Definition

In high school, you’re taught in essays and debates to define your terms. Like most other things learnt, I could not figure out its importance; it seemed like another mundane task.

Only a few years ago, as I observed and felt pointless suffering stemming from misunderstandings, did I realize: it may be the most important thing we do in conversation today.

In the West for the past half-century, we have this ardent emphasis on rights, freedom, individual identity and so-forth. The introduction of the internet means there is more flow; but also more fragmentation. Understandably, problems begin manifesting when sufficient fragmentation challenges the integrity of the whole, and thus the ideas that truly matter are brought under scrutiny so we may find some meaning in our existence.

“…modern people…are ignorant of what they really are. We have simply forgotten what a human being really is, so we have men like Nietzsche and Freud and Adler, who tell us what we are, quite mercilessly. We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are.”

– Carl Jung

What are your values exactly?
What does it mean to be liberal? To be conservative?
Libertarian? Humanitarian?
What does it mean to be a racist? A nationalist? A patriot?
What does it mean to be multi-cultural? To be a fence sitter?

What does it mean to be a capitalist? An entrepeneur?
A democratic socialist? A burden to others?

What does it mean to be easy-going? To have no boundaries?
Who is accepting of differences? Who is naive?
What is the difference between justice and vengeance?

If anyone is left to understand what these categories originally stood for, it is sometimes soured by the younger generation’s ambition for change but ignorance in experience.

The writer had a conversation with a lawyer once, about how one becomes less naïve and more pragmatic as one grows older. However, I also pointed out that it is also the youthful that remain idealistic, and without that what do we have left?

For, after all,
you do grow up,
you do outgrow your ideals,
which turn to dust and ashes,
which are shattered into fragments;
and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments.
And all the time your soul is craving and longing for someone else.

And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders,
looking in these cinders for some spark,
however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled bloody by it and revive in it
all that he held so dear before,
all that touched his heart,
that made his blood course through his veins,
that drew tears from his eyes,

and that so splendidly deceived him!

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is the age of data. There is no doubt the personal computer and smartphone has changed the way humankind interacts with the world – for better or worse is hard to say. Attention becomes a valuable commodity; therefore, so too does valuable content. It’s a positive-loop feed-back effect; ever finer separation of the wheat from the chaff – only limited by human ingenuity/population; inequality exacerbates and so on.

Consider this interview with investment fund billionaire Ray Dalio, hosted by CNBC.

Most people should be able to realize that the conversation stalls simply because of a definition: ‘capitalism’. A definition and the inability or perhaps unwillingness for parties to reach across the aisle and find a middle ground.