Ruminations regarding world views and being articulate

Aweh dearly beloved fellow ruminants & groupies

Let’s start with what I think is a statement of the obvious. To be effective and to be taken seriously it helps a lot to be articulate.  How do you become articulate? As with most other things in life if you want to be good at something you need to work hard at it. The controversial academic Jordan Petersen offers straightforward and good advice on how to become articulate.  

One of my more critical readers castigated me for quoting Jordan Petersen in a previous blog because he is classified by some as a right-wing misogynist climate change denier. This set me to ruminate about who you should read and listen to. One of the very useful things I have learnt from very expensive management consultants is that all problems, no matter how complex, can be reduced to a two-by-two matrix which is today’s featured image.

The vertical axis represents how articulate a person is and the horizontal axis represents the extent to which that person’s worldview is aligned with my own. I have created my own personalised matrix with a selection of people.

This week the broadcaster and journalist Eusebius McKaiser died suddenly and unexpectedly. For many years I listened to him on the radio on the school run and on the way to work. He irritated me a lot. So why did I keep listening to him apart from masochism? He was extremely eloquent and articulate and although he was 80% annoying the other 20% of the time, he really took me out of my comfort zone and made me think making it all very worthwhile. I am saddened by his death.

The top right corner of the matrix I call my own personal echo chamber. This is populated by some of the people I follow and read, and it is easy for me to agree with their thinking. Who would you put into it if you were to make your own personalised intellectual echo chamber?

Eusebius and Jordan Petersen do not make it into my intellectual echo chamber but that does not mean I ignore them. Sometimes they make me think and they are worth listening to. What about articulate and eloquent people whose worldview has nothing in common with my own on the top left of the matrix. I call these scary people I need to understand. Joseph Goebbels was an evil but clever and articulate man. An evil genius who was masterful at the art of propaganda. If you want to study propaganda, then you should study him. In South Africa, we have Julius Malema a clever and eloquent populist politician on a par with Vladimir Putin. These are people you need to understand and to understand them you need to listen to them.

What about people in the bottom left quadrant? There are inarticulate people that I have nothing in common with. I would prefer to ignore them. Most people in this category like the Kardashians can safely be ignored. There are unfortunately a lot of them, and they vote. You would think that a requirement to become the president of a country would be that you need to be articulate. Apparently not. Both South Africa and the United States elected populist presidents who score very poorly on eloquence and intellectual rigour. You don’t need to be able to speak, think clearly or deal with reality to become the president of a country.  You can just say dumb stuff all the time. These are the scariest people of all. You can’t ignore them. The plus side of following these people is that I get to laugh a lot. They always surprise me with the dumb stuff they say and some of it is really funny.

One person I put in this category is the has been Jimmy Manyi, former Director General of labour in the South African government. He concluded that there is an oversupply of coloured people in the Western Cape. When this came out, I remember that I had a laughing fit and I had to sit down for several minutes to compose myself. The coloured people in the Western Cape are no wall flowers and some very colourful and highly amusing real-life theatre ensued. It was better than several evenings at a comedy club.

Then there are celebrities. Being a celebrity because you are skilled at something puts you in the limelight and gives you a public platform, but you can be anywhere in the matrix. Bobby Fischer was a world chess champion and chess genius but apart from that he was an incoherent nutcase. On the other hand, another world chess champion Garry Kasparov is an eloquent and thoughtful man.

The bottom right quadrant, which I call the useful idiots, was the hardest to populate because I don’t pay much attention to them because they are harmless.

People who like to stay within their intellectual echo chamber and don’t like being offended are fond of the concept of no-platforming where you try to prevent someone holding views you regard as unacceptable or offensive from speaking by denying them a platform. You don’t listen to people you don’t agree with. But how do you become articulate? It is the very process of engaging with people you don’t understand or agree with that improves your understanding and fills in gaps in your knowledge as well as revealing your blind spots. It is in this way that you become articulate and a force to be reckoned with. If you shout down those you don’t agree with, they won’t talk to you and you won’t be able to listen to them. The more you do this the less articulate you become.

Dear readers, what have I got wrong? One thing I have got wrong is that there are no women in my matrix, and I have been harshly and justly scolded for that. Am I a closet misogynist? What does your matrix look like and who would you put into your quadrants? I am sure there are those that would put Donald Trump in the top right quadrant. They deserve a platform and perhaps fortified with a bottle of fine red wine we could have dinner together and perhaps we could even have a laugh. Perhaps I could teach them a thing or two and, perish the thought, I might learn from them. But then again being articulate would help.

Thank you for all the ideas and comments. I really appreciate them and please keep them coming.

Regards

Bruce