Chapter 12 Chapter 7 Poisoned Language

If the words don't go well, the people will be at a loss. Language is a guide to behavior Trade, population movement, and the growth and mixing of populations not only broadened people's horizons, but also enriched their languages.Not only did businessmen inevitably encounter and acquire exotic languages ​​in their travels, but they also had to think about the different meanings of those key terms (if only so as not to offend their hosts or misinterpret the transaction). terms of the agreement), and thus they also learned some new and different views on the most basic things.I shall now consider some of the issues concerning the conflict that language creates between primitive groups and extended orders.

All human beings, primitive or civilized, in order to organize their perceptions, depend in part on the properties of language which enable them to ascribe to these sensory signals.Language not only enables the objects that act upon our senses to be classified into distinct objects, but enables us to classify, according to our expectations and needs, an infinite variety of combinations of different signs.Such labels, classifications and distinctions are of course often ambiguous.What's more, all uses of language involve many interpretations or inferences about our environment.As Goethe acknowledged, what we take to be facts is already theory: what we "know" about our circumstances is our interpretation of them.

Difficulties then arise in the interpretation and evaluation of our views.For example, many generally held beliefs are only implicit in the words or sentences expressing them, and may never become explicit beliefs; they are therefore never subject to judgment, with the result that language not only communicates wisdom but also Spreading ignorance that is hard to eradicate. Likewise, because of the limitations of a particular vocabulary and the meanings it has, it is difficult to use it to explain things different from what it is traditionally accustomed to explain.Not only is it difficult to explain or even describe new things using old vocabulary, but it is also not so easy to classify what language has classified in a certain way—especially when this method is based on the intrinsic properties of the senses. When above.

These difficulties have prompted some scientists to create new languages ​​for the disciplines in which they work.Reformers, especially socialists, were driven by the same drive, and some of them also suggested an elaborate transformation of language to better keep people in their place (see Bloch, 1954-1959). Given these difficulties, our vocabulary and the theories attached to it are crucial.As long as we speak in language based on false theories, we will make mistakes and perpetuate them.Yet the traditional vocabulary that still profoundly influences our understanding of the world and how humans interact within it, and the theories and explanations embedded in this vocabulary, have remained in many respects very primitive.Many of these were formed in distant times, when our minds interpreted very differently what our senses conveyed.So when we learn much of what we know through language, the meaning of each word can lead us astray: when we are trying to express our new and better understanding of a phenomenon, we go on Using words with outdated connotations.

A related example is transitive verbs that make inanimate objects appear to have some kind of thinking ability.Just as the naive or ignorant mind always imagines life when it feels motion, so it always imagines thought or mental activity when it thinks there is some purpose.This is better illustrated by the fact that, to some extent, human evolution seems to repeat itself in every early development of the human mind.Piaget wrote in The Child's Knowledge of the World: "The child initially sees purpose everywhere." It is only in the second stage that the mind begins to perceive the purpose of things themselves (panpsychism) and the Creator's purpose (creationism).The meaning of panpsychism is attached to many basic words, especially those denoting order-producing phenomena.Not only 'fact' itself, but the words 'cause', 'force', 'endow', 'choice', and 'organize', which are indispensable in describing impersonal processes, still remind many people of human behavior.

The word "order" itself is a clear example, and before Darwin it was used almost universally to imply the existence of an acting being.At the beginning of the last century, even a thinker as famous as Bentham argued that "order presupposes certain ends" (1789/1887, Collected Works II, p. 399).It can be argued that until the "subjectivist revolution" in economic theory in the 1870s, the understanding of human creativity was dominated by animistic beliefs.Even Adam Smith's "invisible hand" was not entirely free from animism until the 1870s, when the guiding role of competitively determined market prices became more clearly understood.Even today, the study of human affairs, in addition to the scientific study of law, language, and markets, is still dominated by a vocabulary largely derived from animistic thinking.The most important examples come from those socialist writers.The closer one looks at their work, the clearer it becomes that their contribution is more about protecting animist ideas and language than reforming them.Taking the example of the historicist tradition of Hegel, Comte, and Marx personifying "society," socialism, and "society" as it ) is the latest form of the proposed animistic interpretation of order.The fact that socialism tends to be against religion hardly undercuts that either.Socialists think that all order is the result of design, and they conclude that order, too, can be improved by some higher mind.In this regard, socialism also has a role to play in the development of various animisms by authority figures, as initially articulated in Evans-Pritchard's Theory of Primitive Religions (1965).Given the continuing influence of animism, it seems premature today to agree with Clifford.Clifford was a profound thinker who asserted as early as Darwin's time that "except in cases where man can intervene independently, purposiveness no longer implies that design is due to educated man" (1879:117).

The continuing influence of socialism on intellectuals and scholars is also evident in the descriptive studies of history and anthropology.Braudel once asked: "Which of us has not spoken of class struggle, mode of production, labor power, surplus value, relative poverty, practice, alienation, infrastructure, superstructure, use value, exchange value, primitive Accumulation, dialectics, the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . " (presumably these terms are all derived from or popularized by Marx. See Braudel, 1982b) In most cases, the basis of such conversations is not a simple statement of fact, but an explanation or reasoning of the consequences or causes of the facts stated.One thing in particular we should also attribute to Marx is that "society" takes the place of the state or coercive organization of which Marx was actually talking.This is a roundabout way of saying that it leads us to think that the behavior of individuals can be governed by more gentle means than coercion.Of course, the spontaneously formed extended order, which has been the subject of this book, can hardly "act on" or "treat" specific individuals in the same way it "acts on" or "treats" a people or a population.Moreover, the term "state" or more correctly "government", which was a common (or more explicit) English word until Hegel, also contained, for Marx, the notion of power, plainly and unambiguously, And the vague word "society" enabled him to imply that the rule of society would ensure a certain freedom.

So, just as wisdom is often hidden between the lines, so is error.Naive interpretations of which we now know to be false, and suggestions that are often unappreciated but have made a difference, are passed down through the language we use and influence our decisions.Of particular relevance to our discussion is the unfortunate fact that many of the terms we use when speaking of different aspects of the extended order of human cooperation carry misleading connotations of early societies.In fact, many of the words included in our language are of such a character that, if one is used to using them, one will draw conclusions that cannot be reached by calm consideration of the problem, that is, conclusions that contradict scientific arguments.It is for this reason that, in writing this book, I have given myself a self-denying instruction never to use words like "society" or "social" (although they inevitably appear from time to time in the titles and in what I have quoted from others, and I have sometimes perpetuated the terms "social science" or "social studies").Although I have not used these words so far, in this chapter I hope that by discussing these words and others that serve a similar function, I hope to expose hidden toxins in our language, especially when it comes to human interactions and Toxins in the language of institutions and structures of interrelationships.

The rather terse quotation from Confucius at the beginning of this chapter is perhaps the earliest expression of this understanding that has survived.I first saw it in a simplified translation, apparently because there is not a single word or (set of words) in Chinese that means freedom.But the following passage seems to correctly translate Confucius's description of the ideal state of any orderly group of people in (Waley's translation, 1938:XIII, 3, 171-2): "If the language is incircrect, . . . the people will have nowhere to put hand and foot" (translation note: this translation is obviously from the Chinese "... If words don't go well, things will fail; , the people will be at a loss", from which Hayek only intercepted the two sentences "the words are not smooth" and "the people are at a loss", which seems to be inconsistent with the original meaning of Confucius.) I would like to thank David from Oxford University Mr. Hawkes, who has found a more correct translation of a mistranslation which I have often quoted.

The unsatisfactory features of our present political vocabulary derive from their ancestors, chiefly Plato and Aristotle.Lacking an evolutionary notion, they believe that the order of human affairs is the arrangement of some fixed and unchanging human being, fully understood by the ruler, or, like most religions from antiquity to socialism, by some brilliant mind product of design. [Anyone looking for the influence of language on political thought will find a wealth of material in Demant (1978).In the English literature, a very informative discussion of the deception of metaphorical language can be found in Cohen (1931).But as far as I know, a full discussion of political abuse of language appears in the German studies of Scheck (1973) and Siersky (1975: 233-249).I myself have done some work on this question earlier in my (1967/78:71-97; 1973:26-54; 1976:78-80). ]

Word ambiguity and the difference between collaborative systems Elsewhere we have attempted to clear up the confusion created by ambiguous terms such as "natural" and "artificial" (see Supplement A), "genetic" and "cultural", etc., as the reader will have noticed , I generally prefer the less common but more precise concept of "discrete property" to the more common term "private property".There are of course many other ambiguities and confusions, some of which are more important. There is, for example, an ingenious deception in the appropriation of the word "liberalism" by American socialists.Schumpeter put it aptly (1954:394): "One of the highest compliments, perhaps unintentional, is that the enemies of the private enterprise system also find it wise to appropriate the liberal label." Applies to those middle-of-the-road parties in Europe that either claim the banner of liberty, as in England, or call themselves liberal parties, as in West Germany, but do not hesitate to form alliances with parties that are clearly socialist .I complained 25 years ago (1960, postscript) that it was impossible for a Gladstoneian liberal to describe himself as a liberal without giving the impression that he believed in socialism.Nor is this a new development: as early as 1911, Hobhouse published a book entitled Liberalism, or rather, Socialism, and soon after , titled The Elements of Social Justice (1922). The importance of this change—a change that may have been irremediable—compels us to focus here on the vague and confusing language emanating from names widely used for phenomena of human interaction. consistent with the general theme of the book.Our lack of appropriate terms for describing the different forms of human interaction not only marks or reflects the gross inadequacy of existing knowledge about the coordination of various human endeavors.These concepts are actually so inappropriate that we can't even define exactly what we're talking about when we use them. Let us begin with the two opposing principles commonly used to divide the order of human cooperation, capitalism and socialism.Both concepts are misleading and contain political bias.They are meant to be helpful in understanding these institutions, but they tell us nothing about their peculiarities.Especially the word "capitalism" (Karl Marx still didn't know the concept in 1867 and never used it).It was only because of Sombart's sensational 1902 book Modern Capitalism that "a political controversy erupted as the natural antithesis of socialism" (Braudel, 1982a: 227).Since the word conjures up a system that serves the special interests of the owners of capital, we see that it naturally arouses opposition from its chief beneficiaries, members of the proletariat.The activities of the owners of capital enable the proletariat to survive and increase, and in a sense it is the owners of capital that actually create the proletariat.Yes, the extended order of human intercourse made possible by the owners of capital may have led some capitalists to proudly agree to call this the result of their efforts.Yet it is an unfortunate development that brings to mind a conflict of interest that does not actually exist. A more satisfactory name for a cooperative extended economic order is the German word 'market economy'.But it also has a number of serious flaws.First, the so-called market economy is not really an economy in the strict sense, but a combination of a large number of interacting individual economies.Market economies share some, but not all, of the definite features of these individual economies.If we give this complex structure formed by a single economy a name that makes it appear to be an artificial structure, it will have anthropomorphic or animistic results, which, as we have seen, is exactly what we think of human interaction. source of many misperceptions of the working process, and it is difficult to get rid of them.It must always be remembered that the economy produced by the market does not really look like a product of human design, it is a structure that resembles an economy in some respects and in others, especially in terms of its inability to serve a unified sequence of goals In terms of economics, it is fundamentally different from the real economy. The second defect of the term market economy is that it does not yield a convenient adjective in English, which is of course necessary to indicate the propriety of a particular action.So long ago I suggested (1967/1978b:90) the adoption of a new technical term, one derived from a Greek root we already use in many similar cases. In 1838, Archbishop Whitley proposed "catal-lactics" as the name of the theoretical science to explain market order.This proposal has been repeated from time to time, most recently by Mises.The adjective "Catallactic" is easily derived from this word coined by Whitley, and has come into fairly widespread use.These words are especially intriguing because they come from the ancient Greek word "kata-lattein" or "katatassein," which means not only "exchange," but "admission into society" and "turning enemies into friends," further evidence that the ancient Greeks A deep knowledge of these matters (Liddell and Scott, 1940, see "katallasso").I therefore propose that we coin the term "catallaxy" (the process of exchange) to describe the aims of what we commonly call economics, and to call economics "exchangeology," following Wheatley.The usefulness of this invention was confirmed by some of my younger colleagues who had adopted the former term.And I believe that if it becomes more widely adopted, it will really help our discussion. Our Animistic Vocabulary and Confused Concepts of "Society" These examples show quite clearly that in the study of human affairs the difficulty of communication begins with the definition and naming of the object we wish to analyze.The main terminological obstacle to understanding is the term "society" itself.This concept is more important than any other term we have just discussed.Not least because it has been used since Marx to confuse the distinction between government and other "institutions".Using the word "society" to denote different institutions of interrelationships in human activity would falsely give the impression that all these institutions are the same.Like the Latin word societas (society), which is derived from socius, it is one of the oldest words of this kind, referring to acquaintances or companions, and it is also used to describe the actual state of existence and relationship between individuals. relation.As it is commonly used, it presupposes or implies that there is a concerted pursuit of a common goal, which can only be achieved through conscious cooperation. As we know, one of the necessary conditions for human cooperation beyond the boundaries of individual knowledge is that the scope of this pursuit is less and less governed by common goals, but by abstract rules of behavior; Serving more and more the needs of people we never knew, and discovering that our needs are also being met by people we never knew.The wider the range of human cooperation stretches, the less the motives for such cooperation are at odds with people's assumptions about what happens in a "society," and the more the adjective "social" becomes less a key word in a factual statement than a key word in a statement of fact. Like the core of an ancient, now obsolete pursuit of ideals of general human behavior.There is less and less real insight into the difference between the actual character of an individual's behavior in a given group, on the one hand, and his desire to behave (according to ancient customs) on the other.Not only is a group of people connected in any practical way called a "society," but it follows that any such group of people should act like a primitive cooperative group. So the word "society" has become a convenient label for almost any human group.Neither the structure of the group nor the reasons for holding it together need to be known—a term people use for convenience when they don't quite know what they're talking about.Clearly, a group, a nation, the entire population of an area, a corporation, an association, a group, a tribe, a gang, an ethnic group, or members of a race, religion, sport, or recreation, and those who live in a particular place The inhabitants of all are societies or are capable of constituting societies. The same term applies to disparate forms, such as a group of people in constant contact between individuals, and a structure that links millions of people together only by signals arising from long and infinitely extending trade relations. not only is factually misleading, but almost always implies a hidden desire to shape this extended order with the kind of intimate partnership we emotionally crave.This instinctive nostalgia for small groups is well described by Jouvernet—"that is the place where man first arose, which still holds his infinite fascination: but anyone who wants to bring the same characteristics Efforts to transplant into a large society are utopian and lead to despotism" (1957: 136). The key difference overlooked in this chaotic perception is that the behavior of small groups can be directed by agreed goals or the will of their members, while also being an extended order of "society" it forms a coordinated structure, Rather, it is because its members abide by the same rules of conduct in pursuit of different personal goals.The results of these various efforts under the same rules will of course exhibit some characteristics which are similar to those of a single organization of the same mind or idea, or the characteristics of this organization's deliberate arrangement.But to view such a "society" animistically, or to personify it, to give it a will, an intention, or a plan, is misleading.It is, therefore, remarkable to see a serious contemporary scholar claim that any utilitarian "society" must appear not as "a diverse assemblage of individuals ... but as the embodiment of one great man" (Chapman, 1964: 153). It's unnerving. Ambiguous Generalization - "Social" The term "social," though misleading, is less harmful than the adjective "social," which has become perhaps the most confusing term in our entire moral and political vocabulary.This happened only in the past 100 years, during which time the modern usage of the word "social" and its influence spread rapidly from Bismarck's Germany to the whole world.In areas where the word is used the most, it continues to spread confusion in part because it is used not only to describe phenomena arising from different modes of human cooperation, as in a "society," but also to Describe the various forms that facilitate and serve this order.From the latter usage it has increasingly become an initiative, a mandate to replace conventional morality with rationalist morality, and is gradually replacing the word "good" as the name for something that is morally correct.As properly explained in the New Webster's Thesaurus, due to this "special ambiguity" feature, the actual and standard meanings of the word "social" are constantly changing. It will become an instruction when you feel it. On this particular issue, German usage has influenced American English more than English, because in the 1880s some German scholars, known as the historical or moral schools of economic studies, increasingly used the term "social policy" " instead of "political economy" to name the study of human interactions.One of the few people not to be swept away by this new fashion, Leopold von Wieser later commented, was only those young people of the "Socialist era", that is, those who lived in the decades before the First World War One can judge how strong the tendency at the time was to treat the "social" sphere as a stand-in for religion.One of the most vivid manifestations is the presence of the social parish priest.But Vesser insisted that "being 'social' is not the same as being good or right, or 'right in the eyes of God'" (1917).We owe an illuminating historiographical study of the spread of the term 'social' to some of Viser's students (see the references I listed, 1976: 180). Since the entry of the word "social" into the English language, an extraordinary variety of usage has blossomed around us.In the "Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought" (Bloch et al., 1977) we quoted earlier, just after the entry "soap opera" (soaopera), we can find no less than 35 entries related to "social" (social) A series of phrases bound together by the same word, from "social behavior" to "society as a whole".Similarly, in R. Williams's "Key Words", although the author uses the customary "see" method to direct the reader to the corresponding entry, he does not follow this practice for the word "social" .Obviously, it is not feasible to use his method here, so the author simply gave up this method.These examples led me to take a moment to write down all the situations I encountered in which "social" occurred, resulting in the following instructive list of more than 160 words identified by the adjective "social". "of" qualified nouns: Accounting action adjustment MBA times animal appeal Conscious behavior exists institutional causal characteristics Circle of Higher Status Seekers Agreement Composition Understanding Concern concept conflict conscience conscious thought structure contract control reputation flaw comment activist Decisions demand democracy property development category Tendency to Discriminate Distance Responsibility Economy target entity environment epistemology code of conduct etiquette Event Evil Facts factor fascist forces Framework function assembly geographic target interest demeanor group harmony Health History Ideal Involvement, Discomfort, Independence Underlying System Insurance knowledge of communication justice Laws lead life market economy medical immigration rational morality morality Opportunities required order organism orientation Abandoned Ownership Partners Passion Peaceful Pension character philosophy happiness opinion policy position power priority privilege problem process product progressive property psychology Field of Hierarchical Realism State recognition reform for the rule of law Relationship Compensation Research Response to the Responsibility Revolution the role of rights Satisfy the scientific guarantee service signal meaning team language solidarity structural stability stance Identity Struggle Scholars Discuss the survey system talent teleology creed tension theory thinker thought feature use utility value point Virtue is scarce and wasteful Wealth needs work worker world Negative, critical forms of many of the sets of lines listed here are used more generally: so "social adjustment" becomes "social dissonance", "social chaos", "social injustice", "social disorder", "social instability" "And so on. It is not clear from this list alone that the word "social" has become a useless communication tool because it has so many different meanings.The results it actually produced, however, are evident in at least three respects.First, it always sinisterly implies a notion that we've learned to misinterpret in previous chapters, that what is accomplished by the impersonal and spontaneous process of the Extended Order is actually the result of human intentional creation.Second, as a result of this, it requires people to redesign things they never designed.Thirdly, it also acquires the power to render meaningless the nouns it defines. Judging by the last result, it has actually become the most pernicious example of what some Americans call "weasel rhetoric," from Shakespeare's "I can suck sorrow out of a song as a weasel sucks air." eggs" ("When You Like It", III, 5).Just as a weasel can suck up an egg without leaving a trace, so these words can render meaningless to any word they define, leaving the surface seemingly intact.This tricky word is used when one has to use a concept and at the same time wants to strip it of all meaning that challenges its ideological foundations. For the use of this expression in modern American English, see Mario Pai's recent Weasel Rhetoric: The Art of Saying What Doesn't Mean (1978), in which Theodore Roosevelt is credited with coining the term in 1918. However, readers cannot find the extremely ambiguous word "social" in this book. Although the misuse of the term "social" was international, it probably reached its peak in West Germany.West Germany adopted the term Sozialer Rechtsstaat (Social State of Law) in its constitution in 1949, and the concept of a "social market economy" has since spread—but certainly not in the sense of its advocate, Ludwig Eyre. Harder was referring to (he assured me in a conversation that, in his view, the market economy was not necessarily transformed into society, as a product of society, it was).Although the rule of law and the market are very clear concepts from the outset, the qualifier "social" deprives these words of any clear meaning.German scholars concluded from these uses of the word "social" that their government was constitutionally subject to the "principle of the social state" (Sozialstaatsprinzip), which was little more than a suspension of legality.Similarly, these German scholars saw the contradiction between the "state of law" (Rechtsstaat) and the "state of society" (Sozialstaat), so they wrote the "state of social law" (Soziale Rechtsstaat) into the constitution to prevent accidents-I might be able to It is said that this constitution was written by Fabian fools inspired by Friedrich Norman, the founder of nineteenth-century "National Socialism" (Meyer, 1972: 8). Similarly, the word "democracy" has always had a very definite meaning; yet "social democracy" was not only used as a name for the radical Austro-Marxist Any political party used to call Fabian Socialism.However, what we call "social state" today is expressed in traditional terms as "benevolent dictatorship". The very real problems faced by realizing this dictatorship in a democratic way, that is, while preserving individual freedom, are due to The plot of "social democracy" has disappeared. "Social justice" and "social rights" The worst use of the word "social," the one that destroys the meaning of the word it defines, is the ubiquitous phrase "social justice."Although I have written a little about this specific issue, especially in Volume II of my Law, Legislation, and Liberty, The Social Justice Illusion, because of its role in the debates for and against socialism plays a very important role, so here I must at least briefly state the main points.As a luminary with more courage than myself put it bluntly years ago, the term "social justice" is nothing more than "a semantic hoax in the same vein as people's democracy" (Curran, 1958: 8).The alarming degree to which this concept has perverted the minds of the younger generation is attested to by the recent essay "Social Justice" written by an Oxford Ph. The unusual phrase "there seems to be a category of personal justice" is used. I understand that this is suggesting that the term "social" applies to everything that reduces or eliminates differences in income.But why is this behavior called "social"?Perhaps because it is a means of securing a majority, ie for some other reason wishing to increase votes?This seems to be the case, but it must also mean that every "social" exhortation given to us is a call for a further step towards socialist "social justice".So the meaning of the word "social" is actually tantamount to asking for "distributive justice".However, it is difficult to coexist with a competitive market order, and with the growth and even maintenance of population and wealth.Because of these deficiencies, people have come to refer to "social" as the main obstacle to the maintenance of "society". "Social" should really be called "antisocial". If people believed that the relative status of individuals was just, they would be satisfied with their economic situation, and that would be true nine times out of ten.Yet the whole idea in favor of distributive justice (that everyone should get his moral share) is meaningless in an extended order of human cooperation (or exchange) because the available product (its size, even its very existence) depends on the distribution of the product in a sense that is not morally relevant.There are no objective criteria for determining moral rewards and punishments, for reasons we have already discussed.And in any case, the adaptation of a large whole to the truth to be discovered requires us to accept that "success is based on results, not on motives" (Alzian, 1950: 213).Any cooperative extended regime must constantly adapt to changes in its natural environment (including the life, health, and strength of its members); it is an absurd requirement that only changes with just consequences should occur; it is like believing that A well-crafted, organized response can be just as almost as absurd.Humanity could neither reach nor maintain its present population numbers without inequality, which is neither subject to nor reconcilable with any prudent moral judgment.发奋努力当然可以增加个人的机会，但只靠努力并不能确保收获。那些曾同样努力进行尝试的人，他们生出的妒嫉尽管完全可以理解，却是违反公共利益的。所以，如果共同的利益其实是我们的利益，我们就不能屈服于这种人类本能的愿望，而应该由市场过程来确定回报。除了市场以外，没有人能够确定个人对整个产品贡献的大小，也无法确定应该给一个人多少报酬，才能使他选择从事某些活动，能够为向所有人提供的货物和服务做出最大的贡献。当然，如果认为后者合乎美德，那么市场就能产生最道德的结果。 一些没有任何可实现的内容的承诺，把人类分成了两大敌对群体。妥协的方式并不能消除这一矛盾的根源，因为对于在事实方面的错误认识，每一次让步只能产生更不可实现的期望。然而，一种反资本主义的伦理观仍在继续发展，其基础则是某些人的谬论，他们对创造财富的制度大加挞伐，而他们的生存恰恰是靠了这种制度。他们以自由的热爱者自居，对分立的财产、契约、竞争、广告业、利润甚至金钱本身统统加以谴责。设想如果他们的理由能够告诉他们如何安排人类的努力来更好地为他们固有的愿望服务，他们本身就对文明造成一个重大威胁。他们自以为自己的理性能够告诉他们如何安排人类的努力，使其更好地服务于他们的内心愿望，其实他们自己构成了对文明的严重威胁。