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„You will own nothing and you will be happy.“ That’s the sentence commentators all over the world got worked up about, attributing it to the book “The Great Reset” by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret. Australian media personality Rowan Dean, a staunch climate change denier and Trump aficionado, used it to caricature Schwab, the German founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), as an authoritarian eco-communist, with a touch of old Nazi, hell-bent on abolishing private property.

The segment has racked up almost 1.5 million views on YouTube and thousands of people have expressed their concerns about the future of the free world in the comment section. This is ludicrous. It’s hard to think of a more bourgeois figure than Klaus Schwab.

 

Born into privilege as the son of a top executive, Schwab became a millionaire with his annual conference. Here are some of the companies who support his ideas: Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, IKEA, Lockheed Martin, Ericsson and Deloitte. Not exactly your usual commie suspects.

Dean’s absurd caricature is the kind of cheap, misleading shot somebody in the Anglophone world was bound to take. Schwab, the professor with the thick German accent is the quintessential egghead and an easy target for the kind of schoolyard bullying figures like Dean excel in. The fact that Schwab bears a certain resemblance to the Bond villain Blofeld and rarely breaks a smile doesn’t help.

 

 

A fun fact about the sentence, „You will own nothing and you will be happy“, Dean and the other commentators omit is that the sentence doesn’t appear in the book „The Great Reset“. What else won’t you find in the book? A single word about abolishing private property. Schwab never uttered the sentence the talking heads are freaking out about.

It only appears in that glossy WEF video which puts together various speculative statements about what the world might look like in 2030. It is clearly inspired by the idea of ​​the “ sharing economy ” that was all the rage in Silicon Valley not so long ago. That particular video has since been retracted, but a fair-minded take on the issue clearly indicates that the sentence the rabble-rousers latched on to is better understood in the context of this WEF video from 2017.

So, what is „The Great Reset“ all about then? First and foremost, it’s a great disappointment if you are fired up by videos and books about it and expect a juicy, diabolical plan for global enslavement by the “power elites”.

Basically, Schwab and Malleret use the pandemic and its‘ consequences as a launching pad for another attempt to convince the world of the concept of “stakeholder capitalism”, a supposedly more benign and humane version of capitalism, which they contrast with the colder, more ruthless “shareholder capitalism” practiced notably in the US and in the UK since the 80s.

The whole idea smacks of self-regulation, of “socially responsible capitalism”, of philanthropy and “enlightened leadership”, of “British Petroleum” claiming to go “Beyond Petroleum” and similar exercises in corporate fairy tale telling.

Another obvious problem with “stakeholder capitalism” is that small and medium-sized businesses already practice this. They have no other choice, as they are by nature local and bosses actually have the chance to get to know their stakeholders.

Large global corporations are a different kind of beast and it isn’t clear why CEOs should practice this approach voluntarily. They should take direction from the elected leaders of the countries they operate in, they shouldn’t be the ones setting the agenda.

There is an argument for keeping it simple, as Milton Friedman set out in this famous passage: “In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.“

Friedman acknowledges the primacy of politics. What is necessary is a political class willing to exercise its power, to ensure that businesses serve the common good and to force them if necessary. Not to persuade and flatter them as Schwab seemingly prefers to do.

Schwab and the WEF have a certain amount of power, mostly derived from acting as courtiers and enablers for the powerful, but Schwab’s apparent elitism, vanity and do-goodery probably mean that the people he admires view him as a harmless busybody rather than an éminence grise. The fact that he employed people like Philip Rösler, the very unremarkable former German health minister, as a top WEF executive, indicates as much.

Schwab first wrote about “stakeholder capitalism” in 1971. There is nothing scary or indeed, new, about any of this. The cynical reading of “The Great Reset” would be that the current elite fears that the risk of revolt, of “social unrest” will greatly increase in the aftermath of the pandemic and that Schwab once again urges them to make concessions to avoid the risk of being swept away.

This kind of thinking has a long tradition in Germany: the German chancellor Bismarck introduced social legislation in the late 19th century, creating a comprehensive health insurance system which exists to this day, to avoid “social unrest”, i.e. a communist revolution.

Schwab and his co-author explicitly say this several times. For example, in the course of their description of the “Macro Reset” on page 89: “The greatest underlying cause of social unrest is inequality. The policy tools to fight unacceptable levels do exist and they often lie in the hands of governments.“

Stylistically, reading „The Great Reset“ frequently feels like being sentenced to death by PowerPoint. But it’s a PowerPoint presentation with ambitions above its paygrade, a PowerPoint presentation that is living the dream of becoming a book and has left bullet points and (most) graphs behind. The bland, technocratic language is probably part of the reason many people who pontificate about the book haven’t actually read it.

They avoided the torture of struggling through paragraphs like this one: “In today’s complex and adaptive world, the principle of non-linearity means that suddenly a fragile state can turn into a failed state and that, conversely, a failed state can see its situation improve with equal celerity thanks to the intermediation of international organizations or even an infusion of foreign capital.“

The actual “Great Reset” has none of the trashy charm of the other works by the same title, my favourite being: “The Great Reset: How Big Tech Elites and the World’s People Can Be Enslaved by China CCP or AI” by Mr Cyrus Parsa. Here is Mr Parsa about himself: “I was the only human being in the world that knew the timing and worked hard to accurately warn and predict that the world’s people were in impending danger from a Bioweapon or disease (COVID 19, AKA CCP Virus) from China CCP in 2019, leading to conflicts with lockdown, famines, AI enslavement, and the entire Great Reset.“

You won’t find sophisticated schemes aimed at chipping the masses and the belief in the powers of technology, what Evgeny Morozov has called „solutionism“ is probably more fanatical in the boardrooms of Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft. The people occupying these boardrooms probably also have a better understanding of what technology is about than the 83-year-old Klaus Schwab.

It’s hard to imagine that they would come up with the following train of thought: trotting out the platitude that „it is now well understood that physical activity greatly contributes to health“, Messieurs Malleret and Schwab conclude that „For a whole social distancing may constrain the practice of certain sports, which in turn will benefit the ever-more-powerful expansion of e-sports. Tech and digital are never far away! “ As if competitive gaming was an alternative to physical exercise for the masses. Tech and digital are never far away!

Written by two people whose closest connection to gaming most likely is watching their grandchildren play. Other than this, Schwab and Malleret report that the power of intergovernmental organizations dwindles in a world where nationalism is on the rise. The section about surveillance ends with a bland, uninspired passage about the need to balance safety and personal freedom.

Before we get to the „Conclusion“, we are treated to a well-meaning little section about protecting mental health, followed by a quaint meditation about the benefits of walking in nature: „Exercise, nature, unprocessed food… They all have the dual benefits of improving immunity and suppressing inflammation.“

It’s hard to quell the urge to add yoga and mindfulness to the list and of course, the importance of really, truly loving yourself. Here are some questions the authors feel the readers should be asking themselves, in the “Individual Reset” section: “Do we know what is important? Are we too selfish and overfocused on ourselves? Do we give too great a priority and excessive time to our career? Are we slaves to consumerism?“

There are several passages in “The Great Reset” that could be easily published as an opinion piece in the “Guardian” or the “New York Times”. Under “Macro Reset”, page 61, we are told that “If we collectively recognize that, beyond a certain level of wealth defined by GDP per capita, happiness depends more on intangible factors such as accessible healthcare and a robust social fabric than on material Consumption, then values ​​as different as the respect for the environment, responsible eating empathy or generosity may gain ground and progressively come to characterize the new social norms.“

Hard to imagine even somebody like Russel Brand disagreeing with this. Brand has dedicated a whole series of videos to „The Great Reset“. To his credit, he tries to dispel the idea that “The Great Reset” is the kind of communist plot Dean makes it out to be, but it does seem as if he hasn’t read the book, either.

 

In many ways, “The Great Reset” is a great let down, offering up a strange mix of jargon, platitudes and the occasional morsel of valuable information and insight. One comes in the form of the idea that past pandemics might have been instrumental in shaping the world we live in today, “bringing feudalism and serfdom to an end ushering in the era of enlightenment.“

Malleret and Schwab got the idea from  “A Distant Mirror – The Calamitous 14th Century”   a book by the historian Barbara Tuchmann. That’s the only trace of Marxist thinking I could find in “The Great Reset”, an allusion to historical materialism, ie the idea that our thinking is shaped by the world we live in rather than the other way around.

They accurately predict that government policy, especially in the US, was going to change in response to the pandemic. Even though it is unclear to what extent Joe Biden will actually realize his policy proposals, it looks like Malleret and Schwab are onto something when they write: „First and foremost, the post-pandemic era will usher in a period of massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor, from capital to labor.“

They omit the fact that under Trump, the first Covid Relief bill, the „CARES Act“, turned out to be a massive handout for corporations, what economic commentator Dylan Ratigan has termed the „largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.“

Schwab and Malleret continue to speculate that “COVID 19 is likely going to sound the death knell of neoliberalism, a corpus of ideas and policies that can loosely be defined as favoring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention and economic growth over social welfare.“

This sounds like wishful thinking: the idea that this fictional creature, the “free market” should be the final arbiter is very entrenched in the United States and it is an inaccurate description of the status quo in any case. Government intervention has never gone away, on the contrary, the US government intervened massively in the financial crises of 2008, it just chose to make the large banks and their investors whole and left average citizens holding the bag.

Reading this kind of vaguely social-democratic stuff, it is unclear how people like the British journalist James Delingpole have concluded that we are dealing with a “global communist takeover plan”. As Ben Sixsmith, one of Mr Delingpole’s colleagues at the “Spectator America” puts it: “This is no Communist Manifesto. The Communist Manifesto was a bracing read.“

There is reason to believe that Mr Schwab is genuine in his concern about mitigating the downsides of the dominant capitalist regime. A portrait in a Swiss newspaper labels him a “starry-eyed idealist” and attests that his favorite role is acting as a promoter of dialogue between hostile groups or nations.

One of Schwab’s proudest moments was an encounter between Nelson Mandela and South African President Willem de Klerk at WEF in 1992. Asked what should be his legacy, he answered: “An institution that will still exist in one hundred or two hundred years. A Red Cross for international cooperation – that would be a legacy that I would like to leave behind.“

Schwab has been at it for quite a while and the tune hasn’t changed much:

1982

„The crisis symptoms which we discussed here in the last years have reached such a scale during 1982 that we can only feel relief that there has not been a disaster.“

1997

“Governments‘ margin of maneuvre is today seriously limited by the crisis of credibility and moral authority that most industrialized countries are going through. . .  What we need urgently is a convergence of efforts by political, business and labor leaders.“

2008

“The management of an enterprise has to serve all stakeholders. This goes beyond serving only the shareholders; it means that the management has to lead the enterprise as the trustee of all stakeholders and not just the appointee of the shareholders”… I hope that the conscious adoption of a business ethos based on the comprehensive and long-term stakeholder principle, instead of the one-sided, short-term shareholder principle, becomes one positive outcome of this crisis.“

 2012

“Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us. . . . A global transformation is urgently needed and it must start with reinstating a global sense of social responsibility.“

There are some serious problems with Mr Schwab’s world view which become apparent in throwaway paragraphs like this one: “the endgame of all this is clear: consumers and producers, spouses and parents, leaders and followers, we are all being subjected to constant, albeit discontinuous, rapid change.“

The mantra of “change, change, change”, as something that we are being subjected to as if it was a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a choice made by specific, identifiable human beings is all too familiar from corporate mission statements and similar collections of jargon and platitudes.

What is more worrying is that Mr Schwab leaves out the supposedly most important role “consumers and producers, spouses and parents” play in democratic societies; he doesn’t even mention „citizens“. That’s the problem with Schwab’s ideology and his “idealism”. He obviously enjoys rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful and sees his role in persuading them to be nice.

How shallow this “it’s nice to be nice ” school of politics is was on full display when the young Dutch historian Rutger Bregman had the audacity to bring up the topic of tax evasion during the 2019 WEF conference in Davos. He met with a good deal of hostility from the audience and wasn’t invited again.

Ben Sixsmith from the “Spectator” puts it very well: “An air of otherworldliness pervades this book. One of its symptoms is its constant references to ‚we‘: ‚we will‘, ‚we should‘, ‚we must‘. Who are we? I think Schwab and Malleret mean ‚mankind‘ but in practice, it means ‚Davos Man‘, a species of a high-status politician, businessman or academic about whom Samuel Huntington wrote:

‚These transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.‘

The political theorist Colin Crouch warned 20 years ago that industrialized societies were on the way to becoming “ post-democratic ” and provided the following definition: „A post-democratic society is one that continues to have and to use all the institutions of democracy, but in which they increasingly become a formal shell. The energy and innovative drive pass away from the democratic arena and into small circles of a politico-economic elite.“

 

So, there is nothing new about this dominance of business and economics over all spheres of life. This is the real problem, “we”, as in the average people in the industrialized societies who will most likely never get an invitation to Davos, have to wrestle with. Mr Schwab and Mr Malleret might be right, maybe “we are now at a crossroads” and “one path will take us to a better world”, but I don’t have the impression that they are asking the right questions.

 

Here are some suggestions for questions “we” could be asking:

How do we regain democratic control?

How do we show solidarity with workers in developing countries and create global rules for corporations?

How do we regain the understanding that business and economics are the servants of human life, not the masters?

How do we distribute and use the gains from automation and technological progress to enable our life as citizens, as moral agents, rather than passive consumers and cheap biological robots?

How do we liberate ourselves from the grip of the business jargon which has deformed our thinking, talking about love, trust and compassion as paying into “emotional bank accounts” etc.?

We shouldn’t leave the crucial task of asking and trying to answer these questions to Schwab and his powerful friends. It is comforting to know that what they have in mind is not to enslave the masses or to steal our stuff, but more of the same, just a little nicer, just a little greener. But that’s not good enough. We need to do better.

 

 

 

 

A practical guide using the example of English 

“The bear gives birth to a duck”; “The engineer is in the refrigerator”. Or how about: “The onion eats the girl.” All these are real examples of sentences for translation exercises from “Duolingo”, one of the world’s most popular platforms for language learning. It’s striking that under the sleek, gamified surface it relies on the most old school of methods: the Grammar-Translation method. This approach, useful for training translators, was already popular in the Middle Ages.

We know that language acquisition doesn’t work well this way. Language acquisition is a subconscious process. It happens when we understand messages. The traditional approach, still the method of choice for most schools and platforms, is ineffective because the focus is on form rather than content. The emphasis is on “how”, not on “what”, on structure and grammar rather than on meaning, interesting ideas and valuable information.

That’s how you end up with “The onion eats a girl” and all the other bizarre examples. This is not to say that a form-based approach doesn’t work at all. For beginners, almost every approach works to a certain extent. This includes the Grammar-Translation method, which is frowned upon in the language classroom these days, but has seen a renaissance in the digital sphere.

To Duolingo’s credit, it can be said that linking them to bizarre images actually helps to memorize words. The bear gives birth to a duck. In Spanish this would read: „El oso esta pariendo un pato.“ Read the sentence out loud. Now close your eyes visualize how a bear gives birth to a duck.  Repeat the sentence. The probability that you will at least remember the Spanish words for bear, „oso“ and duck, „pato“, for a while is now much higher than if you had simply translated the sentence.

Don’t learn, acquire

Before I talk about how to apply this knowledge to master a language, let’s clarify the distinction between language learning and language acquisition.

Language learning is the conscious effort associated with the language classroom: translation tasks like the ones on “Duolingo”, grammar exercises and vocabulary practice but also role plays and fluency practice of all kinds. The underlying similarity is that the language is the topic to be learned, it’s not used as a tool to communicate messages.

Language acquisition is what happens when we get the message in the target language, when we focus on the “what” rather than the “how”. It is the subconscious process of acquiring vocabulary and structure. It’s the way children learn their native language and it’s also the way the grown-ups master a foreign language.

The distinction is crucial for a variety of reasons.  It’s possible to learn a bit of a language in many different ways, but it’s only possible to master a language through the subconscious process of acquisition. The process of language acquisition never stops. We are always learning new words and phrases in our second language as well as in our mother tongue.

It is not about an „either/or“ between explicit language learning and implicit language acquisition. Without a foundation in the target language, laid through explicit language learning, the step to implicit language acquisition is impossible for adult learners.  Without the subsequent process of language acquisition, mastery of the target language at a high level is equally impossible.

It is crucial not to be fixated on one approach. Under certain circumstances, even beginners can learn implicitly and more advanced learners can benefit from explicit language learning, through focused grammar explanations and exercises, as well as from looking up words that cannot be deduced from the context.

It is important to place less emphasis on the „how“ and more on the „what“ as you progress towards higher levels of language competence. If the content is interesting and encourages further engagement with the topic, if the communication is meaningful and the target language is used as a tool of communication you’ll remember it more easily. It will stick. The more form-based, diluted and boring the content, the less you’ll achieve this goal.  To master a language at a high level, you need to store a lot of information, not only a large number of words, but also nuances of meaning and use in different situations.

To provide some perspective, let’s look at the word count of the English language. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary includes some 470,000 entries. This number is on the conservative side, there are other estimates that include regional dialects, slang and professional jargon which come up to a million words.

Too much to learn

Nobody knows or uses all of these words, of course. Tests show that native speakers know and use between 20 000 and 35 000 thousand words. Let’s set a conservative goal for a second language speaker who wants to master English: 20 000 words. Memorizing the 20 000 items would be just one goal the language learner has to reach. She would also have to master the appropriate use of the words, understand the differences in register, formal or informal, for example.

When is it appropriate to say “I concur” rather than “I agree”? What is the right word to use if you would like to use the expression ironically? Not to mention accurate grammar, spelling and punctuation, the differences between British and American English, the cultural references, so on and so forth. It is simply impossible for the average person to consciously learn all of this. And nobody ever does.

If people do master a language to a high level of proficiency, it is because they have successfully acquired it over an extended period of time. They heard and read plenty of stuff that in the target language that they understood, that they were able to make sense of. Or, to use the technical jargon: they were exposed to a high volume of “comprehensible input” over an extended period of time.

Recognizing pornography

What then, is comprehensible input? There is a long standing debate in applied linguistics what exactly constitutes comprehensible input which need not concern us here. We’ll stick with the famous definition Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward provided for pornography: you’ll know it when you see it. To give an example: if you are at the B 2 level, a scientific paper about psychology that you will have a hard time understanding in your native language does not qualify as comprehensible input. A well written, clear popular science book about the same topic does.

But don’t you learn a language by speaking it? No, you don’t. What you learn by speaking the target language is making the right sounds.  You get used to producing the language, you solidify what you have already learned and you get the chance experiment with newly acquired words and expressions.

The most important benefit of speaking practice is: you get used to the feeling of expressing yourself in a foreign language. For most people, that feeling is uncomfortable and produces the unpleasant sensation of self-consciousness. The degree of intensity of this feeling differs greatly between individuals and ironically, it is especially challenging for the most ambitious types, for the strivers and the perfectionists.

Drinking to talk

Don’t believe me? Try speaking foreign language after consuming what constitutes a moderate amount of alcohol for you. Again, definitions will vary greatly between individuals. You will find that your performance will improve after a few drinks. Why? Because alcohol lowers inhibitions, it lowers the inhibiting sense of self-consciousness. That’s why it’s popular and why it’s called a social lubricant. It should go without saying that large amount of alcohol will have the opposite effect.

What is the point? The point is that the main problem with actually using a foreign language has more to do with psychology than linguistics. The more perfectionistic you are, the more you are invested in getting it right and avoiding mistakes, the harder it will be for you to actually to become fluent in a foreign language.

This is where learning another language can render an additional benefit of personal growth, beyond the obvious one of broadening your circle of communication. It can help you to face the fear of rejection that lies at the bottom of perfectionism. It can help you to come to terms with your simple human fallibility. Psychologists call this “imperfection tolerance”, a truly valuable trait to acquire. At „L&S“, we use communication training, like our „Training for TED“, to help our trainees get used to difficult situations and remain capable to act under pressure.

So, what should you be doing to master a language?

 Three Steps

1) Leave the beginner stage behind you as quickly as possible. If you actually want or have to master a foreign language, try to make the time for intensive courses. It would be ideal if you could attend the courses over a longer period of time. Beginners have a steep learning curve and your goal is to leave pure language learning behind as quickly as possible. As a rule of thumb, the more similar the target language is to the mother tongue, the faster the step from language learning to language acquisition.

Three to six months should do the trick for most learners and most languages. When you choose a language school, ask to participate in a trial day. If the lessons are very grammar heavy and the teacher does most of the talking, go elsewhere. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this pain will pay off in the end. It won’t. You need to get used to making the sounds as soon as possible.

Likewise, if the teacher refuses to give straightforward explanations, wants to elicit everything from the students and obsessively puts the group into pairs, go elsewhere. The “communicative method” is the current dogma of language teaching. It is useful and should be part of every language course, but many teachers have had too much of the Kool-Aid and overdo it. If you only have the choice between communicative dogma and silent suffering under grammar torture, choose the communicative dogma.

Ideally, there should be a balance between interaction, pair work, practice and straight forward explanation and structural overview. Make sure that the school has arrived in the 21st century and uses authentic video and audio material, not just CD players, textbooks and photocopies.

If you can’t attend an intensive course, use the ubiquitous once a week, 90 minutes format. Make sure you have the grammar basics down. The web is your friend, there are plenty of useful grammar training sites online. www.ego4u.com  is a good site for learners of English, for example. Supplement it with plenty of simple video, audio and reading that you can understand. Pictures are very helpful and you’ll find that you’ll remember the meaning of a word much better when you can connect it with an image.

Deal with this kind of material often and regularly. Use going to the gym as an analogy: you will only see results if do it regularly and when you stick with it. The analogy to the gym has its limits. It won’t hurt if you do a language work out of some kind every day, especially at the beginning. Vary your activities and get into the habit of using material aimed at native speakers. Don’t be a snob. Watch children stories, cartoons, read books and comics for children.

2) Once you have reached the B1 level, seek out all kinds of comprehensible input. At the B1 level, short TED presentations, comic books, graphic novels, graded readers, simple explanatory videos and stories on YouTube are the way to go. Try movies and shows on Netflix, too, just make sure that you have subtitles in the target language. Don’t use subtitles in your native language.

If you understand everything, the material is too easy. Find a ratio of known and unknown vocab that you feel comfortable with. This will differ between individuals, generally, you need to train your ability to figure out words from context and be less teacher and dictionary dependent.

You can and should look up words, but not reflexively, as soon as you do not know a word. Highlight the word and try to deduce it from the context. If it is a shorter text, read to the end before looking it up. For longer text or books, you can proceed page by page or chapter by chapter. The best way to look it up is to use this online dictionary: www.linguee.com. It doesn’t cover as many languages as “Google Translate”, but the quality is better.

The great advantage of “Linguee” is that it will show you a variety of example sentences in addition to the pure translation. Sometimes it can be useful to look up a literal translation of sentences or entire passages. To do so, use this tool:  www.deepl.com/en/translator

Seek out every-day interactions with native speakers or tandems, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this is the most important part of your language acquisition. It will help you to become more comfortable in the language and it will build imperfection tolerance. At the B1 level, however, interactions with native speakers can easily feel overwhelming and frustrating.

Don’t get discouraged. You are acquiring the language, by yourself, at your own pace, away from the stress of having to perform in the situation. Trust the process. Assuming they are available for your target language, take one of the assessment tests language schools provide online to check your progress. Here’s a link to our assessment test: https://www.language-and-skills.com/home/placement/

3) Once you have reached the B 2 level, turn to more interesting and challenging material. As a general rule, stay away from dedicated language learning material. Most of it is watered down, boring and hides the focus on form behind impressive sounding brand names like “Financial Times” or the “Economist”. Don’t be fooled. It’s the same old gap fill, grammar tidbit and comprehension question approach with a fancy label. There is a lot more you can do beyond the obvious Netflix and movie watching.

By all means do that, but know that in order to retain vocab well, you need what cognitive scientists call “depth of processing”. The more alert you are, the more the material makes you think and challenges what you thought you knew, the better you will remember it.

If your target language is English, you certainly live in the best of times. There are thousands of hours of free or cheaply available high- quality material to be found online. Start with the TED presentations, www.ted.com, find a topic that you are interested in and research it in the target language. If you are already at the C 1 level, do the same thing; but with presentations given by authors at Google: https://talksat.withgoogle.com/.

Another good place to find long, in depth interviews is Joe Rogan’s podcast, the “Joe Rogan Experience”: https://www.youtube.com/user/PowerfulJRE Rogan is a controversial figure in the United States, but his views are safe enough for people not deeply involved in the American culture wars. Rogan’s podcast is extremely successful, probably because he embodies the average American guy better than anybody else. You won’t get sharp, critical journalism from him, but a sincere interest in learning and time for the guests to fully explain their views.

If a speaker or podcast guest tries to sell you his book and you like the topic, order the book and read it. If that seems a little too extreme, see if you can find a summary online, for example at www.blinkist.com. Or look for a review in an English language newspaper. The British Guardian,  www.theguardian.com, is a good choice, as it has so far dispensed with a paywall.

 The Power of MOOCs

Platforms which aren’t used enough for language acquisition are the MOOCs. MOOCs, short for „Massive Open Online Courses“, are online courses at an academic level. The MOOCs offer an extremely wide range of topics, from Buddhism to securities trading and artificial intelligence. Some of the courses are elaborately produced for the video format; others are simple recordings from seminar rooms. Many of the courses are permanently available and can be used free of charge.

Some have to be completed within a certain period of time and offer the possibility to get in contact with the teachers, to hand in coursework and get it corrected.  A number of MOOCs offer the possibility to obtain a certificate from high profile American and English universities for a moderate fee, normally between $40 and 80. Check out „Coursera“: www.coursera.org   „edX“ : www.edx.org and „Future Learn“ www.futurelearn.com.

Many MOOC videos have also made it onto YouTube. The MOOCs haven’t lived up to the hype of revolutionizing academic education, but they are a fantastic way of killing two birds with one stone: mastering a language while learning something new.

Many language teachers recommend novels, but novels for language acquisition will only work well for literature buffs. Novels are linguistic works of art; they are not written to be easily understood. For many adults, popular science books work better. In the American scientific community, writing successful popular science books is considered a distinction and there are plenty of works worth reading.

Many of our clients like “Behavioural Economics“. Behind this unwieldy term lies an exciting synthesis of economics and experimental psychology, which attempts to get to the bottom of fascinating questions about human nature. Good introductions to the topic are the books and videos of academic superstar Dan Ariely: www.danariely.com

By all means look for contact with native speakers, ideally in situations where there is a topic to be discussed and the language serves as a tool. This is often the problem with tandems, they quickly become boring and peter out. As an alternative to tandems, „Inter Nations“ is a good choice: www.internations.org Inter Nations is a successful German start-up based in Munich and has established a globally active platform for expats. The „Activity Groups“ are particularly suitable for language acquisition.

Theoretically, you can master a language by yourself, just like you can get into shape without a gym and a personal trainer. The main problem, both with getting in shape and mastering a language is compliance.  Working with a good language school helps, because the regular sessions and the relationship with the trainer will boost compliance.

Acquisition works. The best language schools base their method on this insight and good trainers do more than just have a pleasant chat and correct your grammar once a week.  Good trainers will point you toward interesting material and discuss it with you.  They will broaden your horizon and be just as eager to learn from you. If you are looking for a good trainer, visit us under www.language-and-skills.eu

 

Links

https://www.linguee.com/

https://www.deepl.com/

https://www.ego4u.de/

https://www.language-andskills.eu/de/start/placement/

https://www.ted.com/

https://talksat.withgoogle.com/

https://www.blinkist.com/de/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk

https://www.coursera.org/

https://www.edx.org/

https://www.futurelearn.com/

https://danariely.com 

https://www.internations.org/start/

https://www.language andskills.eu/de/start/

 

Book Review: “How to have impossible conversations – A very practical guide” by authors Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. “How to Have Impossible Conversations” is a terrific book in many ways and it does contain some directly applicable practical advice. What it isn’t, however, is very practical, even though it makes that claim in the title.

“It’s easier to write 10 volumes of philosophy than to practically apply a single principle.”

Tolstoi, Diaries 1847

The blurb states that authors Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay will “guide you through the straightforward, practical, conversational techniques necessary for every successful conversation, whether the issue is climate change, religious faith, gender identity, race, poverty, immigration, or gun control.”

In my edition, the back cover comes with praise from atheism’s number one ideologue Richard Dawkins, who calls it  “a self-help book on how to argue effectively, conciliate and gently persuade” and claims that “The world would be a better place if everyone read this book.”  There is a certain irony in having one of the most ideological “New Atheists” praising a book that has a whole chapter on dealing with ideologues but since Mr. Boghossian previously wrote “A Manual for Creating Atheists”, it fits.

For the purposes of this review, it makes things easier that the authors seem to agree with the categorization of their work as a “self-help book”. Leaving aside the misgivings about the genre, the relevant questions are: Does it do the job? Does it help? Mr. Dawkins says that the world would be a better place if everybody read the book. I hope what he means is that the world might become a better place if people actually applied the lessons from the book.

Reading a book is easy, even writing a book is easy, compared to the notoriously difficult task of  changing one’s behavior. This is where the book falls short; it overwhelms with extensive lists of skills and challenging concepts, while providing next to no guidance of how to go about practicing and actually applying them.

However, before we get to the problems and suggestions on how to remedy them, there is some useful advice that you can hopefully take away from reading this review. In order to avoid the trap that the authors fall into, I will limit it to three points. Two of them are taken from the “Beginner Level: Nine Ways to Start Changing Minds”, the third one is hidden in the end notes to the “ Six Expert Skills to Engage the Closed Minded.”

1

 Beginners are advised to model to the conversational behavior that they would like to see in their counterparts. In order to stop your partner in the conversation from obfuscating or refusing to answer a direct question, Boghossian and Lindsay suggest this refreshingly simple and straight forward idea: Tell your counterparts to ask you the same question. When they do that, “give them a succinct answer (that is, model what you’re seeking) and then immediately ask them the identical question.”

There is an interesting example for the application of the technique at the beginning of Chapter Three, where Boghossian successfully used the technique with a Muslim community leader in Australia who tried to obfuscate the fact that he was in favor of stoning adulterous women. Everybody with teaching or leadership experience and every parent knows how important consistent modelling is and how much more effective than the popular “Do as I say, not as I do” school of trying to influence behavior.

2

The second useful idea from the Beginner Level is the “Unread Library Effect.”  It refers to “the well-known phenomenon of people who believe they understand how things work better than they actually do, i.e. the “tendency to believe we’re more knowledgeable than we are because we believe in other people’s expertise.” The authors invite us to think about this very common phenomenon with the analogy of “borrowing books from the great library of human knowledge and then never reading the books.”

A way in which self-help books can be useful is making something explicit that many of us know implicitly.  Giving it a name and describing it as a skill makes it easier to apply, like the human tendency to get into arguments about issues we don’t know very much about. The practical application of the “Unread Library Effect” that the authors suggest is to “model ignorance”. Instead of getting into a discussion about an issue that both parties know little about, the idea is to start with a question about the “how” rather than the “what”.

Using the contentious topic of immigration, they give this example: “I don’t know how the details of using mass deportations of illegal immigrants would play out. I think there are likely pros and cons and I really don’t know which outweigh which. How would that policy be implemented?”

The more ignorance you dare to admit, the greater the likelihood that your counterpart will not switch into adversarial mode but will try to explain the issue to you. Using this approach you get the chance to either learn something about immigration policy or it can lead your conversation partner to the realization of her own “Unread Library Effect”. This is a more effective way of sowing doubt in somebody’s mind than arguing your point.

Giving others the “gift of doubt” is the main theme of the book, in this way it is a philosophical book in the best sense. The authors seem to have great faith in the human ability to reason, the whole book can be read as an encouragement to reflect and to lead an “examined life” in the meaning attributed to Socrates. For Socrates, the examined life meant the attainment of wisdom and intellectual humility by questioning our superficial certainties.

There is a dangerous political naivety and inability or unwillingness to see the limits of their faith in reason and civil discourse that I will examine in the last part of this review.

3

One of the most common dead ends in conversation is what the authors call the “true for” stance, meaning this is true for me and therefore cannot be questioned. Everybody has encountered this maddening stance which insists on the only superficially understood relativity and subjectivity of knowledge. What it fails to understand is that rational discourse is only possible if both parties agree that there are things which are “objectively” true in the sense of a shared description of the world.

A simple way of understanding this is to use the example of the natural sciences. There are no final truths in science. This doesn’t mean that it is a free for all, however. There needs to be a shared understanding of the method of deriving knowledge and there needs to be shared insights to build on, in order to make discourse possible. Would you want to fly in a jet constructed by an engineer who strongly believes in her truth, even though it substantially differs from the laws of thermodynamics?

Boghossian and Lindsay suggest this ingenious intervention, one my favorites being: “If someone says something is true for them, ask to borrow one of their possessions, such as their water bottle, sunglasses, phone or keys. Then claim that you believe “Possession means ownership is true for me, so it is true for me that this is mine now.” When they object, you can immediately ask them “Why can things be true for you, but not true for me?” I love this idea and am looking forward to applying it.

I hope I have convinced you at this point that “How to Have Impossible Conversations” is a terrific book, a treasure trove of interesting ideas, backed up by solid research and a thorough understanding of philosophy and science. From the point of view of reaching its objective, however, of actually helping people to change their behavior, there is a problem. It is an academic book written by a mathematician and a philosopher who seem to lack an equally thorough understanding of didactics and the psychology of learning.

Say Please and Thank you

Here is the table of contents of “Seven Fundamentals of Good Conversations”:  Beginner Level: Nine Ways to Start Changing Minds, Intermediate Level: Seven Ways to Improve Your Interventions, Five Advanced Skills for Contentious Conversations, Six Expert Skills to Engage the Closed Minded, Master Level: Two Keys to Conversing with Ideologues. 36 skills you need to master, with a large number of subordinate skills, all in one book, which claims to be a “Very Practical Guide”.

Even if I build a “golden bridge”, skill two, intermediate level and grant that some of the skills are very basic and most people won’t need to train them, like for example “be courteous, say please and thank you” subskill nine, from main skill three,  “rapport”, this is simply way too much to handle and nearly impossible to operationalize.

Be the change

I have been working on “active listening” skills with participants in communication training for years. I would argue that active listening, i.e. fully concentrating on listening and understanding, suspending judgment and quelling the urge to discuss or formulate a reply while the other person is talking, actually covers a lot of the ground that Boghossian and Lindsay aim for.

They list it merely as skill four of the “Seven Fundamentals of Good Conversations”. The insight I’ve taken away from training active listening and trying to apply myself is how very difficult it is to actually do consistently. The instances where people are able to apply active listening after the first time they encounter it is rare.

I am referring to a training situation, where the trainees first get an explanation, then watch a video and read a text about the skill. Once they are asked to apply it in a role play, the majority of trainees struggle to suspend judgement and many fall into the trap of turning the conversation into a friendly discussion and the normal exchange of views.

The Noble Quest

This doesn’t say anything about the intelligence or level of education of the trainees. Most of them were highly educated, intelligent and competent people. It just shows how difficult it is to break the habit of a lifetime. Modern organizations are competitive environments where wisdom and intellectual humility are not regarded as career enhancers. What is rightly seen as career enhancing is intellectual dexterity, strong rhetorical skill and the ability to intelligently bullshit when you don’t know the answer.

How many times can you honestly say “I don’t know” in a meeting or a presentation, subskill 17, Skill 9, Beginner Level, before your boss and/or your colleagues will have the impression that you are incompetent rather than wise and intellectually humble?

They might make the counter argument that their advice is not intended for the workplace but that is where people spend most of their time, if they are lucky enough to have a well paid white collar job. If people can’t train and apply the insights from the book there, its value is questionable.

This discrepancy between the ideal world the authors are painting and the reality of the existing professional environment again points towards the political naivety I will deal with at the end.  For the time being, my focus is on how to help people actually apply all of the great ideas the authors present in their work.

The Psychology of Religion

If my task was to develop a full time curriculum to train all of the skills up to “Master Level”, where they delve into fascinating questions regarding the connection between identity and morality, I would say that a year long full-time course would still be an ambitious time frame. And it would certainly entail a fair bit of reading after class.

Especially the “Master Level” covers a lot of challenging content and you need to wrap your head around quotes like this one: “The psychology of politics is really the psychology of religion, understanding national elections is not about what’s the most efficient policy. It really is the psychology that we evolve to be religious; we evolve to do intergroup conflict; we evolve to make things sacred and encircle around them.” If you are not familiar with evolutionary biology, the work of Jonathan Haidt and the psychological turn in philosophy, you have a lot to read up on.

Communication seminars normally last 2 or 3 days and if they are good, the majority of the time is devoted to actually practicing the skills. It is obviously impossible to even cover the “Beginner Level” in such a time frame. The only way to deal with the wealth of content accumulated by Boghossian and Lindsay would be to break it up into a series of seminars, streamline the content, boil the 36 skills and innumerable subskills into something a lot more manageable, say five skills each for every level.

That would be an interesting project and a valuable series of seminars. A crucial point would be to create practical exercises for every single skill. It would take time to get the concept to a level where it flows well since creating good seminars depends on actually running them several times to smooth out the kinks. So much for some constructive criticism and a suggestion on how to remedy the book’s shortcomings.

Let’s now turn to the problems that have no obvious solutions. The main problem that I see is the insistence on “civility” and “rational discourse” being the solutions that America needs right now. We find ourselves in their version of the “agora”, the public square of ancient Greece where the philosophers assembled to hash out their differences, jointly seeking truth through the application of reason.

Straight White Guys Are Liars

If only, they seem to say, the United States could be more like this, less divided, less ideological, less irrational, then America would be great again. You can read the whole book as an academic version of “Why can’t we all just get along?” They have very little time for “radicals” and “extremists” and seem to conceptualize politics in the United States as a failing debating society that needs to read their book.

They are amusingly tone deaf to the anger of minorities since they see the righteous anger not as necessary propellent of social change but as something to be avoided at all costs. There is a very telling example in the book, where they talk about a feminist colleague who said to Boghossian: “At this point, if a straight white male told me 2 + 2 = 4, I wouldn’t believe it.”

The two communication specialists take this statement at face value, not as an expression of exasperation with a society that continues to treat women and minorities unfairly. They hilariously suggest applying their methods to the statement and recommend asking questions such as: “If you went to the emergency room and the doctor happened to be a straight white male, would you believe him if he told you that you need an immediate emergency surgery to save your life?”

It would be interesting to know how they would react if a black man said the same thing to them. Since their underlying philosophy is nothing if not conventional, they would probably shy away from giving such a silly, patronizing response. Convention has made white Americans very sensitive about belittling the righteous anger of black people but it’s still ok to mock the feelings of women and queer folk.

This is not the place to discuss the real problems of identity politics. Suffice it to say that America’s gravest problems are not to be found in the powerful position of the “grievance studies” in American academia.

More Than Rational

The most serious intellectual error they commit lies in their shortsighted critique of ideology and the assumption that the problems of ideology can be remedied by a good helping of “reason” and “rationality”. As much as they might dislike Focault and modern political philosophy, it is baffling that they fail to appreciate that politics in modern mass democracies is not a debating society, especially since they hail from a country which came into being through a violent revolution.

Ideology, understood correctly in this context, is the necessary legitimization for a political struggle that is fundamentally about power. It’s not amenable to reason, its very point lies in the fact that it cannot be questioned and thereby legitimizes action. “We hold these truths to be self-evident”. Very little room for sowing doubt there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Classics tend to be books which people would like to have read but never did. Neil Postman’s “Amusing ourselves to Death” is a classic which doesn’t deserve this fate. His counter-intuitive take on how our media shape our understanding of the world is more relevant than ever.

Prophecy is a notoriously difficult business and many great minds have embarrassed themselves trying.  In “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, first published in 1986, Neil Postman passes the prophet test with flying colors and writes whole passages which now read as eerily accurate descriptions of the present.

Even though the main focus of the book is on what Postman calls “the epistemology of television”, i.e. how a new medium like television shapes our understanding of what constitutes knowledge and how we acquire it, he briefly turns his attention to what in his day was called “computer technology” and has this to say about it:  “a central thesis of computer technology – that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data – will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the  massive collection and speed of light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations, but have solved very little of what is important to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

Written in 1985, when Mark Zuckerberg was still a toddler, 13 years before Google was founded and two years before the term “big data” was allegedly coined by John Mashey.

The Concept of Truth

The core of Postman’s argument is that television’s rise to the position of America’s leading medium has transformed the American understanding of what constitutes knowledge and valuable information. In his view, media aren’t simply conveyors of information but define what is understood to be as true and important. He says that “the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not and never has come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the truth is a kind of cultural prejudice. “

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” delivers a significant part of the explanation for the success of serial liar Donald Trump: “television provides a new definition of truth: the credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. Credibility here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality testing.   It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity and vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one more) conveyed by the actor.”

Complex phenomena like the rise of Trump don’t lend themselves to monocausal explanations, but Postman’s observation regarding the changing nature of a culture’s perception of truth goes a long way in making sense of his appeal. The main point here is that Trump’s rise to power is not an aberration. It is the logical consequence of a culture which has adopted television as its most important medium. Donald Trump is nothing if not a creature of television and it is his authentic-seeming style, honed by years as a reality TV host, which represents truth in an age shaped by the epistemology of TV.

Don’t blame it on the Kardashians

The problem with television Postman warned about in 1986, isn’t that it produces trivial entertainment. His argument is more sophisticated than the standard conservative trope about the success of the Kardashians being a sign of decadent times. He doesn’t want to be misunderstood this way: “to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as a standard brand academic whimpering, and kind of elitist complaint against junk on television, I must first explain that my focus is on epistemology, not on aesthetics or literary criticism. Indeed, I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow.”

The problem he warned about wasn’t that television produced entertainment, but that on television, everything becomes entertainment.  He calls entertainment the “supra ideology” of television and says: “No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.”

By reframing the world as the wellspring of a constant visual stream meant to entertain us, television has probably fueled what the American writer Chris Hedges calls the “cult of the self”. Information changes from something we need to adapt to our local circumstances to something we constantly consume, mostly without any meaningful consequence.

More than a Moral Critique

Television strengthens the illusion that the world exists to entertain us that we don’t live to serve, but that our infantile, insatiable consumer selves sit at the top of the pyramid. Plenty of books and articles have already been written about this dangerous development, so there is no need to pursue this train of thought further here.

Postman take was prescient and remains unique and interesting because it doesn’t just come in the form of a moral critique. There certainly is an element of that in the book, best exemplified by the ominous sentence on the back cover of my paperback edition: “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when a cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture death is a clear possibility.”

It’s hard to deny that Trump and the current state of public affairs in the US spring to mind, but it would be facile and foolish to lean back in the armchair over here in Europe and assume that the dark prophecy has become true. The future remains open, the complexity of the world doesn’t fit neatly into the confines of any single theory.

Writing this in Germany, it is interesting to note in passing that part of the reason that Germany has been to significantly delay these problematic developments might be the national penchant for regulation, seriousness and the inherent conservatism of German society. Television, for example, still hasn’t become as ubiquitous as it is in the US.

From Telegraph to Television 

The true value of Postman contribution is his perspective on how different media shape of our understanding of who we are and what we perceive to be true. His perspective helps us to get beyond the naïve misunderstanding that media are neutral and that it doesn’t matter how the message is delivered.

The foundational medium of Western-style societies is the printing press. Postman says:   “Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration. Typography created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Typography made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into mere superstition. Typography assisted in the growth of the nation-state but thereby made patriotism into a sordid if not lethal emotion.”

These are sweeping assertions and it doesn’t matter if they are a 100% true or not. Postman helps to think about media and the way we understand the world differently. He invites us to switch our perspective.  Here is another example of this refreshing switch: “The clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And that, though few would have imagined that connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy then all treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.”

Postman’s story, the story of shifting media dominance from typography, via the telegraph and photography to television gives us a framework to think about the internet, the new medium which is well on its way to incorporate all others.

It helps us to ask more intelligent questions. Instead of asking what we should do with the internet, how we should regulate etc., we need to ask what it has already done to us, to our understanding of ourselves and what we perceive to be true. What is the epistemology of the internet? Has it just continued the trends already apparent with television, for example?

Is the credibility of the teller still the measure of truth? Is entertainment still the dominant “supra ideology”? On a deeper level, the book raises questions about the nature of human insight and understanding. How does human insight differ from machine cognition? What is the role of intuition and innate ideas?

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” is a terrific book and it has aged well. It’s beautifully written and far more than a boring, pessimistic diatribe about modern life. I recommend it to everybody who wants to understand how the media we use to define the way we perceive ourselves and the world we live in.

 

Links

Neil Postman Are We Amusing Ourselves to Death Part I

Amusing Ourselves to Death Part II

Neil Postman on Cyberspace

Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message – 1977 part 1 v 3

Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message – 1977 part 2 v 3

Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message – 1977 part 3 v 3

My fellow citizens, when we come together to inaugurate a president, we come together to confirm the power and the beauty of the idea our great republic is founded on.  We come together to celebrate the power of the promise made in the Declaration of Independence. The promise that everybody on this earth is created equal and endowed with the same inalienable rights. Not only is this the true creed of our time, the world has been looking to America to see this promise fulfilled for more than 200 years. It is this creed that binds this nation together. And from our shores, it has spread all across the globe.

We have received this precious gift from our founding fathers and we bear the responsibility to keep this promise alive. However, I will not allow my gratitude and my humility to cloud my vision. I will not shirk from the responsibility I shoulder when I accept this precious inheritance and I urge you, my fellow Americans, to do the same. Our founding fathers were merely human and they were flawed. They murdered Native Americans and stole their lands. They kept slaves and condemned innocent women, children and men to unspeakable misery for generations. We still feel the reverberations of their deeds today.

With that in our minds, we won’t judge the past by the standards of the present, but we also won’t allow our gratitude and the love for our country to disregard the unnecessary human suffering caused in our nation’s past. Only by daring to acknowledge our painful truths and continuing our journey to bridge the meaning of the words in the Declaration with the realities of our time, we can prove ourselves to be worthy heirs of the promise made at the founding of our republic.

I take my oath of office at a time of great danger for our nation. But I’m not just speaking of the pandemic, which has killed far too many of our citizens. I am certain that we will win this battle, once again guided by reason, competence and responsibility for the lives of all Americans.  I‘ m not speaking of Russia, China  or Iran, either. No other nation poses the greatest danger to the survival of our republic. What I’m speaking of is our unwillingness to see ourselves, our almost childlike inability to face the truth about who we are and what we have done.

Our founding fathers, for all their flaws, would be appalled by our conduct. We have become blind to our dark side. Our flag has become the wool over our eyes. We have become addicted to war and violence. We have all but forgotten our noble tradition of providing refuge to the poor and the persecuted. We have kept immigrants in cages and ripped their families apart.  We have turned our weapons against ourselves, brutally repressing protests demanding justice and persecuting journalists for uncovering war crimes.

Hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the Middle East have perished and we are no closer to ending the war on terror.  On the contrary, our violent acts ensure that the children of our victims hate us with ever greater passion. We are spawning new terrorists every day. Our founding fathers fought heroically to free themselves from imperial rule. My fellow Americans, ask yourselves: how would our founding fathers judge us? What would they say to the American Empire?

We maintain military bases in every corner of the world. Our war machine is the most fearsome and expensive in the history of the world yet victory remains elusive. We profess the love for our soldiers, but these proclamations ring hollow. While we thank them for their service and glorify their sacrifice, we continue to send our sons and daughters to kill and be killed in senseless, unwinnable wars.

Are we a nation of deluded infants? Has it come to that?  I believe we are better than this. I believe we are worthy of the great inheritance before us. We can find the courage to see ourselves, we can face up to our truth: yes, we have built an empire.  We have built an empire in the belief that we needed to in defence of our freedom.

We have alienated many other nations because instead of shouldering the imperial responsibility and leading an empire of reason and civilization, we have allowed ourselves to fall far short of our ideals.  We have preached human rights, but we have supported violent coups and unjust regimes.  We were attacked and we didn’t seek justice. We sought revenge. We have abducted, tortured, and killed innocent people all over the world.  People created equal and endowed with the same inalienable rights.

The United States, like any other nation, has the right to act in its national interest and to safeguard its national security. However, our national interest no longer is the common good, the well-being of all Americans. Our national interest has become captured by a small, corrupt elite who serve nobody but their own monetary interest. Many in our elite have fallen prey to the oldest temptation: idolatry.

They have bowed down to idols and betrayed their better nature, they have chosen the route of self-enslavement. Their appetites have shaped themselves as gods and these false gods have taken command. It would be too easy to just blame the elites, however. Our whole culture has been infected by a slavish admiration of wealth and power. The money changers have taken the high seats in the temple of our civilization.

Today, we say ‘Enough is enough! We will bear it no longer!’ Today, we begin to restore that temple to the ancient truth, the ancient truth inscribed in the heart of every human being. We will relearn to discipline our appetites, we will build an economy that serves the people.  We will no longer be enslaved by our fears and our appetites.

We will no longer be enslaved by the illusion that we live to serve the economy. We will no longer slavishly admire the money hoarders while our brothers and sisters are begging in the streets.  Trump is gone, a new day has come. We will extend Medicare to every American. We will make sure that freedom for is more than empty word for the majority of Americans.  As long as we live in fear of becoming sick and ending up in bankruptcy, we’re not free.

Now that we have found the courage to face the dark side of our magnificent achievements, we are  finally ready to take on the challenge of climate change. The world has grown weary of American leadership and we have turned inwards, fighting futile culture wars. But America is back!  My administration will work tirelessly to regain the trust of the world’s nations.

This work will start here in America. To achieve our goals as individuals and as a society, we must move forward as a disciplined and loyal army willing to make sacrifices for the common good.  Without such discipline no progress is made and no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. Here at home, this larger good will take the form of the Green New Deal.

We will renew and rebuild our power stations, our airports, our highways, our schools, our roads and bridges.  Our greatest primary task is to put our national house in order and to put our people to work. In large part, we will accomplish this through direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war. We will turn our war machine into the greatest power for reform and renewal the world has ever seen. We will deploy the skill, excellence and bravery of our people to serve this higher purpose.

We will once again become the shining city upon a hill and set an example for the world. The time of wasting blood and treasure in senseless wars is over.  Now is not the time for the human family to fight each other. Now is the time for all us to stand together against a common enemy. The climate crisis has given us the greatest gift, if only we are willing to accept it. Our human hearts seek the bond and certainty of belonging to a group and all too often our groups have faced each other off in battle.

Let us face this greatest danger our species has ever encountered together as one human family. Let us stand together to preserve the fathomless beauty of our home in this vast, inhospitable universe. We have a larger battle to fight, it’s the battle for the survival of mankind and America is once again offering its leadership to the peoples of the world. In this dedication of my nation’s task, I humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one in our great human family.  May He guide me in the days to come.

If you are looking for somebody to help you say what needs to be said, in a style that fits the occasion and the audience, contact us under: 

https://www.language-and-skills.eu/de/start/