Words and their meanings

Text in Context

[A] fundamental subjectivity of experience makes every word we write and utter a bottle of pressurized ambiguity effervescent with myriad meanings, tossed into the ocean of experience in the touching hope that it will convey a clear message about what we see and what we feel.

– Maria Popova, The Marginlian

As people, we use words to align expectations and coordinate actions with others, in society and the economy, in enterprise and finance, and in all the various other aspects of our social and our private lives.

And this creates a place for problems, because sometimes the meaning we intend through the words that we use is not the same meaning that is understood by those who receive those words from us.

In poetry, this effervescent ambiguity of meaning in words gives us the power to express emotions that resonate differently with different people, each in our own unique way, reverberating within the subjectivity of our own personal experience.

In rhetoric, this effervescent ambiguity gives words a power to persuade people to agreement, sometimes falsely, as the meaning people think they are agreeing with and the meaning argued for by the orator are not always the same meaning. This happens a lot in politics, which is one of the things that gives politicians their sometimes unsavory reputation.

In logic, this effervescent ambiguity is anathema to the clarity and precision with which words must be used to ensure that agreement in form is also agreement in substance. This is critically important in the law, which is the reason process becomes so important in legal matters: it is the process for making sure there is agreement on the words and their meanings that ensures justice in the case, and consistency across similar cases.

In Finance as it is practiced today, rhetoric (veering towards the poetic) has displaced logic in order to capture our common sense in a misunderstanding that makes no sense.

That misunderstanding manifests as confusion throughout our populations by simultaneously asserting the truth of two logically incompatible propositions, neither of which, in common parlance, is rejected as incorrect.

One proposition is that money does not really matter. That what matters in Finance and Enterprise and the Economy Society are the individual merits and morals of individual actors in the markets, even when those merits and morals are expressed through money. It is never the money that matters. It is the merit and morals being expressed through money that really matter.

The other proposition is that money matters as a proxy for quality of life, such that more money always equates to a better quality of life. So we can abstain from nuanced discussions of choice and consequences on quality of life, to reduce all consideration to mere quantities of money, with absolute confidence that the large quantity will always, of necessity, equate to the better quality.

This is the rhetoric of Neoliberalism, as the special pleading for the special interest of capital markets professionals in exercising monopoly control of society’s shared savings aggregated into social trusts for the social purposes of socially provisioning Workforce Pensions and Civil Society Endowments, that calls on us to simultaneously accept that money matters, as a proxy for quality, and that it does not matter, because it is really just a utility for expressing individual merit and morality, which are what really matter.

Which is it?

Does more money mean better morals?

Does less money mean lower merit?

Obviously, neither is necessarily either true or false. To equate money with morals, and more with merit, we need to know more than just the quantities, We need also to understand the context. Why is there more in some cases, and less in others? It matters how the numbers are arrived at.

Other manipulations of the meaning of the words follow suit from this incongruous assertion that money doesn’t matter but that more is always better.

Investment, for example, which means money put to work as financing for enterprise, generally, becomes investment as money put to work in financing enterprise through the capital markets, specifically, cutting off, linquistically, any possibility that there might be other ways of making investments that can and should also be considered.

From this it follows that the Prudent Person becomes the Prudent Person Investing Money becomes the Prudent Person Investing in the Markets becomes the Prudent Investor in the Markets, becomes the Prudent Investor, cutting off, again linguistically, any possibility that a prudent person may choose to invest money in some way other than through the capital markets.

In this way our common sense of prudence in the choice of investments from among all the possibilities is replaced by professional expertise in choosing what to buy and when to sell to extract profit from price in the capital markets.

And in this way, Prudent Stewards of Social Trusts become Asset Owners Allocating Assets Across Asset Classes, and within classes, selecting Asset Managers peer-benchmarked by Consultants for outperformance in maximizing the highest possible purely pecuniary profit expectation, either through price-taking in the public capital markets, using the mean-variance mathematics of Modern Portfolio Theory to build portfolios of trading positions that meet or beat the markets overall, or through financially engineering “value creation” for profit extraction in the private, alternative, capital markets, solely in the financial best interests of capital markets professionals, in reliance on the axiomatic assertion that more fees and profits for them will always also mean a better quality of life for us all.

And in this way we are left without a voice in holding our institutions of finance accountable for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercises of their institution authority/power true to their institutional agency/power/mission.

We have to leave that to the experts, because only the experts know what to buy, and when to sell. So only the experts can judge the expertise of other experts.

We have no say.

Which means we are left with only two strategies.

One is to boycott in the markets, as a mass movement for the exercise of individual choice in choosing not to choose those choices that are bringing consequences upon society that we do not accept.

The other is to protest against politicians to demand that they make laws that make the people we identify as bad actors stop acting in ways that we identify as bad, and make them pay to clean up their mess!

When the problem is that we are correctly executing a corrupted code, neither boycotts nor protests will be effective.

What we need to do is correct the code.

And the place to start is with correcting the language that traps us in that corruption.