Language and Politics

"Luck," wrote Michael Lewis discussing the extraordinary career of Jim Clark in creating several new computer companies worth billions each, summing up a career in The New New Thing (p. 250), "is one of those unfortunate words that are required to do more than their share of the work." This article will touch on how general semanticists ought to note politics are affected or how they reflect the weight we give to words. We must recognize and help others to see how fuzzy concepts lead to societal confusion and what we call unfortunate outcomes and unintended consequences. Let us briefly consider the worldview behind such words as lucky and unlucky, and fortunate and unfortunate. They can tell us a great deal about how General Semantics works to inform us about the relationship between words and the reality that they well or badly undertake to describe. Words are not things but they shape things such as attitudes, votes, policies, and results. Many a person has been affected by the mere mention of a New Deal or a Great Society and some promise of help to the less fortunate. To say one is lucky or unlucky in love, card playing, financial and/or political matters, or life in general is to attribute failure or success not to skill, rational thinking, willpower, persistence, and triumph over circumstances but to fortune. It is to argue that our fates are independent of our actions. We Americans often say that life is a game. We not only measure things in terms of the football field but look at life as a contest on that field. Think of the commonly mentioned level playing field that "all men [and women] are created equal" are claimed to deserve. We have to remember that in any game there are winners and losers. Not everyone can expect to win or tie every game. Our system is capitalism and capitalism means competition. In a capitalist society, if we speak of the fortunate and the unfortunate or the advantaged and disadvantaged, the rich and the poor, the winners and the losers, we are actually revealing our fundamental if not always conscious belief not in the gifted and value of work, not in people being good at the game, but in luck. We are revealing that we believe we all are arbitrarily subject to the whims of fortune. Fortune is seen as a goddess. She stands precariously on a globe. Fortune rules the globe on which we live, and humankind is divided between those whom she--fickle as men say women are--favors and those whom she does not. Few there are of Seneca's lucky, "those over whom Fortune has no power." In another system called socialism, both the favored and the unfavored, they say, are treated equally. Wealth is redistributed and some money differences are ironed out but, as Mrs. Thatcher observed, socialism in the long run always fails because in time one always "runs out of other people's money." Have you paid your way in society? We like to say that capitalism offers the possibility of each and all to earn their own money. It offers no warranty. We all would like and should strive for fairness, an equal chance for all, but at the same time many of us say that the world is certainly unfair. We see that as The Bible says "time and chance happeneth to us all." The Bible no longer gives us the core connections we used to have, and the scriptures of other religions we are beginning to understand challenge our beliefs and threaten our political future. We have lost the Victorian belief that the imperium and its status quo is just. We no longer speak of the nineteenth-century deserving poor, a term that logically posited also the undeserving poor, the latter for some fault of their own not ready to earn what they need. They were the social equivalent of the religiously damned in Calvinist world in which the elect rejoiced. We used to say that if you did not work you did not eat. Now, we have a sense of entitlement but likewise the term social Darwinism. We expect or at least demand that we be rewarded whether we deserve reward or not, whether we have earned prizes or not. …