Communication requires that there be no hierarchy – it requires that everyone involved be on the very same level (or rather, we could say that it requires that everyone involved to be aware of being on the very same level, which is an extraordinarily rare state of affairs). Any power differential at all (even the slightest trace of it) and there can’t be any communication. There can’t be any true communication in this case because the terms of the discourse are always going to be set by the one with the most power. It’s not a level playing field; there’s always going to be a bias operating and if there’s a bias there then we’re never going to be any truth…
How do we know what ‘true communication’ is anyway, we might ask – how are we supposed to know what is communication and what isn’t? A good rule of thumb here is to say that when we engage in communication then this changes the way we see things. Communication – if it is to be such – has to result in change. It means that we come out of the interaction different from the way we went in – the ‘benefit’ of communication is therefore that we get be changed in ways we cannot foresee. As soon as we see this therefore then we can also see that whilst some of us (a small minority) will be interested and see this as a great thing, whilst most of us (the huge majority) will perceive ‘being changed in ways we cannot foresee’ as being an out-and-out disaster, as being the worst outcome possible.
Clearly, what we’re talking about is what James Carse calls ‘infinite play’ (or ‘the infinite game)’. Professor Carse defines The Infinite Game by saying that.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
In contrast to infinite play, finite play is all about ensuring that we don’t get changed, it’s all about ensuring that it is the other players who have to change, who have to adapt – whether they like it or not – to our will. They change – we don’t. The aim is to be ‘the mover but not the moved’ (in the traditional Christian tradition this is how we see God – as ‘the Unmoved Mover’, the Judge who cannot Himself be judged). Enforcing our will in the world (rather than allowing the world to change us) is what we call ‘being in the goal-orientated mode’. This is what we are pleased to call ‘being a successful controller’.
What we have here are two radically diametrically opposed ways of being in the world – we have ‘exploration’ versus ‘conservatism’, we have ‘reaching out and taking a risk’ versus ‘building a wall’. We’re either curious and playful in nature or else we’re super-serious, or else we’re dogmatically inflexible and defensive when it comes to anything new, anything we don’t straightaway recognize as familiar. When we’re in Conservative Mode then we’re operating under the auspices of FEAR; we are the helpless slaves of our own fear but – needless to say – we don’t see it like this. If we saw it like that then we’d see the fear that we’re trying to run away from. Instead, we turn everything upside down and say that change is bad (or that unplanned change is bad) and that what we’re doing is ‘protecting the all-important values’, ‘doing our civic duty’, ‘calling out the enemies who are threatening our way of life’, or however else we might like to phrase it. This is of course classic right-wing rhetoric. Classic right-wing rhetoric always comes out of fear – it’s fear that is trying to sound strong…
When faced with reality – as we can hardly help from being every now and again – we will respond in one of two ways, the default way of responding being to play finite games for all we’re worth, to busy ourselves in our trivial finite games. Finite games are all about control and control – in order to be successful – requires us to be powerful, it requires that we have more power than those who we are to control. Society itself is an exercise in power, as James Carse notes; it is theatrical, having an established script that we are compelled to stick to. This orientation – the slavish orientation towards adapting to the given system – is impressed upon us from the very beginning – obedience is required from us from the very beginning. We compete with each other to see who can be ‘the best at being obedient’; rewards are handed out to those amongst us who do better at this than everyone else. As Carse says, a platform is given to us (so that we may have a voice and be listened to by everyone else) only when we have proved ourselves in relation to the societal equilibrium values, and what this means is that only those of us who are the most afraid that will have a voice, that will have the right to determine reality for the rest of us. Authority doesn’t indicate strength, but rather the complete and utter absence of it…
This is the Magisterial Voice, and the Magisterial Voice has nothing whatsoever to do with communication. To quote James Carse –
Magisterial speech is amplified speech; it is speech that silences.
Magisterial speech has nothing to do with real communication because it’s ‘only working one way’, because it’s all ‘top down’ (which means that what we’re talking about is control rather than communication). This is true of the entire power pyramid – this is the case for every part of society, no matter what level of the hierarchy we ourselves might happen be on. Society is a ‘power pyramid’ and this means that control is being applied all the way, on every level, with no exceptions. As we have just said, because everything happens according to power (whether we see this singular fact or not) there can’t be any such thing as communication; because what we’re looking at here is a solid ‘control system’ there can’t be any communication, either travelling up the pyramid, or down (no matter how enthusiastic we might be about using the word). Manipulation is the word we should be using, not ‘communication’ – the megaphone voice of authority has nothing to do with honest communication…
We stubbornly persist in imagining that ‘life is better at the top’, but this is only ‘superficially the case. It’s nominally the case – it’s only better in an illusory (or ‘theatrical’) way and believing in comforting illusions always carries a price tag. Even to be at the very top of the pyramid doesn’t confer any real benefit to us – the controller is just as much a prisoner as the controlled (since the controller is controlled by their need to control). We might feel like saying that the controller is in a better position because it’s up to them whether they want to control or not, (because there’s no one above them in the hierarchy to tell them one thing or the other) but this isn’t the case – to stop imposing our will (which is to say, to stop being the one who says what gets to happen and what doesn’t get to happen) will bring us face to face with actual reality, the ‘raw, unvarnished thing’, and that’s exactly what we don’t want! That’s precisely why we started controlling in the first place – so that we could safely insulate ourselves against what’s really out there (as opposed to what we say is out there, in order to protect ourselves from this awareness). We control in order to insulate ourselves against the vertiginous spectacle of Infinite Possibility, therefore; we control so as to ensure that we never catch sight of the truth (which is that what we call ‘security’ is nothing more than a fiction, a state of abstraction (or removal from the actual).
Communication cannot be allowed to exist or else the power pyramid would disintegrate and that wouldn’t be any good because we’re all totally invested in it; because we have a stake in the status quo – and are therefore unwilling to question it – we have to give up any chance of genuine communication (and the precious opportunity for psychological growth that it brings). We pay lip service to communication, but that’s all; we can’t afford to go any further than that, we can’t risk the integrity of the collusion that we’re in hock to. We’re not really living, we’re only playing at it – we’re ‘playing at living in the sterile safety of the societal game’. It’s only a theatre, in other words. Those of us most exposed to reality are – of course – those of us who are at the bottom of that pyramid – we’re at everyone’s mercy here because we have no power at all. We have no respect either because we only respect power. We look down on those of us who have ‘failed at the game’ – we don’t care what happens to them. They don’t matter – they have no voice and that’s another way of saying that they ‘don’t matter’. The more power we have the more we are able to insulate ourselves from anything happening to us that we don’t want to happen (the more insulated we are from actual reality, in other words). This gives rise to one of the great ironies in life – which is that the only ones of us who are exposed to reality, and who thus have something to say, have no voice. Whilst those of us who are at the top (in the ‘elite’ position) are completely disconnected from anything real, and because of this they become the ones we listen to, they become the ones who are granted the megaphone voice which is ‘the privileged voice of authority’…
Image credit – grafittistreet.com
