Dystopian foie gras

I sat in on a leadership meeting last week where I wasn’t allowed to contribute. That was tough.

Just observe. Listen. Get a sense of the team dynamics.

Wow, the semantics.

‘Oh, that's just semantics,’ they would say, over critical words that have various meanings, and many do not understand the implications of.

Dismissing semantics isn’t trivial; it’s tactical. It’s how people smuggle in power or an idea without admitting it. The dodge is dangerous. We can’t let people get away with that.

This is familiar to many of us, but in these perilous times, it struck me much harder this time. Important words meant completely different things to different people.

When someone said ‘accountability,’ one person heard ‘blame.’ Another heard ‘ownership.’ A third heard ‘micromanagement.’

The thing that nags at me is how innocent miscommunication is. Are we learning a more subtle art of deception as a result of being force-fed?

Are we a diabolical fois gras now?

I am resorting to defining  ‘agnotology’ more often in conversation again. Uh oh!

The deliberate cultivation of ignorance. Not just the absence of knowledge, but the active production of confusion. You can find a reference to it using your now-acronym-ridden engine/platform du jour.

Are we so completely conditioned to accept semantic chaos? It’s everywhere.

There are so many examples. Political narratives are peddled that make people fight for fictions. Social media, where, I am reliably informed, a significant majority of the content (beyond cat videos) is either delusional, dangerous, bland or wholly unchallenged slop. The inside of our brains gets the second foie-gras reference.

A culture where asking - ‘what do you mean by that? - feels awkward or gets you deplatformed. Overgeneralising a bit.

When words lose their meaning, truth becomes negotiable. When truth becomes negotiable, does power go to whoever shouts loudest?

It feels like we're drowning in deliberate ambiguity.

And again, there are many examples. Fact-based decision making that ignores inconvenient facts. Data-driven strategies that cherry-pick the data. Transparent communication that obscures more than it reveals.

Is every undefined word a small surrender to confusion? When we let semantic sloppiness slide, are we making space for someone else to fill in the blanks with their agenda?

Could the antidote to agnotology be precision?

In that meeting, what if just one person had asked, ‘What specifically do you mean by accountability?’ Would the entire conversation have shifted?

Is that desire for clarity a form of resistance? Is that precision actually one of the small shifts we need to push back all the absurdity?

What do you think? Are we facing culturally cultivated confusion, or am I seeing patterns that aren’t there? Like dead people.

An article on my Substack delves deeper into the semantic challenge we face—link in the first comment.