How do we know what we mean by words? Frequently, we are not provided the means of rigorously checking that you and your audience have agreed meaning, but this isn’t much of a problem as most of our communication tends to be about relatively object-level, everyday sorts of tasks which you and your audience have had enough verification of shared meaning that you are unlikely to mistake what each other means. However, and especially when we speak of more abstractive concepts, there may form connotational senses which serve the purpose of obscuring reality. This obscurant connotation is most likely to take place where there is a political end being sought through the correct use of words. Note how democracy and politics carry distinct connotations, the former positive and the latter negative, but at the level of denotation, do they describe different phenomena? The lesson of this is that if someone is loading their language with positive connotation, they’re trying to sell you something.

People, though as a rule are generally stupid, are not completely impenetrable when they see that what was promised by certain words, i.e. something good, and the actual reality diverge. It is like these words trick people to walk into dark alleys where they are mugged by reality. The United Kingdom is currently experiencing the abundant fruits of multiculturalism, and so where multiculturalism might yet be used by insulated politicians, academics, and white upper classes who have no actual lived experience with multiculturalism as it actually takes place, the people who are involuntarily exposed to its fruits tend to come away with a distinctly negative connotation. Suddenly, multiculturalism no longer signals holiness to those in the know; but of course, only a disaffected and democratically impotent population are in the know.

One of the great lies of the Enlightenment is that human society is, in some way, outside of Nature. There is reference to the animal kingdom, and its cruel and merciless beauty is well-known, but civilization is, through a bifurcation with the term of art ‘’state of nature’’ separated from these laws, no longer beholden to the violent conflict which is the rule in Nature. What we have achieved is not some separation from or excelling beyond the state of nature, we have only tamed ourselves to resolve disputes with a little more politeness. Instead of brutish competition where the consequence of loss is frequently death, we have put in place a system where losers only have fewer material goods, less social status, so on and so forth. We cooperate because the system has, up to this point in time, demonstrated that most people are still intent on cooperation; those who defect are roundly punished by society for their defection, and so long as we are capable of employing this game theoretic strategy of tit-for-tat at the collective level, we may have civilization. When defection is no longer punished, defection becomes a more optimal strategy for gaining material goods and social status. In a time of civilizational decline, hawks rule and doves are slaughtered. Only through a process of hawks picking each other off in the Interesting Times of civilizational decline does some sufficiently powerful hawk re-solve the problem of punishing defection, and doves may prosper again.

In human society, war is relative; if we may say that war is politics by other means, then inversely politics is war by other means. And inasmuch as we are forced to partake in politics, we are forced to participate in war. Of course, this is just the rule of Nature. You can as easily rid society of politics as you can kill Gnon, so it is best to negotiate skillfully and with tact. We do not engage in politics only by voting or by putting pressure on politicians through financial incentive, every single social interaction is political. It is only that humans have developed collective strategies to better hack into the benefits of cooperation.

One of the most interesting collective action problems (and is frequently not even noticed as a collective action problem) is language. When the skillful use of rhetoric is a significant factor in attaining wealth and status, people develop strategies to make language work better for them. The difference between a rap battle and a presidential debate is only one of degree; quite literally, each combatant is meant to win over the crowd through whatever rhetoric achieves that end. One can go further in pointing out that these are merely human forms of persuasion, which in the animal kingdom may take on the form of gorillas beating their chest or peacocks spreading their feathers.

One of the purposes of philosophy is to demarcate which forms of argumentation are sounder and bring us nearer to an understanding of what is the case and which forms lead us astray, because it is only in reflection of what is actually the case that we are able to intelligently shape our behavior to positive ends. That said, the academic article, the philosophical disquisition, the monologue, the sermon, these are equally forms of persuasion that have nothing but the intent of gaining status for the individual or some collective purpose. They are recognized as more civilized forms of persuasion for their good faith, i.e. cooperative, means for resolving dispute.

So long as one is sufficiently abstracted away from the actual, lived results of a policy described through words of positive connotation, one engages in mere sophistry, weaving together pretty sounding words which are not intended to ever really be verified in practice. It is philosophy when we are able to pick out someone’s behavior and tell them ‘’No, this is what I mean,’’ but where that process of verifying shared use of language is forbidden, an avenue to understanding is cut off and sophistry flourishes. Philosophy is the language of doves, sophistry the language of hawks. When the thought police are active, subterfuge must be employed to get the same work done, which is frequently costly and leads to misunderstanding between those who are otherwise in the know (as opposed to those who care not at all for knowledge, i.e. the sophists). Hence the collective action problem; there are potential benefits to defecting from the ostensible purpose of language, to communicate what is the case between individuals and distribute knowledge to better orient behavior to optimal means. Words are tools. Just as a hammer might be used to pound in nails or a skull, words may alternately construct or destruct. A society which is unable to collectively punish defectors from the cooperative use of language is a society which rapidly loses the ability to communicate ideas, reducing us to less civilized, bestial forms of discourse which tend nearer zero- and negative-sum games.