Elected officials speak in a language that’s unique to their status group. If you’ve ever tried to attend a city council or school board meeting, you’ve watched them open with the onanistic portion of the thing, handing out certificates and doing grip-and-grins. “Bob, I just want to echo your wonderful comments about this amazing program.” They see themselves first, then others of their class, then they go blind. The first duty of a public official is to take a lot of selfies.
In a crisis, they recite. We’ve all watched them do this. “This is not who we are.” “Let me be clear: Hate has no home here.” You know what they’re going to say before they say it, and you know the tone before you hear it. The current mayor of Los Angeles is very fond of “our message has been very clear” and “we’re going to link arms and stand together”, so you’re not surprised to hear her respond to a question with something like, “Well, Maria, thank you for that great question. Our message has been very clear: We’re going to link arms and stand together.” Listening to elected officials speak is qualitatively different than listening to people speak. They perform the ritual behaviours of their status group.
[…]
They become debilitated by a lifetime of ritual language. If a staffer hasn’t told them to look somber and say “I’m sorry for your loss”, they don’t know how. It isn’t a line they’ve been equipped with for the event. Hey man your kids burned to death I almost lost my Corvette once, man. All kiddin’ aside, man!
[…]
They aren’t people anymore. They can’t talk like people. They don’t have normal human affect. What’s particularly interesting is that this learned inability to read human cues is recent and narrow. Bill Clinton, as much a politician as anyone who has ever lived, had a well-known ability to see people and signal his empathy, or at least to do a brilliant job of faking it. Similarly, Donald Trump is obviously very very fond of Donald Trump, who is amazing, trust me, everybody says so, but he has a normal human ability to spontaneously bullshit with the normals. Elite disconnection isn’t inevitable.
The broken personal thing behind all the broken institutional things is a loss of basic human connection and behavior. It’s a learned disconnection, and they can’t hide it.
Chris Bray, “The Mask Becomes Your Face”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2023-08-22.
November 25, 2023
QotD: Political language mirrors the ritualized nature of political life
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