Does Language Generate Conflict?

Language is particularly useful and effective as a system of communication but it tends to generate ambiguity and confusion in equal measures to those of the invocation of clarity and understanding. It is not always or immediately apparent but the integrated systems of communication we inhabit are naturally and adaptively biased towards their own reproduction. The optimally concise method that language reproduces both through and as us is by misunderstanding, argument, difference and doubt.

Even where and when we seek to define or constrain the ambiguities and doubt, we only ever offset and delay an unremitting complexity and unbounded linguistic entropy that always and without question percolates to ascendancy elsewhere. A consequence of this is that the narrative tropes, agendas, ideologies and political philosophies we attempt to anchor our identities and realities upon are generally also precisely those ensembles of certainty that generate maximal coefficients of doubt and ambiguity, elsewhere or elsewhen.

What this has led us to is a world in which the narrative identities and political fictions we come to inhabit have acquired the ability to maximally self-propagate through a transmission medium of minds and artefacts that optimally reproduce precisely the kinds of disorder and uncertainty that regenerate and sustain those narratives. Bureaucracies, for instance, reproduce the structured narratives that replicate precisely the optimal dysfunction that self-validates their own tenured continuity in whichever environmental context they inhabit.

We find ourselves in this way wedded to a medium of communication that achieves much more by its failures to communicate than it could ever do be bei g or becoming unambiguously transparent and effective. This is the generative discontinuity of language and I fear it predisposes us to precisely the kinds of disagreement and conflict we see everywhere in the world.

Words and meanings, like people, can be truly beautiful but there is always and without exception a masked dark side that, being so psychologically unpalatable, we tend to ignore. This ignorance and denial, ironically, reproduces more of the same and this is the unacknowledged purpose of a logic and language of information for which we all represent an unwitting and gullible transmission medium.