Wednesday 7/3/24
People like to say that actions speak louder than words.
You are also told, though, that the pen is mightier than the sword.
The reason that people say actions speak louder than words is three-fold. First, they are ignorant and project and all but formally worship their ignorance like it's the god who rules them. Second, they possess little to no language skills. Third, they are insecure regarding point the second and therefore deflect away from that insecurity pertaining to their inability to command language at what one would like to think is an adult level, because the truth is the adult level is often below a child's level given that adults regress and devolve rather than learn and grow.
We can also factor in how their inability to deal with the stresses and challenges of life has stunted and lessened them further. They're fragmentary, and increasingly so. Most children are closer to whole than most adults. Life will make those children less whole as they become older and are children no more. (And being actually whole--which is far beyond merely having your various parts present and accounted for--requires time, devotion, wisdom, commitment, whereas a child is more in truth intact, we might say, than whole in this manner.) Life wears people down. The challenge is to rise up, to become more complete, closer to being whole in the most significant sense, as one goes along. This takes many things that most people don't possess, don't come by, don't seek, don't secure, don't process, don't understand, don't realize, don't explore, don't cultivate.
The truth is that people are apt to do nothing, action-wise. They're not going to do the right thing. They'll cut a corner, which is their preferred form of action. They'll do less, which is also an action. They're not going to do what they said were going to do, but making that statement in the first place was an action, too. It did something. It created an expectation in the other person. Made them think or feel something. Perhaps caused them to schedule something. Be somewhere for something. Count on something.
A friend of mine recently said to me, "People never do what they're say they're going to do." He was complaining about people he knows not doing what they said they were going to do and how it's always this way.
He is someone who doesn't do what he says he's going to do. I said, "Well, perfect reason for you not to do what you say you're going to do, right?" He replied, "That's not what I mean." To which I thought, "Isn't it?"
People are terrified of language and communication. There's that aforementioned insecurity. We then get projection and preemptive strikes. It's like when someone responds online to something about grammar with some anger and insecurity-addled remark along the lines of "How dare you expect me not to spell every single word wrong and actually make sense and not sound like a drunken rock."
People are borderline illiterate. You can go days online without seeing a single four-word sentence that isn't some grammatical abomination. Shouldn't we have a bare minimum standards for ourselves? Shouldn't writing at a first grade level be one of them? Honestly, shouldn't we be able to write as well as a six-year-old?
Does that make me a monster because I think we should have some standards for ourselves in that regard? Any regard? Shouldn't you have enough respect for yourself as an adult to be able to write as well as a first grader?
What do people do, though?
"Fuck you ur not the grammer police."
Not that I comment in these instances, though, because how could you even pick and choose? It's near-total. I just absorb the evidentiary slings and arrows of a basically illiterate society.
But the above sort of comment one does see when someone else has pointed out the most basic language-related thing is purely an indication of stupidity, fear, insecurity.
Consider the following. What am I supposed to do with this? What am I supposed to do with you if you are this way? What am I supposed to do with a world full of you?
"Its better to drink and just get a uber then drink and drive yourself."
Oh. Get drunk, take the car service home, where one should drink further, become more drunk, and it is at that point that one should take to one's car and have a raucous late night drive, though I suppose this could also be a daytime affair.
I am increasingly uncertain how I am supposed to take a single human seriously.
Another truth is that words are actions. People are ineffectual in their actions and borderline helpless with their words. Then it's just a blame game and a shifting of the blame game. People are more insecure about their lack of language skills than they are their ability to drive to the dump on a Saturday morning.
The wife keeps nagging, you wake up and get in the car so you'll be back in time to take the girls to soccer and then you can tell yourself you're a man of action while also authoring the previously quoted lines. Actions (me!) = good, Words (the hard to think of things) = bad.
But the truth was, for that guy, he just didn't want to listen to his wife's words on the subject anymore.
Words will be villainized and one form that can take is claiming words automatically mean less than they do, which is a form of blaming the victim.
The problem is not with words or their potential in and of themselves. It's with people who are ineffectual when it comes to all forms of actions of an efficient and demonstrative nature.
There can be so much behind and within words. Whole people and whole worlds. Words are just actions with letters or sounds. But if you're a nothing doing nothing with anything, then you go with a cliche like, "Actions speak louder than words" as a form of self-protection against your own insecurities, which is not an efficient action, action though it be.
