SUBMISSION
BACTERIA
In
October last year I decided to start studying at University again.
This time, I made my choice taking under consideration just what I
like the most: languages. During the last two weeks, many students
have been discussing in the “Forum” the need to limit the use of
pesticides, the negative impact of chemicals on the environment and
the worrying emergence of resistant bacteria. But crops are not the
only thing that can be hit by pests and plagues.
I
have recently started working in a big company. In the office there's
no noise, no comment. The general behaviour is as "colourless"
and "tasteless"
as the furniture. Tapping fingers write, while eyes are permanently
fixed on the screen. There is no pulse, no acceleration, no passion:
only the permanent communication of faceless men with their
computers.
Employees
have become robots, all of them educated in a mixed, foreign
language, a kind of "Martian"
consisting of four hundred words in different languages, with a
scrambled syntax and strange morphological rules. The language of the
future is neither English nor Chinese, but "Potpourri".
It
is impossible to understand this indecipherable mixture. As a matter
of fact, no one understands the others properly. One can just
understand the inmediate, the specific rules of the specific, though
abundant, work to be done.
This
paucity of the "Martian"
language guarantees mental submission, obedience. During "breaks",
people go down together to have some coffee. Day after day, they sit
facing each other and remain silent. They are all dressed in uniform:
the uniform of a limited communication. It is the expression barrier
of a society which considers itself "cosmopolitan". A
society that speaks the language of that hunchback who performed in
"The
Name of the Rose".
PENITENZIAGITE.
The
linguistic "brake"
to fluent communication has led to a deeper limitation of thought. No
one understands properly what he or she does. A few days ago, while
we were trying to find out who the customer who had made an incoming
payment was, one of my mates inmediately excluded a South African
company. I asked her why she had excluded that client. She answered
that the customer could not have been the one who had paid, because
he was South African. I then asked how could she be so sure that the
payer was not South African. She inmediately answered that the money
had been transfered from Russia. Once again, I enquired about the
reason why she knew that THIS was the origine of the money. She
explained: "This
payment has been done in "ZAR".
I then wanted to know which currency ZAR
was. She admited that she did not know it. Finally, I decided to look
it up in Internet. ZAR
is
an abreviation which stands for South
African Rand.
The payment came precisely from South Africa.
Unlike
silent operators, managers are often very chatty: expert
communicators and manipulators who are constantly taking part in
sociology and psychology courses. It is the mass indoctrination of a
totalitarian state with a facade of benevolence. In fact, this is
nothing but the society described by Susanne
Colins:
silent, obedient workers and an élite of manipulators.
I
can only think of one "spray" that can defend us
of such ideological and cultural submission bacteria: a reflexive use
of language. Recently, I have read some comments in the UNED
forum encouraging limitation, lower demand, lack of depth and
equalization of University level to private "academia".
People complain of how difficult English can happen to be and
requires that a lower level is inmediately set, in order to make it
possible for everyone to get a degree. This is nothing but the result
of a rather spread philosophy. Actually, the philosophy of "I
have already paid for my degree and I claim what I have paid for".
It might be worthy to remember that University has never been the
Paper Money Factory of the European Central Bank but a
meeting point for a reflective, collective, universal way of
thinking. And something as precious as universal knowledge should
under no circumstances accept limits.
I
paste here a link that I have found particularly graphic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAgsq8Suna4
