The Semiotics of Dishonesty
How one word, “regulations,” warps the fight against climate havoc
In December 1992, I went home to Miami for a short visit. It was four months after Hurricane Andrew, and signs of the storm still lingered. The battered buildings were obvious; what was not obvious, not at first anyway, was what had happened to the minds of certain residents. Certain driving residents. My mother was driving us home from the airport, and as she approached a four-way intersection, her path was clear to make a left turn. But she slowed and stopped before beginning the turn, saying only, “Wait for it.”
A moment later a car blazed through the intersection, directly across our path, utterly ignoring a red light, and it would have t-boned us if we’d tried to take the turn. Only then did my mother proceed through the intersection. The explanation, she posited, was that during the hurricane, when the power was out, certain drivers decided that this meant that all traffic laws were suspended and they could do whatever they wanted. And even four months later, with the power long restored, some of them were still behaving that way. Apparently they believed that traffic laws were there simply to annoy them, and they welcomed the chaos of a storm because it freed them, at least for a while, from having to conform. It’s not conservatism, or libertarianism, it’s anarchy. And I’m glad we’re not dead from it, but it was close.
***
I understand why the word “regulations” is used the way it is. I understand why it’s simultaneously a bogeyword and a cudgel. I have been a small business owner, and I have dealt with various regulatory thises and thatses; I even made a video several years ago about a trick the State of California pulls on new LLCs that is so mind-bendingly backward that I concluded it must be deliberately designed to trick people into making an expensive mistake. So no, I do not blindly trust the government and its rules-writers, they do not always operate in good faith. I know this in my bones, and once learned it cannot be unlearned.
But I also understand the semiotics of language, and how it can be used to twist a debate. The shortest, simplest explanation of semiotics, for this purpose, is: semiotics is the way language, any single word or combination of words, can be used as a kind of signpost toward meaning. As if each word in a sentence is a billboard along the highway, telling you, sign by sign, where to go and how best to get there. The Burma-Shave model of language comprehension.
The word “regulations” has become a one-word signpost that, after long misuse, only ever points in one direction, so potent that you usually don’t need any other words around it to give meaning; and so flexible that it can be used in almost any context while still pointing relentlessly in the same direction. “We’re all for cutting regulations,” says a conservative politician. Then a liberal politician says “We’re big big believers in regulatory power,” and somehow even a liberal listener reacts negatively.
The linguist George Lakoff describes why this happens in his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, beginning the book by instructing the reader to do exactly that: don’t think of an elephant. Except that in reading or hearing the word “elephant,” you really can’t help yourself, an elephant will be invoked in all its trumpeting glory. “Regulation,” like “elephant,” is a signpost, a frame, a trigger: it invokes itself, and the conservative right has so tainted it over time that, no matter how you try to use it in a sentence, it will always point in the direction that conservatives want. It will always make me think of the way the State of California successfully fooled me into giving it more money in the form of a tax penalty for noncompliance.
The current GOP administration says this about its ongoing deregulatory efforts: “By amending and eliminating regulations that are ineffective, duplicative, and obsolete, the Administration can promote economic growth and innovation and protect individual liberty.” But this suggests a fine-tooth-comb approach to regulatory reform, not the wholesale brushing aside of regulations we’ve actually seen. And how does the rollback of coal-emission standards, to pick only one example, accomplish any of their stated goals? While it does promote the building of new coal plants, that is a dying industry, and the effort comes at the expense of new technologies that are already eclipsing coal in economic growth. For the same reason, this rollback does not promote innovation, since renewable solar, wind, and hydro projects are far more innovative than a technology from the mid-19th Century. And of course it does nothing to protect individual liberty because it is axiomatic that an individual is not free when he or she can’t breathe.
A better word for “regulations” is simple: “protections.” A rule that a chemical company can’t dump its toxic wastewater into a river isn’t a regulation restricting economic activity, it’s a protection that keeps nearby residents safe from contaminated water. But this is where the GOP’s superior understanding of semiotics comes into play.
Here’s a headline from The Guardian on August 21, 2018 that uses conservative language perfectly: “Trump administration scraps Obama-era regulation on coal emissions.” Here, as conservatives well understand, the word “regulation” points toward the company being regulated. It’s a big flashing sign that always points in that one direction. By definition a regulation is a restriction, and since no one likes to feel unduly restricted, they instinctively identify with the poor company that must wrestle with these burdensome regulations. But if the word “protections” is substituted, only that one word, suddenly the orientation of the whole sentence shifts — the sign points the other way: “Trump administration scraps Obama-era protections on coal emissions.” Now it’s all about ordinary people who are no longer being protected against companies that want to make an extra buck by dumping more poison into the air. (Indeed, the sub-head of the article notes that 1,400 premature deaths per year are expected from this rules change.)
One construction of the headline invokes the assumption that government is malevolent and opposed to the efforts of people (companies) trying to make an honest living; the other construction invokes the assumption that some big companies don’t care what happens to people so long as the company’s bottom line improves slightly.
Here’s another example, this one from Frank Luntz, the Republican wordsmith responsible for such odious phrases as “death tax” (estate tax) and “energy exploration” (oil drilling). In his book Words That Work, he notes that “Back in the mid-1990s, a majority of Americans (55 percent) said that emergency room care ‘should not be given’ to illegal aliens. Yet only 38 percent said it should be ‘denied’ to them.” And while these may seem like minor semantic quibbles, in fact, as Mr. Luntz’s presumably-high consulting rates would attest, these differences matter enormously.
The GOP’s deregulatory zeal is the equivalent of the driver in Miami who thinks traffic laws are an annoyance. And when it aims to roll back or eliminate common-sense protections that seek to limit atmospheric carbon emissions, the GOP becomes the equivalent of that driver in Miami who would have killed or maimed us (and him) in a horrific mid-intersection crash. It is a manipulation of language designed to wring out a few more dollars for a dying industry, and it is every bit as dishonest as the government practices it claims to detest.
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