Beyond Words are just complicated airflow

There is this scene in Succession where Kendal Roy walks into a room and says "Words are just, what? Nothing. Complicated air flow." If you haven't seen Succession you can watch just this scene below:

It's an interesting use of words don't you think?

There is a deeper meaning to it though it might at first seem like "What did the poet mean when he said the sky was blue" explanations

The context for Succession in this line is that people in the show don't treat words as a direct mapping to the truth. They treat words as transient, things that only have value at the very moment and nothing beyond. For them, Truth is just a shifting commodity, whatever works at the moment.

Now this is true for the majority of the world as well except for the ones with some levels of Autism or Aspergers. The professional-managerial class that works in most tech companies or in finance, politics, or at the top of any social hierarchy are masters in this art of using words as complicated airflow.

It's easy to map this straight to sociopathy or psychopathy and say that is what these fields optimize for but there is an even more startling case to be made for words at a very meta-level.

A lot of things in society work because of private truths and public lies. If things were accurately described for their actual definitions rather than the public lie version, a lot of systems that we have stabilizing society on a day-to-day basis would stop functioning and we descend to anarchy.

But at an individual level, these public lies stop smart individuals from thinking clearly, it stops them from executing at their best, it forces them to psychoanalyze every axiom before using it as a prior for thinking about things.

Politics is a great example to understand this. So many smart people find themselves aligning themselves with some political group or political ideology. This is how it usually starts.

Then they listen to some charismatic clown on either side of the political spectrum and subscribe to that ideology. The left and right are not fighting because they are different, they fight because they are the same. The fight is not between rich and poor. The fight is between the rich and the other rich.

They listen to political campaigns and think, This guy/girl makes sense and vote for them. Now take a step back and ask yourself, what is the definition of politics?

This is the Wikipedia definition:

Politics (from Ancient Greek πολιτικά (politiká) 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.

Any smart person who reads that constructs some mental model in their head of what politics is. This is what they teach you in school.

Now let me tell you a much cleaner definition of politics:

Politics is deliberately making things better for some people by deliberately making them worse for others.

The above is the actual definition of politics. No politician will define it like this. They will tell you how they will make things better for "one group" but will intentionally or unintentionally hide the group they are making it worse for. It is impossible to create a political policy that is net positive. There will always be winners and losers. Once you see this, you'll never subscribe to any political party ever again. It is hiding in plain sight for you to see and you can only see it once you find the right words and that my friends is the entire theme of the article.

Words are complicated airflow but they are not complicated airflow. Bit of Schrödinger's cat situation there innit mate?

Words are imperfect but they are the best we have. Once you find the right definition of things, you are unstoppable and have a framework to look at things accurately. But the world we live in is terrible at teaching smart people the right definitions. You have to actively learn how to look for it.

This is one thing our ancient ancestors got right with religion. Religious textbooks and authors of the past use esoterism to hide messages in stories. It is surely an opioid for the masses, but for the individuals who are capable of reading between the lines, it is still the best shot at discovering secrets hidden in plain sight.

Every moment in history happens only once. While the authors of the past have resorted to esoterism, the Internet today allows us to move beyond it. Anons across the internet can now talk about the public lies to the ones who are capable of looking for them. They can do it without exposing themselves to getting scapegoated by the elite or the masses for going after the public lies.

On the other hand, you still have charismatic clowns exposing public lies for personal fame/power or simply out of naivety. The issue with this is that public lies are a necessary evil. So there is a double bind as a collective where we want the smart people to learn about public lies as early as possible while keeping them away from the majority. This is both dangerous and exciting because maybe this will lead to a way out of the words as a complicated airflow situation.

I dream about a world where this leads to sort of a Hegelian synthesis where we as a civilization learn to balance both the private truth and public lie definitions without having to resort to esoterism or descending into anarchy. It really is a fun social experiment that we are running at scale.

Will you leave with another version of these:

An economy is an area of the production, distribution, and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services.

The economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to promote stuff to insecure people.