Collapse of the First Global Civilization Part 5

Language, Government Gridlock and the Breakdown of World Communications

Bruce Nappi

Published in

Extra Newsfeed

43 min readJan 17, 2016

Previous Parts in the Series

This series addresses the current environmental crisis in light of major new discoveries about human culture.

Part 1 introduced the two major reasons the First Global Civilization has started into collapse: over population vs. limited resources, and complexity vs. limited human brain ability. The A3 discoveries were also introduced. They will be used throughout the series to explain in more detail why these two problems are causing the collapse and how society can best get through it. This part also explained how the world, until just after WWII, still lacked an adequate scientific understanding to see how human civilization was approaching a limit to sustain human life.

Part 2 discussed how the scientific studies finally started coming together in the late ’50s to expose the impending problem. The studies quantified how our current world population is using resources faster than the earth can replenish them. The studies showed that the “storeroom” of critical supplies nature created before humans arrived is running out. Humans, however, were not able to accept the new scientific observations.

Part 2 then briefly explains why the new science alone was not sufficient to successfully change human behavior. Even though people throughout the world see evidence right in from of them, because of limitation of human thinking, most humans aren’t able to understand the science or VISUALIZE the implications. There are some people who did understand it and tried to explain to the world the impending ecological crises we face.

In 1962, Rachael Carson write the book Silent Spring about the world wide death of birds due to DDT. Large public protests occurred. It still took over 10 years of protests, the establishment of the Environmental Defense Fund, and many expensive lawsuits for the US to respond with a national ban on DDT. A similar process occurred after the publication of Farman’s 1985 report on the Ozone Hole. But, the phase-out of Freon only started in ’94 with a “directive” from the UN, with further enforcement by the EU in ’97. However, this problem has still not been put to bed! Only as recently as 2007, at the Montreal climate summit, did most of the countries in the world agree to stop fluorocarbon use. But even then, the complete ban date was kicked down the road to 2020! (#1)

For the last 40 years, world governments, university professors, leaders in the environmental movement and many media celebrities have talked about the problem. But they have made very little progress. Society, however, has made major breakthroughs before, like putting a man on the moon. So, why have these 40 years of talk been so unsuccessful?

Part 3 explained the concept of the “Stone Age brain” and how the limits of current human brains are not capable of dealing with the complexity of modern technology or the complex social structures we have set up. Human brains are fine tuned for quick responses to dangers immediately at hand. If your house catches fire, and you see the flames, your brain will instantly think of many ways to get out. When the problem is very complex, and the details can’t be directly observed, human brains don’t do so well.

Part 4 went beyond the simple inability of human brains to understand complexity and discussed deep psychological barriers Stone Age brains have that block people from taking action.

All parts of this series are based on the A3 Discoveries

In this Part, the following issues are discussed:

How FLAWS in human language contribute to the breakdown of cooperation in society.
Why ALL democratic governments are in gridlock.
The widespread breakdown in communication around the world.

The Language Tragedy

Language learning is based FIRST on emotion

In Part 3 of this series, I discussed how our Stone Age brains have a very limited ability to understand the problems of over-population, resource depletion, and complexity. What puts our limited brain ability in double jeopardy is another brain limitation described as discovery 12 in Part 1:

Humans initially LEARN LANGUAGE, not as logical reasoning, but as an emotion-behavior process.

After infancy, and early childhood, most humans eventually go through another childhood learning stage that develops their logical based reasoning. The first-learned behavior-based structure and memories, however, stay solidly in place as the person’s primary response system.

The behavior-based structure persists throughout adulthood and remains the first response the brain makes to new perceptions.

While that process provides a strong survival advantage for primitive hunter gatherers, in a complex world, it leads directly to conflict.

Unfortunately, it is the persistence of this primary response that causes terrible problems for adult social interactions in a complex world. The learned behaviors acquired during the early learning process can disrupt and redirect logical thinking. They can’t easily be changed because they are part of the early development brain structure which is wired to be driven by direct experience. However, if this structure and process is understood, education can be used to counter the conflict behaviors it generates. Society has not figured this out yet.

How does this early language learning process actually occur?

The human brain, at birth, has most of its neurons. They are arranged in layers. However, the interconnections between layers are mostly not formed. These connections form during childhood and define the behavioral stages we observe.

The part of the brain responsible for processing emotions is one of the first to develop after birth. Early experiences impact brain development and influence how the brain becomes “wired”. Experiences that the five senses bring in help build the connections that guide brain development. Early experiences have a decisive impact on the actual architecture of the brain.

Emotions develop in layers, each more complex than the last. The stress response develops immediately, from birth through age 3. Recognition of speech sounds also begins at birth. A six-month-old can recognize the vowel sounds that are the basic building blocks of speech. Vocabulary starts growing during the second year. Empathy and envy begin to develop during the second year through about age 10. Language skills are sharpest early on but grow throughout life. (All of these age numbers are typical, and can vary widely.) (#2)

Notice, however, that before vocabulary learning starts, children are still able to interact with others and can do so in complex ways. They can respond very quickly to things people say and appear to do so as if they “understand” the logic adults associate with the spoken words. Until only recently, scientists were being fooled by these complex “behavioral responses”, believing they were logically thought out responses.

There is an old phrase: “the age of reason”, which describes the point in brain development when a child switches from reward-punishment thinking to “reasoning based on rules and conventions of society”. (#3). This usually occurs around the age of 7. After the “age of reason” transition, which can occur over a wide age range, and not at all in some people, we see “logical reasoning” appear. But the basic foundation for the logic-emotion-perception connection is still stored by the brain in its primary learned form, which includes the emotions related to the words when they were learned.

One of my discoveries was to understand the precise steps humans go through, to learn verbal language. I emphasize “verbal” because this skill develops very differently from other communication forms like written, “sign language”, or symbolic communications like pictures and drawings. Sign language and pictures have become a more complicated distinction of humans since many successes have been demonstrated teaching monkeys and apes to communicate with hand gesture signs and symbols. Infants, for example, can learn to communicate through pointing, crying, and facial expression much earlier than they can learn sounds. Infants can also learn to respond to sounds and words long before they can speak them or logically understand them.

Verbal sounds are not initially learned in infancy as a logic tool, but rather as simple sound patterns that cause others to act to satisfy their physiological and emotional needs. This is similar to the learning model proposed by Pimsleur. It is only after a large vocabulary of single word-sounds are learned, that children learn to connect words into short “logical” groups. I call these groups single sentence logic. At that point, the logical connections are still very “loose” and very often erroneous.

Science is just starting to figure out how children’s brains are processing the symbols and sounds. My observation of word use is actually based on how logic is formed when word sounds, especially longer groups, are being learned in association with emotional tone — i.e. anger, laughter, facial expressions etc. “I told you not to do that”, in a harsh voice with a facial scowl, for example. My favorite is listening to the long string of curse words that 2 year olds can repeat, not knowing even the basic meaning of the words. I have seen this continue, recited as “rote” verses, into the teen years (need I add adults to this), with little understanding or complete misuse of the actual meaning of the words they are using.

The age of reason

As language learning moves to the “logic” stage, regional and cultural differences introduce huge variations. These variations have now come to produce substantially more confusion than earlier in society due to the internet. While earlier societies had large differences in word meanings, in local use, the definitions were refined for uniformity through local dialog. On the internet, there is no such closed community to reinforce meaning through experiential interaction.

Not until humans approach “adolescence” CAN they learn finer word distinctions. I highlighted “can” because when adolescents become able to learn words and logic, most don’t do it willingly or rigorously.

It is also clear that the ability of humans to use words, and deal with their multiple definitions and fine details, has a very wide range of accuracy and repeatability — including none at all. The wide range of variability is further stretched when logic needs to be maintained, not just in one sentence, but over multiple sentences, paragraphs or separate writings. Looking at observations of world society and education, language skills have never been very strong, and are now in serious decline because of the modern “tower of Babel” humans have built that we call the internet.

Single Sentence Logic (SSL)

SINGLE SENTENCE LOGIC (SSL) is the process of memorizing multiple words as an associated logical group. A single logic sentence can range from a simple two word phrase to a full multi-word sentence: be smart; torture is evil; eat well and live long; education is good for our country; watch out for Friday the thirteenth; the police are our friends; if you see a cop, run! What makes it SSL is that our middle brain (see Part 4) generates not only a “logical connection”, but an emotion when it visualizes the words in the sentence together. SSL plays a huge role in human communication.

Stone Age brains have a huge capacity for storing SSL sound patterns. They are learned from parents and teachers, but also media sound bites, political speeches, poetry, song phrases and peer interactions. Rap music is an SSL field day. SSL memory for verbal sounds is similar to the musical memory for “riffs”, which are simple repeated note patterns.

SSL allows memorizing long pieces of text through a process of serial SSL association. A well known memory technique is associating names and faces with an already learned logical sequence. SSL is also the basis for learning the tenets of religious and philosophical systems (Confucianism, conservatism). They are also the basis of the knowledge learned in many professions (accounting, law, medicine). In such systems, each of the SSL phrases are individually memorized. They may or may not be logically consistent with other phrases.

Because extensive knowledge groups can be memorized without the need for philosophical logical rigor, SSL is also the cause of a worldwide language minefield! The term “logic” in SSL, only means association. It does not mean philosophical truth. So, on the negative side, SLL is the foundation for common sense, superstition, propaganda, regimentation, bigotry, nationalism, and hysteria.

Unfortunately, modern communication has become so corrupted, that all world nations have become the equivalent of insane asylums. I don’t make this claim lightly. This is possible because SSL allows all humans to simultaneously hold in memory, and use in running conversation, statements that are completely contradictory. For example, consider a phrase most people know well: “opposites attract”. This is “obviously” true, right? Stop a second. Ask yourself if you believe that? Isn’t it obvious, positive electric charges attract negative charges. North magnetic poles attract south poles. Males attract females. What more proof do we need?

But hold on! Does black attract white? Does heat attract cold? Does sticky attract slippery? Bright attract dim? Day attract night? Yet, can’t we all remember hearing the “opposites attract” claim many times, and seeing people take action based on that statement? In fact, if we keep thinking of opposites, we will find that most opposites don’t attract. So, look what this tells us. Humans can take action on ideas that pop into their heads, even though there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And the more emotionally disturbed they are by a situation, the more likely they are to do so. Here are just a few other examples of contradictory ideas individuals routinely have: what foods are good for you, and what you actually eat; new year’s resolutions that you never keep; that weight you promised yourself you need to lose; whether you can trust the government; whether you can trust anybody; are you a good person; are you a bad person. Most likely, you will flip flop on every one of these depending on your mood and how serious you are facing up to yourself. How often do you practice what you preach?

A situation where we see contradictions often come out is what we call hypocrisy. One form of logic is presented at one time that conflicts with another form of logic presented at another time. It becomes “hypocrisy” when the person’s response to challenges is denial and rigidity rather than wisdom seeking and change.

Trigger words

Trigger words are words that are used frequently in society which bring out strong emotions in many people. These words are so powerful, they can often lead to very extreme action, such as violence, riots, and war. A good example is labeling someone a “liberal” or “conservative”. Some problems with trigger words are:

They draw reactions that may not be the reaction a speaker or writer expect will occur.
For very emotional words, the mind of listeners and readers may become so disturbed just hearing or reading the word that logical thinking is shut off.
The listener and reader, while still listening and reading, may zone out and totally miss material.
Their subconscious will still record parts of additional material, but will screen it, interpret it, and save it based on the overriding emotion. This can add additional emotional disturbance as well as completely misinterpreting the message.
Very strong trigger words can launch full attacks of denial or hysteria.

Now, consider the problem of trigger words in light of the previous discussion of definition variability. Many words that bring strong emotions have been around for a long time. Over that period, they often change meaning. In fact, the change can be so great that the original meaning gets totally reversed. “Liberal” and “conservative” are such words.

During Roman times, “liberalis” meant: suitable for a free man. By the middle ages, it meant: selfless; noble, nobly born; gracious, munificent, generous, free from social control. So, for most of history, to be liberal was a “good” thing. It was associated with “liberal education” and “liberal arts”. In 1776, a new twist was added by Adam Smith who talked about: “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation.” This introduced the new concept that “liberalis” could apply, not only to a person, but to business and government. “Liberals were committed to using the powers of central and local government pragmatically and constructively, so as to secure order, economy, free-market conditions and self-improvement.” (#4)

Controlling words

But when political groups engage, each group wants to control trigger words that are viewed as good words and bad words. They want to claim that the “good words” apply to them and the “bad words” apply to their opponents. To do this, they go into denial. They LIE to themselves about established definitions. Through speeches and writing, they force their members to shut off all the associations the members know that don’t belong in the group’s current belief set. Using SSL, they find specific uses of the “good words” that support their beliefs. They then voice those uses over and over and deny that the words can mean anything else. A similar strategy is used for “bad words”. They associate bad connotations with “bad words” and then use SSL to associate the bad words with their opponents.

Most humans are not aware this is happening and are powerless to stop being brainwashed by it. In the modern word of political doublespeak, this kind of brainwashing is called, “informing the public” or “just a person’s opinion”. In times past, we would have called it “Propaganda”.

In modern politics, for example, if money is spent “liberally”, and some faction thinks that such spending is harmful, that faction will declare “liberal” a bad word. They will claim that those who support the “liberal” spending should be tarred and feathered. For those who believe increasing the size of government is harmful, being “liberal” with government growth will be declared a bad word. However, if the same people promote the unlimited growth of: population, industry, and the extraction of raw material, even though “liberal” currently means “excess”, they will deny that the word “liberal” applies to these situations.

Now, think of the problems this use of trigger words and selective SSL causes when people from different backgrounds come together for discussions. When each person hears a trigger word, their brain is immediately flooded with SSL that supports their preferred set of beliefs and emotions. It’s as if each person is then speaking a different language, even though the words are the same.

Here’s a specific example. A group of people hear a speaker say, ‘LOVE your NEIGHBOR as yourself.’ The two emphasized “good” trigger words give everyone a “good feeling” twinge. But the group might have very different people in it? Here are a few examples: a clergyman; a ruthless landlord; a homeless person; a policeman. Now consider how each of these people might deal with the emotions raised by ‘love’ and ‘neighbor’ as they listen to additional things in the speaker’s talk. The speaker brings up the topic of the war in Vietnam.

The clergyman sees the war as a trial of life. Yes, we have to fight some people. But those people, wherever they may be, are, firstly, God’s children. We must view them with respect and caring as we would a neighbor.
The ruthless landlord loves his family and his neighbors. But those people in Asia aren’t neighbors. They are barbarians. We should kill them.
The homeless person: Sure. It’s easy to talk about “love” and “neighbors”. I had them once. But now, this is obviously a talk for someone else. I can’t even get a buck to buy something to eat. “Love” and “neighbor” talk is just political double-speak for politicians to push the burden of hardship back on us. I believed the political lies. I fought in that war. Now they treat us like trash.
The policeman first thinks of his kids. But the feeling doesn’t last long. Who does this speaker think he’s talking to. He’s never walked a beat before. Sure people talk about love and neighborly caring. But around every corner is a wolf hiding in sheep’s clothing. One neighborhood gang is fighting all the others. So, you have to be suspicious about everyone. Who care’s about Vietnam. The war is right here.

Word precision problems

Besides the wholesale misuse of words due to differences in what people believe they mean, we also face a serious problem of the imprecision with which people understand definitions. All people in society, especially academics, need to understand that serious problems can occur when definitions are not carefully stated and adhered to. In fact, the problems of misusing definitions have become so immense, they are a key factor in the impending collapse of humanity!

A recent paper published on an academic website was titled Professors Disagree On Climate Change. It’s actually a pretty common statement. But being common, it has also picked up a lot of emotional and political baggage. While it makes a juicy article heading, it also sets the stage for a lot of controversy and poor decisions if its hidden assumptions aren’t recognized right from the beginning. For example, in the academic world, there are frequently disagreements over specific points in even the most well accepted theories. Gravity and all the laws of physics are good examples. So, telling an academic audience that some professors don’t agree on something isn’t at all unusual or controversial. But to the public, it sounds like a significant statement. So the assumptions behind the meaning of the word “disagree” need to be stated here. The words, “climate change” cover a lot of ground — thousands of subtopics in fact. So not stating what the phrase “climate change” is specifically talking about leads directly to confusion and misinterpretation. A more appropriate title would have been something like: Two well known professors study differing results in polar vortex climate temperature data.

Another example is a political announcement to the effect that, “we will fight to the end to resolve this issue.” Why doesn’t it say, “we will cooperate to the end ...” The point is, “fight” and “cooperate” have clear definitions. Why would the citizens of a country want to elect a candidate that, from the start, expresses a fight approach, rather than a cooperative approach? The actual definition of the term “fight” has been lost to society. If the political candidates intend to do this fighting in their role as delegates in a “democratic” government, then what has been done to the definition of “democracy”? Maybe our society has taken our government back to the days of the Gladiators.

Each of these examples shows that the words, though having accepted meanings, have had their definitions given up in favor of their “trigger” value. When we see this, it is clear the “contest” is no longer in the realm of logic.

Another problem with modern language and word precision is the lack of universal agreement on any word. If you look for the definition of words like “democracy”, “socialism”, “capitalism” etc. with the goal of studying them, or writing an opinion piece about them, you won’t find a definitive one. Instead, you will quickly find many different statements in academically responsible sources that say something like, “there is no accepted definition for xyz” etc. I did such a search not long ago for “capitalism” and “socialism”. Yet the same publication, that contained papers that stated there was no definitive definition, also published hundreds of papers discussing both of them in detail. How does that make any sense? Essentially, the “Emperor has no clothes”. Yet, the scholars of our kingdom are publishing papers on the quality of the cloth and skills of the Emperor’s tailors! Similar situations occur in both law and medicine where decisions are made based on whether some result meets some definition. But when the definitions are arbitrary, the outcomes are subject to substantial injustice.

The significance of this is that, Stone Age brains have more concern for their personal viewpoints (fear that others might control them) than cooperative efforts to work together. And since most humans can only think using Single Sentence Logic, having multiple dictionaries appears reasonable to them. IT ISN’T! Without commonly agreed upon definitions for almost every working term that forms the basis of our social vocabulary — freedom, life, liberty, happiness, equality, rights, justice, etc. — a complex, interdependent society can only operate with very low justice and efficiency.

Narrow-mindedness

Once again we see Single Sentence Logic at work. Narrow-mindedness has been a huge problem in human society since the dawn of time. My research suggests that society’s failure to make inroads addressing narrow-mindedness is because it is more complex than anyone thinks and very different from what most people believe, including the scientific community. They still don’t understand it.

The major misunderstanding is that we view narrow-mindedness as a choice. That is, society views narrow-mindedness the way medicine viewed homosexuality 50 years ago. We think we can change narrow-minded people just by “reasoning” with them. We can’t. Narrow-mindedness is primarily a medical condition. The narrow-minded person’s BRAIN is not wired the same as other brains. To understand this better, let’s look at the definition, some synonyms and some antonyms for narrow-minded.

Definition: Unwilling to grant other people social rights or to accept other viewpoints; not willing to listen to or tolerate other people’s views; not receptive to new ideas; having a closed mind, not willing to accept opinions, beliefs, or behaviors that are unusual or different from your own; lacking in tolerance or breadth of vision.

Notice how many variations I found with a short online search.

Synonyms: conservative, partisan , opinionated, one-sided, short-sighted, small-minded, partial, bigoted, prejudiced, biased, conventional, old-fashioned, reactionary, blindfolded, parochial, provincial.

Antonyms: progressive, impartial, objective, unbiased, broad-minded, liberal, open-minded, tolerant, unprejudiced.

Notice the political slant of many of these words. This is not a coincidence. Society believes political divisions are completely due to choice. That the views of different political groups are just points of view. This is very wrong.

To be clear, narrow-mindedness is primarily caused by an inherited brain structure. Those brains are optimized for storing facts. They conceptualize life as a huge collection of “logic bytes”, or SSL. They are fast talkers and quick with snappy comebacks. They are very poor, however, at figuring out logical relationships in complex situations, and almost totally unable to understand the concept of TRUTH.

People with these brain structures are then educated by life experience. Schooling, media, religion, family, and peers pour a huge amount of information into their brains. But they are mentally unable to visualize and logically understand all of that information as an integrated system. The world view of the narrow-minded person is essentially a world driven by SSL superstition. This becomes a “house of cards”, or more accurately, a “fortress of cards” in their head. Any attempt by someone to use logic to remove one of those cards and replace it with another, damages part of their fortress. This triggers a huge crisis of FEAR. It triggers fight or flight.

Challenges to their logical fortress are so alarming to a narrow-minded person that their entire focus turns away from trying to understand, to defending the fortress. They gravitate to messages that provide comfort and support in simple phrases — Single Sentence Logic.

They are easy prey for lies that promise security. This, of course, is one of the great tragedies of our time. And one of its tragic ironies is that any attempt to explain something to them using “logic” and “data” just increases their confusion and fear. The problem this raises for human society is that narrow-mindedness constitutes a large majority of the population. As the complexity of society increases, the retreat from understanding it will increase. People’s ability to know “truth” will decrease and be replaced by simple superstitions. Communication in society will more and more closely be indistinguishable from insanity.

Repercussions from language problems

So, what effect does the behavior-emotion form of language learning have on humans when they become adults? As an adult, when someone reads or hears a trigger word like “communism”, the immediate brain response is to release the related stored emotions that were associated with the learning experience which added the word to their vocabulary. The emotions are experienced by higher brain functions as feelings and drives. These may be very strong drives. If they are strong, they will trigger primary fight-or-flight behaviors in the listener or reader. The fight-or-flight response can even be strong enough to stop conscious thinking about further information the person is being exposed to.

For example, consider the common handshake. The predominant explanation for the custom of “handshakes” in current society, came from a very ancient practice of extending hands to show another person that you were not carrying a weapon. This was such a fundamental safety interaction for our Stone Age ancestors, that parts of the behavior response may even be encoded in our human autonomic system. At root, however, is the emotion of personal safety. If during an encounter, one person’s hand was quickly withdrawn and an axe pulled from a belt and raised, the other person’s response would be an automatic fight or flight behavior. It wouldn’t be: “let’s see, there seems to be some interesting new gesture going on here. He’s grabbing his axe. Maybe he wants to trade it for something? Or maybe it has some new designs on the handle he wants to show me?”

While this example may seem contrived, just fast forward to 2016 and watch a few real-life police shows, political debates, or just the evening news. Words and gestures, especially any related to aggression, personal safety, religious beliefs or race, revert very quickly to basic emotional and physical responses. People lose their tempers. Attacking, resisting or running away occur frequently, and very quickly.

Associating a verbal sound pattern with higher logical concepts comes much later in the hearing process. It takes a lot longer to do. It’s almost like doing a language translation. This results in significant limitations to how humans hear and speak language. The major limitation is that, having a Stone Age brain, most people are not able to broadly understand logical or complex issues. This is especially so when the emotional content is high and the information is received quickly. In such a situation, most people are not able to intuitively envision many interacting variables at one time. What they do is fall back on SSL.

Unfortunately, my new language model predicts serious negative implications for humanity’s ability to use language to run a complex technological society.

The benefit of understanding and applying my new model is that language breakdowns, like those we now observe in democratic governments, can be explained in detail. AND, similar analysis can be applied to language breakdowns that are hurting most other segments of society. What we understand, we can help mitigate. These negative consequences will become worse as the world becomes more integrated and people have to rely more on communication for coordination.

Because winning, in our society, has become more important than TRUTH, or efficiency or justice, the political fronts are able to keep the public in an emotional frenzy. In that frenzy, we are so driven by emotion that we can’t even stand back and say to each other, “hey, why don’t we create this new invention. We’ll call it a DICTIONARY. That way, when we speak to each other, we’ll be able to understand what we’re talking about.”

The tragedy, of course, is that society has already tried that. But when people are whipped into a rage, they shut out reason. It’s all about winning. To win, they throw out anything in their way — like well established definitions of words. And once that happens, we have entered a world of insane people. Why? Because there is no longer a way to communicate based on reality. People under the control of emotion (their primary language brain), using Single Sentence Logic (superstition), deny all the definitions that can be verified by reality so they can steal the words for themselves to mean whatever they want them to mean.

Breakdown of Communication in society

So how does this language mess affect society. Every situation in society that depends on people communicating important information to each other has broken down. Here are some of the more important ones:

The Media

photos — Stuart Pinfold, Timo Newton-Syms

People rely on the “news” media to tell them what is happening in our world. But, the standards of journalism that led the media to seek truth and keep government in line are gone. The news media is now controlled by business interests and maximizing profit. They are totally focused on high revenue. To do this, they have four strategies:

1. Barrage people with advertising to bring in revenue.

2. Keep people amused and distracted, or scared so they will be glued to the TV.

3. Keep people ignorant of how industry has gained and maintains control of government.

4. Keep people ignorant of the impending collapse of society and the ecosystem.

This means, the public will be distracted with:

1. More exciting, more clever, and longer advertising.

2. “Real life” police stories focused on issues that scare people. There will be endless coverage of foreign “terrorist” wars with statements that those terrorists are trying to target us. The foreign threat will be hyped by tying it to every possible violence event at home.

There will be “presidential election” news focused on candidates that tell people they are under serious threat from foreign enemies. Those candidates will support the media. There will be long coverage of disasters focused on personal crises. They will present these in a way that every viewer feels personally in danger.

3. There will be “cats caught up a tree” human interest stories to burn time at low cost. There will be lots of time focused on celebrities and “good times”, just as there was during the depression, so people won’t see the real hardships.

BUT, There will be minimal coverage of industry wrong-doing.

4. There will be minimal substantive information on the overall collapse of society. And most related to a constructive use of language, they avoid showing scorecards of U.S. performance, because the failings would stand out so clearly.

Healthcare

People are not capable of understanding the complexity of healthcare, how well it is performing, or how they can get good care. They are being lied to by government, industry and the media. They are told people in the U.S. have the best healthcare in the world. They don’t. In fact, the U.S. is now way down the list on all the major indexes despite having the highest medical costs in the world. The following graph shows how the U.S. compares to other countries by cost per citizen.

But here is how the U.S. medical system performs compared to the others based on the World Health Organization. Try number 37!

The government made one major move to fix this — the Affordable Care Act. Its primary goal was to get universal coverage for all Americans. The U.S. is the only advanced country in the world not to have universal care. The effort did not succeed because individual states blocked it. In short, the healthcare industry, with the support of government, industry and the media, is doing everything it can to continue to block performance information from the public.

Oh! If you want to know what this means for you personally, the life expectancy of someone born in the U.S. compared to the leading countries, is #37 as well. Males can expect to live, on average, till age 79, females till 81. In Japan, the ages are 80 and 87 respectively. This is 7% longer for women (at only 37% of the cost!)

Education

Education is an institution where people do get a chance at direct involvement at the elementary and high school levels. All the casualties of the emotional roots of language learning and Single Sentence Logic come into play here to stop citizen effectiveness. School board personnel maintain tight control over meeting formats. Citizens are not given full access to the information they need to understand the whole problem. Citizens are not given the tools they need to analyze the information they get. Citizens do not have the background to understand many of the complex issues involved. And, citizens have been brought through an educational system that reinforced the worst practices of Stone Age brain emotional and Single Sentence Logic skills. So, citizen meetings almost always degrade into discussions of small issues and interfamily rivalries over insufficient budgets. The citizens don’t understand the over riding issues around the change in education needed for the new society.

At the college level, Single Sentence Logic and a dominant focus on revenue keeps higher education tied to its 19th century roots. Inter-collegiate rivalry prevents the coordination needed to envision a new education for the future. Industry meddling is directed to producing low wage workers for their future exploding profits.

Justice

Justice and the law have sold out to corporate revenue and marshal law military type control. Law schools have completely succumbed to producing legal drones that focus on career earnings. There is no visible sign, in any form, that they can even contemplate a new structure for the legal system that does not simply “modernize” the practices of medieval English law. The codification of medieval practices for the complexity of modern society, has created such a complex quagmire of regulations that no one, not even the best lawyers and scholars, can grasp more than a small fraction of it. Citizens are, essentially, entirely blocked out of this, except for being maltreated. Industry uses this complexity to capture special privileges for itself.

Small municipal government

This institution is essentially a parallel of primary and secondary education. The people are allowed to “participate”, but their involvement is controlled by the current power structure. The election process, just like that of higher levels of government, is blocked by superstition. That is, modern local governments are still using legacy concepts from the early 19th century. Citizens, drawing on Single Sentence Logic, cannot see beyond this. If visionaries from the community come in, they don’t usually have the funds to produce visualizations of their ideas sufficient to educate all the powers involved. Since jumps to future systems will require changes across the board, piecemeal approaches, even if tired, will fail. Furthermore, most small governments are steeped in power structures that don’t want change that they can’t control.

Interpersonal relationships

What most people don’t realize, because the changes have come over multiple generations, is that life in our modern complex society bears little resemblance to traditional family life.

Yet the stereotypes of “tradition” are carried forward through verbal and photo histories. Children’s behaviors are modeled on those of their parents. Their emotional responses are modeled on parental queues which they either accept or radically reject (a two option choice). And their Single Sentence Logic expectations of life come from parents, peers and television.

All of these are holdbacks to “visions” of “dreams” of the past ( i.e. the “American dream”). And industry wants to keep it that way. If changes are made in society, they are incremental, fitting only the worst of current local pressures.

So, how, specifically, do the described language problems enter this picture?

1. The way people talk to each other is dominated by emotion. They have not been taught how to restrain their emotions so they can use logic.

2. In primary and secondary education, children’s lives are programmed around the “traditional dreams” of their parents. The children are walked through a preplanned existence, learning to the tests, without gaining an understanding of how all the pieces go together. When they are thrown out into the world, they are “deer in the headlights” that can only exist following very narrow paths. Industry wants it that way.

3. People’s heads are a landfill of superficial Single Sentence Logic superstitions about an environment that is described using words with haphazard definitions. For people to have any conversations, they have to talk in such superficial generalities, that very little of substance can be communicated. The result is they are reduced to the basics of existence that they can purchased as complete items, which industry has controlled to have very short permanence.

4. In group action, people are driven by media trigger words, to follow narrow response channels.

Due to the extreme mobility, fast transportation and global internet connections, the concept of extended family, which is the dream model of their parents, is long gone. They are also thrown into a “throw away” employee world. So, to a currently graduating “adult”, they are cast adrift on a turbulent ocean, with no extended family or employment base. Most of the possessions they can acquire have very short permanence. When they try to understand their environment, all they can get is superficial information. It appears as a gibberish of groundless definitions. Looking for “informed” guidance like they had going to school, they are now confronted by extremes of right and left — you live in a humanly-hostile world that was caused by the left; you live in an environmentally-hostile world that was caused by the right. Other “informed guidance” tells them to “turn to religion”. But there are now thousands of religious options to choose from, all seeming to have the deceit of industry throughout. Others tell them to “shun religion”. But their only explanations are rejections of religions. And the individual has NO skill at sorting this out on their own! (Is it any wonder that extremist organizations like ISIS are able to attract such lost soles?)

Government Gridlock

The stalemate between “conservatives” and “liberals” is doing serious damage to populations around the world. If we listen to media discussions about this, the reason given for the gridlock is that people “just have differences of opinion”. The A3 discoveries show that this statement is seriously misleading. It is philosophically flawed. And until people recognize this, and change it, the confusion is not going to stop.

Sure, people can have different opinions. But there are multiple categories of reasons for disagreement. A common, justifiable reason is that the issue is one of taste. For example, one person likes red; another likes blue. Some people like sweet food, some don’t. In cases like this, it is easy to just let people have such differences.

But the issues usually presented to governments for action are very different. For those issues, there is usually a broad, complex foundation for the issue. Decisions made about the issue usually affect people in drastic ways. This is not a case of people “just having differences of opinion”. It is a case of many lives being changed, some people being helped, and others entire lives hurt seriously. In cases like this, what a government is expected to do is to dig deeply into all the details that affect the issue. They are expected to then bring very high levels of wisdom to all the details to understand how they can be organized into action to “best” benefit all the citizens. This is a long way from “just opinions”.

Based on the “Stone Age brain” observations discussed in the previous two parts, it can be confidently stated that understanding the interaction of all parts of most complex modern issues, is beyond the mental abilities of all humans! To minimize this problem, many people can work together. BUT, they have to understand HOW to do it. And this is where the “Language Tragedy” and its long history of damage to human culture comes in.

The “Democratic Process”, one of the most fundamental processes in our culture, that the world holds with such high esteem, is seriously flawed. (This will be discussed in more detail in the next Part.) The flaws are well known to people open minded enough to read about them. One of the most serious flaws is how our elections are run. They have been made extreme, winner-take-all, competitions, to choose just a few individuals for key roles. To do this, the competitions are opened to the public. Organizations called political parties form around these individual candidates. To focus the public, the media singles out just a handful of issues that the public appears to be interested in at the time. The parties then, select sets of trigger words , and paste them together in short Single Sentence Logic phrases, that can most greatly divide the public around the candidates.

The candidates then repeat these phrases over and over again attempting to parade themselves as the embodiment of those phrases. Why does it work? Because, the psychology of most humans is fine tuned, through language learning, to react to the trigger words. Even if these words are used in poor sentences that make almost no sense, when people hear the words, their brains are so consumed dealing with the emotional fire storms the words have ignited, there is no brain power left to analyze the logic involved.

In short, our government is being driven by serious faults related to how humans learn language. The process, due to all of these faults, elects individuals who are least likely to be able to work together. Why? Because they are selected by debates and speeches to be exceptional standing as individuals! Nowhere in the process are they forced to demonstrate their ability to understand fine details of issues, to organize people to use tools to deal with large amounts of detail in quantitative ways, or to organize, manage and work in harmony with others.

Language, of course, is only part of the problem. Other bases for disagreements can be tracked directly to psychological foundations described in Part 4, plus the other language problems presented earlier in this post. Until and unless those fundamental flaws are recognized and addressed, the gridlock will grow, probably turn to violence, and lead to serious tragedy in modern human civilization, just as they have throughout history.

To help visualize the previous observations, let’s look at an ongoing major disagreement in society and analyze how it is framed based on the language problems presented. How about Social Security in the U.S..

Word precision

A basic definition from Investopedia states Social Security (SS) is: “A United States federal program of social insurance and benefits … [that] include retirement income, disability income, Medicare and Medicaid, and death and survivorship benefits.”

Right from the start, society falls flat on its face with regard to Word Precision. If we ask citizens what each of the highlighted words in the previous sentence mean, will we get a consistent answer? I don’t think so. If we even go a step deeper and ask why is a government giving people these supports at all, will we get a consistent answer? I don’t think so either. So, the whole discussion starts out on a very murky foundation to begin with because the basic reasons for it are not precisely defined, and the key parts of the implementation are not well defined.

Emotional learning

As children grow up, they will eventually be exposed to the words related to this issue. But the words will not initially be presented in the sequence shown in the definition. The concept of SS will not be learned typically until high school, well into adolescence. But words like: United States, insurance, benefits, retirement, income, disability, death, and survivors, will all be encountered long before that. While not taught directly to a child during word learning, children will usually hear all of these words being discussed by adults, or on TV, or in passing in school subjects. So, the child will store the sound along with a referred emotion from the adult saying them. Even before the age of reason, with no knowledge of their meaning, a child will have a notion that the words are “good” words or “bad” words. When the definition and logic of the words are learned, they will always be learned with an emotional bias, based on the learning environment. For example, if the school is public, private, charter, or religious, the context of the words will be set on different foundations. If the student mix of the school is predominantly WASP, black, Latino, Asian, Italian, Scandinavian, Jewish etc., again, the context conveying the words will be different. Examples of situations the words are used in will be different. How the student’s heritage changes how the words are interpreted will be different. The contexts, in many cases, can be very emotionally charged.

Narrow-mindedness

The SS system is a very complex process. It redirects a huge fraction of government funds. That makes it a highly charged issue, especially when many people are personally experiencing the high stress of tight economics and the mind numbing confusion of high technical complexity. As a narrow-minded person emerges from adolescence into responsible adulthood, they will be forced to take on financial responsibility for their own life. The high stress of life, and added complexity of making their own decisions will drive them into a very rigid way of interacting with the world based on their learned fragments of Single Sentence Logic. Unless they can somehow escape this prison, they will carry that structure throughout adulthood. Most of our elected leaders will fit this model because of the process society has established to elect them.

Single Sentence Logic

Looking at current society, we find Social Security framed with the following elements of Single Sentence Logic:

The landscape is sharply divided into “liberal” and “conservative” viewpoints. Citizens believe this.
The words “liberal” and “conservative” are not precisely defined. In fact, the definitions are very loosely defined. People routinely misuse them, and change what they mean about them from moment to moment.
The words, however, are such charged “trigger” words, that just chanting either word can stir a crowd into a fury. So they are used often to pull other words into association with them, regardless of what the other words actually mean.

A short aside from communication theory. If we have two people, Bob and Jane, having a discussion about an issue, there are FOUR points of view of the issue (not two): 1. Bob’s view; 2. Jane’s view; 3. What Bob thinks Jane’s view is; 4. What Jane thinks Bob’s view is.

The reason for pointing out the 4 positions is because we will see these all the time in media commentary. For the Social Security “debate”, there are also 4 positions: 1. what the “liberals” think SS is about; 2. what the “conservatives” think SS is about; 3. what the “conservatives” say the “liberals” believe; and 4. What the “liberals” say the “conservatives” believe. The reason 3 and 4 don’t match 1 and 2 is because each group, due to their development environment, is unable to envision the model the other group is using to base its conclusions on.

Some “Liberal” concepts about SS, typically associated with the word “Democrat” (which is just as loose a term), as stated by a “Democrat” (In this case, Senator Bernie Sanders):

SS is a human “right”, not just something good to have.
Millions of seniors live in poverty. The country has a “responsibility” to help them.
The U.S. has the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on the planet. The country has a “responsibility” to help them.
We must strengthen the SS safety net, not weaken it. We should be expanding these programs.

Notice, this is ALL Single Sentence Logic. “We must strengthen the SS safety net”. Sure. Sounds good. But are there any costs to do that? Are there ways to strengthen it without adding cost?

Here is the “conservative” view of what the “liberals” think (from the National Center for Public Policy):

Entitlements.
…critics of privatization [liberals] argue that the answer is to simply increase the Social Security payroll tax to cover the future deficits.
An alternative suggestion by critics of privatization [liberals] is to leave the payroll tax at its current rate of 12.4% but apply the tax to wages above the current cap of $80,400.
[liberals believe] The Social Security system should be protected at all costs. Reduction in future benefits is not a reasonable option. Social Security provides a safety net for the nation’s poor and needy. Changing the system would cause a reduction in benefits and many people would suffer as a result.

In the previous two blocks of statements that are “supposed” to be describing the same “liberal” view, they are not even talking about the same issue. The Democrats are focusing on basic principles. The conservatives are focusing on how to pay for the program long term. The Democrats fire off their trigger words: human rights, millions, seniors, poverty, responsibility etc. The conservatives fire off their trigger words: critics, privatization, simply, increase, payroll tax etc. In the hall of congress, as soon as the Democrats hear “privatization”, their emotions grow so high, they can’t make sense out of any of the following words. As soon as the Republicans hear “entitlements”, “millions of seniors in poverty”, their emotions go so high, they can’t make sense of further talking.

If either side tries to get into details, with liberal descriptions of hardship or conservative proposals for where the funding will come from, the words might as well be “falling on deaf ears” because those ears are psychologically deaf.

Eventually, both sides are forced to cross the line: liberals talking about funding; conservatives talking about social needs. This is where the word definitions and more Single Sentence Logic come into play. Each will try to pick a definition for each term that benefits their model, and degrades the other model. This will include using different age ranges, different payroll levels etc. Given that there are so many terms involved, and emotions are so high, they don’t have the patience to build the needed glossaries. So they just keep on fighting. Remember, this is NOT just a choice. Their brain’s are pre-wired for this. Narrow-mindedness is an inherited brain structure supported by a narrowly selected set of Single Sentence Logic.

But most critical, at the most fundamental level, the emotions on both sides are being driven by a crisis level of FEAR. Their middle brains, the fortresses of Single Sentence Logic, are so rigidly filled with aligned logic, with detailed political superstitions, that allowing even one crack in the fortress will open their Achilles heal to attack and total defeat. A discussion of legislation, in their Stone Age brains, becomes a “fight or flight” contest for SURVIVAL.

The Language Problem in summary:

Language is first learned as word sounds which guide simple behaviors. The sounds are stored with emotional queues that drive the behaviors.
Words stored with strong emotions act as trigger words. Hearing the words triggers a fight or flight total body response.
Hearing a trigger word can consume so much middle brain activity it blocks higher level conscious thinking.
Single Sentence Logic (SSL) is the primary Stone Age brain process to associatively link multiple word sounds together.
An associated SSL link is remembered with an emotional tag.
SLL will form before precise logical definitions or reasoning associations for the words are learned for the Single Sentences.
Word definitions are highly variable, due to both cultural variation and competition of groups to control powerful words.
The lack of broadly agreed word definitions is the basis for extensive confusion in communication. As complexity and stress due to complexity grow, definition confusion can easily grow into violence.
Narrow-mindedness is an inherited brain structure supported by a learned narrowly selected set of Single Sentence Logic. Narrow-mindedness is NOT a conscious choice.
A Stone Age brain can have substantial SSL memory ability. IQ is only a fair indicator of memory ability. An incredible memory for sports statistics may be better. A high score playing Trivia Pursuit may be the best.
A Stone Age brain can be filled with a large amount of contradictory SSL. In polite circles, this is called superstition or freedom of thought. Such a collection of contradictory elements is not distinguishable from insanity.
SSL is the primary form of communication for many human activities: the media, politics, musical lyrics, poetry, rhymes, etc.
The primary driver of a person’s ability to concentrate and think logically about an issue is the lack of strong emotions about the issue.

It takes a true Darwin and Da Vinci type analysis, cooperative work, self-confrontation, willingness to change, open mindedness, and persistent patience to resolve logical inconsistency. A modern society composed of Stone Age brains, in general, does not have many of these skills. Also, unfortunately, this statement leaves out some categories of people that have gained stereotypes for cultural leadership. These include: academics, who choose to “agree to disagree” rather than go through the emotional ordeal of resolving the conflicts, admitting the errors, and painstakingly correcting the legacy in the knowledge base; doctors and lawyers, who are selected and trained for their ability to rigidly follow protocol, memorize large amounts of logically unassociated information, and deal quickly with high focus on isolated situations.

How can we overcome this language problem?

I’m sure just posing this question gives many readers chills down their back. It is such a large world wide issue, solving it may seem almost unimaginable. I admit, I’ve had thoughts to that effect. But, I do have some ideas.

There are precedents for changes on this scale that have been accomplished. The world has been entirely ruled by monarchs for 8000+ years. This was turned around when a small group of colonies in America decided that they wanted to try a new approach called “Democracy”. There are now 123 countries, out of a total of 192 countries on the planet, that consider themselves a form of democracy. This is amazing progress for only 240 years. Women were re-given the right to vote in the U.S. in 1920. (Yes, as most people don’t know, women could already vote (#5) in most colonies before 1776. It was only upon setting up the U.S. Constitution in 1784 that their right to vote was taken away.) Once these huge steps were taken by someone, the crack in the dike was opened.

So, sure, changing world governments is the goal. But this can start at the lowest level. How? It takes champions! Anyone reading this story, who recognizes the language flaws described above in their work or social environment, can rally support from a few friends and initiate action to correct the flaws. Doing so will bring quick improvements. These can be promoted as successes and additional efforts started to duplicate the successes.

So, what specifically, would correcting the flaws look like?

Identify discussions that are not working due to divisions among group members.
Seek out members who are frustrated that the group can’t make progress. Particularly, look for members that represent all viewpoints.
Form a “back to basics study committee” for the effort telling all members you want to use a new approach.
GO TO PAPER right away.
Have each member list out what they believe are the project goals, which ones have general agreement, and which don’t have agreement.
For each goal without agreement, ask each member to describe what they think the reasons for disagreement are.

So far, this is a pretty standard approach. Now introduce the new approach:

Without attempting to drill into the logic of each disagreement, start with the “basics”, meaning the language basics. Go word by word through the list of disagreements and check on each person’s definition of the terms. The outcome of this process should be a glossary of terms with definitions that ALL agree with.
— This specifically does not mean voting on a “best” definition for each word. It usually means creating multiple special modified definitions to capture the details of all disagreements.
— For example, the term “family member” might be causing a problem because some people want this to mean all members, while others think it means only adult members. Other’s still might want “family” to include senior and junior generations living together, etc.. The glossary would then generate terms like “adult primary family member”, “adult extended family member”, “entire primary family” etc. Keep the process going until the vocabulary brings in all concerns.
Watch out for trigger words!
For example, one of the suggested previous definitions might have been, “adult nuclear family”. Pay attention to the emotions of the group. The word “nuclear” might have upset some people because to them it implies only “traditionally” married couples. Go to great lengths at this point just to get accepted definitions. Create a list of any “trigger” words that come up and whom they belong to.
Use the new definitions to try to resolve the disagreements. A reduced list of disagreements will result which contain the new vocabulary.
Review the new disagreement list for Single Sentence Logic. That is, review the disagreement statements to determine if the conflicts are occurring because any of them are too general. Expand those that are, so their logic is consistent with the logic in other statements, both agreeing and disagreeing. This could be a long effort. But it will substantially reduce the disagreement list.
Be alert for narrow-minded defenses. These will contain denials of generally accepted information like scientific studies. They will falling back on untestable beliefs, popular beliefs or superstition. If any of these come up, don’t challenge them outright. Add them to the trigger word list as “trigger beliefs”. Include them in the disagreement list.
Use the new statements to again resolve the disagreements. The remaining disagreements should be greatly reduced and produce a very clear list of problem issues. These will mostly be related to trigger words, narrow-minded issues, and complexity.

Resolve COMPLEXITY through VISUALIZATION.

For many modern problems, when sufficient details are added to definitions and sentences, a broad workable meaning for the sentences is too complex for humans to easily understand.

A good example comes from the environmental movement. They want action now! They tell us, “we have to act FAST”. When someone asks them why, the usual answer is, “To avoid the WORST!” But what is the worst? Why do we need to be afraid of it? They never tell us. And since the average person can’t go from the word, “worst”, to a vision what the worst really looks like, they can’t decide how to respond.

I any disagreement sentences are too difficult to envision, just from the words, it is important to produce accurate visualizations of what the logic of the sentence means.

Create a win-win team

While this process focuses on fixing language flaws, going through the process will usually forge personal bonds between former opponents. They will come to see how their human bonds were misled by simple word problems. The new alliances and new information will have a strong effect on the original problem.

The next part in the series, Part 6, talks about The Failure of Democracy. It digs into the major flaws pervading one of modern society’s most fundamental and cherished institutions: DEMOCRACY! These include: the conflict of government and freedom, majority rule, Lynch Mob Democracy and human rights, the lies of governments, and Direct Democracy.