Understanding the failure of political words

Svetlana Voreskova, thank you for the long response. I appreciate our conversations. I tried to keep this brief.

The rhetoric never means anything anyway. It is just a lot of noble sounding word-salad designed to appeal to the emotions of the easily led.

Precisely the point. The reason for the word salad is that there are no longer clear meanings for these terms. Let me itemize this:

1. The basic concepts that were originally developed under these names had a range of interpretations and steadily evolved. Those were valid within the context of time and place. Those are not the meanings now.
2. The politicization of the terms adds at least 150 years of evolving meanings that were not intended to explain or clearly differentiate but to confuse and inspire emotional reactions by the building of mythic structures. After more than a century of this the historical baggage of the terms far outweighs any useful or objective meaning.
3. After reading any of my writings it should be kind of obvious that my interest is paradigmatic social change driven by technology. My original areas of historical focus were revolutionary change in East and Southeast Asia, history of technology, and intellectual history. That was all an effort to understand what drives modern revolutionary (disruptive) change particularly change in social structure and intellectual understanding of the justifications of that structure. Social, political, and economic change is a product of ways of seeing the world that allows the solution of problems that are unsolvable under existing or previous world views dependent on your perspective in the process of change.
4. We live in a universe that is the product of a massive change in how people understood the universe in 16th and 17th century western Europe. Interestingly the preliminary developments of that change happened in China in the 14th and 15th century. Part of that was the beginnings of a concept of globalization. Ming China made a decision to block that development. Western Europe went with it.
5. I, and many, many other people, consider this period an equivalent or larger shift. I think it is larger. Dealing with this kind of change is the very definition of disruptive. But we know that because we understand what has happened in the different stages of these kind of intellectual transformations in past. What happens, simply, is that societies split into increasingly uncommunicative groups (see my Long Tailed Rat of History) based on their individual perceived world which is a range of stations from an earlier world to the newest world. To people this means that other people begin to not make sense. Some people kind of make sense and people begin to adjust because the new ideas begin to explain things in life that were not well explained before. On a day to day basis this is very pragmatic. The new way of seeing the world works in more ways than the old way. Or, most commonly, problems that could not be solved become understandable and then solvable. That is the only reason that people make changes unless they are forced to make them by conquest, etc. That sometimes works, too, but is not how very large changes are made. (We can argue about Alexander and the Hellenic conquests that created the Graeco-Roman world of which we are a direct product. The old doesn’t go completely away but the understanding of it changes.)
6. Sorry, I’m going to be blunt: After your quote above you went all word salad on me. In light of what I do (see above) you began speaking the language of an old world order system and specific subset of that based on one branch of political propaganda. My original point was that the terms capitalist, socialist, democracy have little or no value now. Select concepts within the etymology (literally the history of those words) have value but we must literally work that out without old assumptions. This is a process of slow thinking. And that makes it so difficult. Remember China above. Ming China opted for the tried and true that was, unfortunately, no longer strictly true. The end product of that was the collapse of imperial China in the face of a more effective view of the universe from western Europe. Two hundred years later (after unimaginable suffering and death) they are struggling with moving to a new world order just as we are. With their experience I, for one, think they are getting “it” better but we will see.
7. I really don’t know what the end changes will be but I’m pretty sure, based on the last fifty years of history that the basic concept of capitalism, i.e. capital as value based on natural resources, manufactured goods, and finally services, is no longer viable. The entire structure of capitalism is based on growth in order to support increased population and build value (wealth) and to make up for the inherent problem of the steady consolidation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The even bigger issue, unknown until about thirty years ago is the destruction of our climate that makes a system based on unlimited growth deadly. There are many other issues having to do with the quality of life that are factors in this also. But in any case the changes driven by technology (IT/AI,/Social Media/Mixed Reality) have been shifting us to intellectual property as the base value system. This is a very different model and this is what we should be talking about.
8. Socialism was articulated to solve early problems in industrialization as an major element of capitalism. The theory was brilliant but became, in its time and place, a process of militant and even military change. That caused it to become dogmatic in reaction to capitalism (the earlier laissez faire type) which also became dogmatic. To cut to the chase, after fifty years of wars, economic instability, evolution, etc. it was discovered that one way to solve inherent problems within capitalist systems was to manage the markets to prevent distortions (only haphazardly effective) and to use taxation to prevent the inevitable consolidation of wealth to the point that would destroy the semi representative forms of government that had evolved under the name ‘democracy’. A major part of the socialist remedy is expanded public ownership which does slow down growth, accidentally, but is subject to political abuse as are all current systems of government. We need to do much better here.
9. All of this works more or less successfully unless applied dogmatically and/or managed under arbitrary authoritarian systems. Incompetence eventually terminates these systems.
10. And one last point: Fascism is a combination of feudalism (rule based on personal relationships with external conquest, and capitalism). That is more accurately corporatism. This allies the wealthiest corporations with authoritarian, strongman rule that is above the law. It has nothing to do with socialism in any of its forms and is the result of Adolph Hitler using the word socialism for his nationalist party to confuse the issue. (This is where the technique came from that was so effectively picked up by the Russians, e.g. KGB and Putin, to weaponize words by making them meaningless.) And why we need to reset almost all of our political language. Hypercapitalism, the late American model, is simply giving over government to the owners of wealth as oligarchs who “own” the government indirectly. People still elect representatives but the representatives work for the oligarchs who fund them and not the people. This can slip easily into fascism when things get disrupted or fail due to corruption, greed, or natural disasters. (Trump is a good example.)

Hopefully this explains things a little more clearly. It is essential that we all avoid falling into mindless dogma and word salad thinking. Bankrupt language and antique social models can be death for us and our planet. That is the essence of what I am talking about.