reality your best stories are written with the characters being people doing things people do. In good literature each character has good and bad qualities which interact with the good and bad qualities of the other characters. They intertwine, not oppose. That’s how it should be. That’s how life is.
Jax: All wars are expressions by suppressed people of their desires to rule themselves.
Cherry: Maslow once said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” If you’re a soldier, I guess you tend to see every problem as a target.
Brown: Sports are war. You’d kill a man to beat him on a basketball court if it were for the NCAA championship. Man, I love the game. I love the competition. But, we got to realize it’s part of our society which helps a crazy man like Nixon control the people.
Minh: Nothing happens by itself. Everything is unity. Though you may seem isolated from the rest of the world, everything you do is interconnected with the universe. You are not here alone.
The state does not exist apart from the individuals who comprise its citizenry.
There is no such thing as inconsistency. Inconsistencies are a product of a static view of life. (To me this rings true. I have heard and expressed these views before myself, in a slightly different slant. Minh, sometimes I think you are inside my head.) Life is a balance. For everything we acquire, we lose something. To dam a river to generate electrical power you must be willing to accept the loss of the river. You say love is inconsistent with hate. I say they are one. To eliminate hate is also to destroy love. (Perhaps he means to destroy the capacity to hate is also to destroy the capacity to love.) Perhaps that may be taken some steps further. I do not know. Is peace a quality of war? Can one be eliminated without eliminating both?
EXPLORATION FOUR: Personal Conflict—Marriage.
Conflict at all levels follows a pattern. At all levels it has seeds, it grows, evolves and finally explodes or perhaps the final level is, it dies. We liked each other, respected each other and perhaps loved each other. Or perhaps we only loved the image we each held of the other. Did our learned language control our perception of each other? Were our ideals of marriage and mates limited, controlled by that language? Were our responses within that marriage, our responses to each other, pre-established by language and thus predestined for conflict? I believe our respect for each other forbade us from stepping over pre-determined bounds and the limiting of our responses to each other destroyed us. These limits, these restrictions were both qualitative and quantitative. They confined our acceptable behavior to a mass-produced, language-induced, artificial rut. If we could graph emotions, ours would have been flat lines with no peaks of elation nor dips to despair. We became excessive only in our limitations and our boundaries were closing on the center. The limits on our emotions became a progressively steeper descent, a self-enhancing restrictiveness ever concentrating until we had no acceptable responses left and had to explode. The more thwarted I, and now I realize, she, became, the more we allowed ourselves to die. Suffoca
tion was evident in physical and sexual as well as psychological and social events in our lives. We had locked ourselves together in a decaying relationship. All this I believe was due to our accepting pre-established frequency responses in our language and they controlled our thoughts. Hawaii was an effect. It began like a movie script—every word and motion perfectly culturally acceptable, perfectly played. Oh, how well we knew our roles without even realizing we were playing them. The perception of differences we did not know how to accept led to irritation we could not diffuse. The irritation led us to entrench, to build false securities, to build walls. We sought and built separate support systems and we prepared for war. The walls heightened our fears and insecurities. We passed from defensive to offensive. We exploded. Perhaps divorce is the death of conflict.
EXPLORATION FIVE: The American Ideal in Vietnam.
We came not to conquer. We came to help. We came to insure security and independence. We came to end conflict. We said and we showed that we would selflessly lay down our lives to end this conflict. And yet our altruism has corrupted itself until we can only be satisfied with annihilation. We define everything about is in terms of conflict. As long as there are two sides there will be conflict and we have said we will not tolerate conflict. We will stamp it out. It is the same as sentencing Vietnam to total destruction and annihilation. Perhaps they do not need us. Perhaps without us they will annihilate themselves for they too are determined to end the conflict.
EXPLORATION SIX: Proposals and Solutions—A Proposal for Disarmament.
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