How Open Dialogue and Integrity Can Change Your Life
And how our modern culture discourages that.
I grew up with the dialogue that you must be sure of yourself if you’re going to say something, lest it upset anyone in your environment, or humiliate you in front of other people. There was nothing worse than being an embarrassment. This wasn’t my parent’s fault — or their parent’s fault, in fact it wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was imbued, or subtly written into, the language of the culture of the British Isles. The way it was imbued was through language.
Language is so powerful in a way that I think goes largely unnoticed in modern culture; which is a shame because marketing companies are very aware of the power of language and use specific language to target specific audiences, much in the same way that designer’s use colour to excite our emotional palette. This creates an imbalance; a closed dialogue between us and the companies that sell things to us. Recently, a colleague of mine was saying that he didn’t need any more stuff in his home. However, he went onto say that ‘if something in a shop is there, and it has the right price. I will buy it.’ That started me thinking, why?
The why is the emotion, the language and the colours of the packaging evoke, and the imbued cultural narrative that if we don’t own stuff then we’re not…
