Right to Community - From Manipulation to Meaning

Canadian democracy, like most advanced democracies around the world, displays the strong tendency to be concerned over what people believe instead of what is true, to be lulled into being persuaded by perception rather than reality. Millennia ago, even Plato warned against the propensity to permit persuasion to overshadow the problem of knowledge. In the modern Canadian context such problems are only magnified by the instant communication and countless images that flood our senses.Take a citizenry, especially of the mass-consumer and tech savvy variety, and the potential is huge for fabrication, half-truths, misnomers, outright lies, and innuendo. While such things remain a temptation in fields like advertising, politics can now be added. Why? Because such perpetrators know we are vulnerable to manipulation and their commitment to honourable public service is regularly trumped by their efforts to get our vote, or suppress it. And to get it they must persuade us of things that actually might not be relevant. Even as far back as the late-1800s, Joseph Blanchard wrote in his Essentials of Advertising: “The mission of advertising is to persuade men and women to act in a way that will be of advantage to the advertiser.” While such attempts at persuasion have always come part and parcel with politics, in recent years political promotion has become the accepted, or ignored, rhetoric of democracy. The savvy communicator, armed more with party slants than with realistic assessments, has increasingly usurped the plain style of an Abraham Lincoln, Tommy Douglas, Robert Stanfield or Lester Pearson.Political promotion abhors a vacuum, and the growing space between senior levels of government and local communities provides ample opportunity to trust that jargon can close the distance – a practice unworthy of good politics and integral communities. The professional promoters in the PMO now launch government rhetoric, which once sprouted from the farm, the small town, the city or the region, from the party office. It’s often fake and we know it. A government can treat us like morons by trying to launch negative ads against opposition leaders or by turning us off of politics altogether – either of which suits their purpose if it provides a winning combination.Our political language is no longer the vocabulary of community or service but the vernacular of the partisan professional. This is, in part, why it sounds so strange and unreal to us. Our communities face serious and debilitating challenges at the ground level, while we are nevertheless watching on in silence as the government continues to scope out the options of procuring a massively expensive fighter jet that will suck up the billions of dollars we will require to put a dent in our massive infrastructure deficit as communities. Crime in our communities has actually been in the state of decline for almost two decades; nevertheless, money that we could use to enhance public transport in our communities will be targeted for super prisons.We are rapidly on our way to becoming the first generation of Canadians to have a mass-produced culture that has little to do with the places where we live. If we are to actually live out democracy in our communities, then we must create a vocabulary, a developing knowledge, that deals specifically with our own strengths and challenges. Part of the reason we experience ever greater difficulties in achieving common action is because we have permitted our common talk to be usurped by the seductive language of politics. We experienced this in London during the dark days of the ElectroMotive labour struggle. While the feds, both locally and in Ottawa, spoke of “jurisdictions,” “free market intrusion,” and “foreign ownership rights,” citizens of all political persuasions were utilizing words and phrases that seemed to have fallen from our vocabulary until that moment – “We’re with you in this struggle,” “Didn’t know what to do, so brought by some coffee,” “”You folks need some food?” or my personal favourite, “I know it’s kind of complex, but you’re part of our community and I just want to be here with you.” Heard any of that kind of language from Ottawa lately.Georges Sorel, the controversial French philosopher, used to talk about the “language of movement.” A community that cannot find a common vocabulary that brings it together will of consequence become a place of endless and empty rhetoric, devoid of truly human content. Our humanity is found in our gathering, not our isolation or divisions. Our language must rise to that level if we as communities are to take back our future.Modern historians have taken a new approach to our political past. Great political shifts have traditionally been studied as the interactions between the key political figures, yet for the last decade researchers are learning to define such essential moments in history by studying the language of the people themselves. Hidden in such phrases were the dynamics of change. If we want paradigm shifts in our communities, we’ve got to stop being politically manipulated and start building a local language of meaning.