philosophy

What always really gets on my nerves, even with myself, is the misuse of words. You see it everywhere. It’s not just the propagandistic distortions and Orwellian re-purposing that cause concern. Very often it’s simply the carelessness that people commit in order to make themselves look a little better, perhaps in a very human way.

But these are by no means just trivial offences. Language is very powerful and economical – it represents real things.

Something that is extremely noticeable is the misuse and mixing of opinion and truth. Everyone knows that you publish an opinion and it takes less than 10 minutes for someone to have a counter-opinion. This is actually a good and dialectical practice. You could use argument (thesis) and counter-argument (antithesis) to arrive at a new insight (synthesis) and learn something. Understand the other and yourself better.

As we all know, this only happens on the internet once every 2.8 million years. One reason for this is the misuse of words. Opinion above all and exclusively one’s own opinion is equated with truth. You are right. Your own opinion is supposedly right. But one peculiarity of opinion is that it is NEVER true.

By definition, an opinion cannot be true. Because if it were true, it would be the truth and thus no longer an opinion. Of course, it may happen that one of the opinions turns out to be true, that it is proven. But at that very moment it is no longer an opinion, but simply the truth. Which includes that the other opinions on the subject, which previously existed on an equal footing with the now true statement, are superfluous and must be discarded.

This shows how extreme the effects can be if you don’t use words correctly. If you set an obvious opinion (and there are many things for which no definitive true statements exist) as the truth, you are not only an unpleasant person, but you are also stating that the opinions of others (i.e. the potential antitheses) are superfluous. Without proving that these statements are false, but one denies the validity of the other’s statement.

This is, of course, a deeply depressing state of affairs. Which makes it impossible to negotiate the problems. A reactionary work.