No One Can Listen

Harry Markopolis is an option trader who figured out that Bernie Madoff's hedge fund was a fraud decades before Madoff's ponzi scheme crashed in multibillion dollar financial scandal. This last year Markopolis penned a financial thriller titled: "No One Would Listen" (buy at Overstock.com) which details his frustrations as he tried to convey his discovery to the financial community.

He talks about how he brought his information to the SEC, the press and others, but no-one would listen.

I've had similar problems throughout my career where I have very clear ideas to communicate, and I am simply unable to communicate the idea.

I've come to the conclusion that it's not a simple case that no-one will listen, but that our leaders have dinked around with the language to such an extent that no-one can listen.

The modern era has been full of intellectuals who sought to manipulate discourse at a foundational level. For example, Hegel, Marx and modern progressives love the term "sublate." This is a process in which a term gets turned into its opposite.

The process is ever so clever; however, as progressives grub power through a systematic undermining of our language, we lose the ability to communicate with each other.

So, the power of the Aristotelian tradition was not so much that Aristotle created a superior method of reasoning, but that he created a relatively clean method for people to communicate their reasons.

Whenever there is a society where the Aristotelian method clicks, people are able to communicate with each other and accomplish great things. When intellectuals resort to manipulating the language to gain power, the ability to communicate dissipates and the society diminishes.