By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
The Macedonians have a word for it - "Magla", fog. It signifies the
twin arts of duplicity and ambiguity. In the mental asylum that the
swathe of socialist countries was, even language was pathologized.
It mutated into a weapon of self defence, a verbal fortification, a
medium without a message, replacing words with vocables. Easterners
(in this text, the unfortunate residents of the Kafkaesque landscape
which stretches between Russia and Albania) don't talk or
communicate. They fend off. They hide and evade and avoid and
disguise. In the planet of capricious and arbitrary
unpredictability, of shifting semiotic and semantic dunes, that they
inhabited for so many decades (or centuries) - they perfected the
ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like speeches. The ensuing
convoluted sentences are Arabesques of meaninglessness, acrobatics
of evasion, lack of commitment elevated to an ideology. The
Easterner prefers to wait and see and see what waiting brings. It is
the postponement of the inevitable that leads to the inevitability
of postponement as a strategy of survival.
It is impossible to really understand an Easterner. The syntax fast
deteriorates into ever more labyrinthine structures. The grammar
tortured to produce the verbal Doppler shifts essential to disguise
the source of the information, its distance from reality, the speed
of its degeneration into rigid official versions. Buried under the
lush flora and fauna of idioms without an end, the language erupts,
like some exotic rash, an autoimmune reaction to its infection and
contamination. And this newspeak, this malignant form of political
correctness is not the exclusive domain of politicians
or "intellectuals". Like vile weeds it spread throughout, strangling
with absent minded persistence the ability to understand, to agree,
to disagree and to debate, to present arguments, to compare notes,
to learn and to teach. Easterners, therefore, never talk to each
other - rather, they talk at each other. They exchange subtexts,
camouflage-wrapped by elaborate, florid, texts. They read between
the lines, spawning a multitude of private languages, prejudices,
superstitions, conspiracy theories, rumours, phobias and mass
hysterias. Theirs is a solipsistic world - where communication is
permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw
others off the scent.
This has profound implications. Communication through unequivocal,
unambiguous, information-rich symbol systems is such an integral and
crucial part of our world - that its absence is not postulated even
in the remotest galaxies which grace the skies of science fiction.
In this sense, Easterners are nothing short of aliens. It is not
that they employ a different language, a code to be deciphered by a
new Champollion. The Cyrillic alphabet is not the obstacle. It is
also not the outcome of cultural differences. It is the fact that
language is put by Easterners to a different use - not to
communicate but to obscure, not to share but to abstain, not to
learn but to defend and resist, not to teach but to preserve ever
less tenable monopolies, to disagree without incurring wrath, to
criticize without commitment, to agree without appearing to do so.
Thus, Eastern contracts are vague expressions of intentions at a
given moment - rather than the clear listing of long term, iron-cast
and mutual commitments. Eastern laws are loopholed
incomprehensibles, open to an exegesis so wide and so self- contradictory that it renders them meaningless. Eastern politicians
and Eastern intellectuals often hang themselves by their own verbose
Gordic knots, having stumbled through a minefield of logical
fallacies and endured self inflicted inconsistencies. Unfinished
sentences hover in the air, like vapour above a semantic swamp.
In some countries (the poorer ones, which were suppressed for
centuries by foreign occupiers), there is the strong urge not to
offend. Still at the tribal-village stage of social development,
intimacy and inter-dependence are great. Peer pressure is
irresistible and it results in conformity and mental homogeneity.
Aggressive tendencies, strongly repressed in this social pressure
cooker, are close under the veneer of forced civility and violent
politeness. Constructive ambiguity, a non-committal "everyone is
good and right", an atavistic variant of moral relativism and
tolerance bred of fear and of contempt - are all at the service of
this eternal vigilance against aggressive drives, at the disposal of
a never ending peacekeeping mission.
In other countries, language is used cruelly and ruthlessly to
ensnare one's enemies, to saw confusion and panic, to move the
masses, to leave the listeners in doubt, in hesitation, in
paralysis, to gain control, or to punish. There, symbols are death
sentences in both the literal and the figurative senses. Poets,
authors and journalists still vanish regularly and newspapers and
books are compiled into black lists with dreadful consequences. In
these countries, language is enslaved and forced to lie. There are
no news - only views, no interest - only interests, no facts - only
propaganda, no communication - only ex-communication. The language
is appropriated and expropriated. It is considered to be a weapon,
an asset, a piece of lethal property, a traitorous mistress to be
gang raped into submission.
And yet in other places in the East, the language is a lover. The
infatuation with its very sound leads to a pyrotechnic type of
speech which sacrifices its meaning to its music. Its speakers pay
more attention to the composition than to the content. They are
swept by it, intoxicated by its perfection, inebriated by the
spiralling complexity of its forms. Here, language is an
inflammatory process. It attacks the social tissues with artistic
fierceness. It invades the healthy cells of reason and logic, of
cool headed argumentation and level headed debate. It raises the
temperature of the body politic. It often kills. It moves masses.
Submerged in and lured by the notes issued forth by the pied piper
of the moment - nations go to war, or to civil war, resonating with
the echoes of their language.
Language is a leading indicator of the psychological and
institutional health of social units. Social capital can often be
measured in cognitive (hence, verbal-lingual) terms. To monitor the
level of comprehensibility and lucidity of texts is to study the
degree of sanity of nations (think about the rambling "Mein Kampf").
There can exist no hale society without unambiguous speech, without
clear communications, without the traffic of idioms and content that
is an inseparable part of every social contract. Our language
determines how we perceive our world. It IS our mind and our
consciousness. The much touted transition starts in the mind and
consciousness determines reality. Marx would have approved.
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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com