Communication about Freedom
We live in a fascinating age. As a matter of fact, I can't think of a time in history where so many factors have risen to the surface that demand our attention and our intelligence as we seek to deal with them.
This is an age that has so much going on that its fascination almost bridges on fear.
There are so many things going on, and we are often not prepared to deal with them,
and so we look around us with apprehension, wondering if we are really going to be able
to face up to the opportunities and the problems that we have.
This is an age where the concept of authority is being challenged.
It is an age where two opposing forces that have been opposed throughout much of history
are facing each other for a real serious confrontation.
These two forces could be called the forces of liberty and the forces of tyranny.
But I'm going to refer to the forces in a more gentle vein, and I'm going to call them
the forces of libertarianism and the voices and forces of authoritarianism.
And these two general ideas are now coming into confrontation.
What is important right now is that we learn how to communicate precisely what we do mean
in these areas.
Communication about liberty is, I believe, one of the most basic items today.
Now, fortunately, we human beings have a lot going for us. You know, really, people are
wonderful. They really are. We want things and we have a great deal of ability to get
the things that we want. But one of the things that we do have is an ability to communicate
to others ideas that we have in our minds. Now, we are the only species, so far as we
We know that has the ability of communicating with really great precision.
We presume here that many other species are able to communicate primarily at an emotional
level to let others of their kind know that they fear something or that they are happy
about something.
An emotional type of communication we can detect in the lives and behavior of a number
of Other Living Species.
But when it comes to man, we can communicate, and we spend a lot of time doing it, trying
to communicate with great precision various technical and various refined ideas that are
of enormous meaning to us.
So the art of communicating is an important one, and it is particularly important as we
We begin dealing in abstract thought, which would relate, of course, to such things as
libertarianism, authoritarianism, and so on.
First of all, how do we communicate?
Well, there are a number of ways that we communicate.
One, one of the most common, is by means of the spoken word, the voice.
We vocalize, we verbalize, we put into agreed-upon sounds meanings that we intend to convey to
another mind.
And we should keep in focus constantly that the important thing about communication is
not the word that we use, but the fact that understanding ensues.
So many times people are, they create a problem for themselves because they get, you could
say, hung up on their own words.
They don't really get to the meaning.
They become word-bound and then they limit their communication by insisting on the use
of certain words.
There's no particular word that is sacred.
There is no particular series of words that has to be followed.
If we are going to communicate intelligently, it is the transference of images that we're
really after, the transference of an idea into the mind of another party, never mind
what words you use.
The word is the servant to the idea, not the other way around.
Of course, this business of verbalizing is only one of the methods that we have of letting
other people know precisely what meaning we intend them to understand.
Another method is writing.
We take these same verbal sounds and we have developed a system of symbols to accompany
the sounds, and by stipulation we have agreed that certain sounds relate to certain symbols,
And then we put it down on paper and we can communicate that way.
And this is a very good way of communicating too.
It takes a little more effort usually.
Most of us will tend to verbalize a lot more than we inscribe.
We are not quite as willing to take the time to write as we are to vocalize.
In fact, possibly most of us vocalize a little too much, which I suppose is one of my
Cardinal Sins.
Anyway, that's another way we have of communicating, writing.
Another is by drawing pictures, sketching, drawing, artwork of various sorts.
In fact, all artwork, in a sense, is a type of communication from sculpturing to dancing,
music.
All of these things are methods of communicating an idea or an emotion or something of this
sort.
We use color this way.
I might point out that even the posture of the person communicates, his gestures, his
facial expressions, the type of clothing that he wears, the manner in which he comports
himself, where he dines, whom he is seen with.
All of these things tell a story. You and I are constantly engaged in the business of
trying to let other people know who we are and what we mean to ourselves and, hopefully,
what we mean to other people and to things. Communication is a tremendously vital activity
of the human being. Actually, we probably haven't done as much work in this area of
has a basic drive biologically, he has a basic drive economically, and he has a basic drive communicatively.
I don't think we've tended to put those three things at the same level and I think we should.
Because communication is so important, it becomes a primary objective to learn how to do it well.
And there are some extremely important rules. Fortunately, they are also quite simple, so we can learn to be good communicators to let other people know what it is that we mean.
Now, one of the first things to understand about good communication is that communication is always a two-way street, just like hooking up an electric circuit.
One wire won't do the job.
You have to have a flow of current going both ways.
And take, for instance, verbal communication.
When you are going to verbalize an idea, one of the most important things you can do is
to begin by getting the attention of somebody, the party you want to communicate to.
Now you do this in any number of ways, but one of the best and quite frankly one of the
The easiest is to begin by looking at that party. Look at them intently and don't let
your eyes or your attention waver. Now, this is one of the surest ways of getting their
attention in return. And in a sense, by doing this, you have plugged in to their mind and
now you're in a position where you can convey thought. Now, if your mind wanders and your
eyes wander and so on, well, you can be pretty sure that your recipient of ideas is going
Try to take in everybody, focus on one. I might even suggest that this is a good plan
if you're addressing a large group and have a numerous audience in front of you. It is
still a good idea to focus on one person and be sure that you're in rapport, that you
are hooked in with his brain waves, as it were, and then it is going to seem to the
and the others that you're talking to them too on a person-to-person basis.
It's a very important thing.
Get the attention.
All good communication is really a one-to-one affair.
It's one mind to one mind.
If you put something in writing, it's one mind to one mind.
If you create a picture or a work of art, you are really expressing yourself, but hopefully
Now, in order to facilitate good communication, there are certain lines that you should not cross over.
In fact, I could divide this area of communication into three spectrums, so to speak, or three avenues.
There would be the frigid zone, the temperate zone, and the torrid zone.
And good communication occurs at the temperate zone.
Now what I mean is this, I'll take the frigid zone first.
The frigid zone occurs when you begin trying to communicate with someone and you hit upon
on a subject that they're not interested in, or you do it in such a way that you tend
to ignore their importance, you begin to praise yourself, you are so egocentric that you fail
to notice that they also are egocentric, and the consequence is that you just sort of lord
it over them, you become a braggart, or you talk too loudly, you don't make it an easy
thing for them to tune in with you, and when you do this, you begin to bore people.
And that creates a dropping in temperature, and you're moving into the frigid zone.
When people are bored, their attention is going to go someplace else, they're going
to begin looking at their watches, they're going to begin yawning, they're going to
And the minute a person begins to get angry as a result of your communication efforts,
he's not interested in hearing anything more that you've got to say.
He's interested in saying something back to you.
In fact, he wants to take you on now.
He doesn't want to communicate with you.
He probably wants to hit you.
And so the room is heating up.
You're in a torrid area and communication of ideas is being narrowed right down to a
motivational factor where he's either going to want to get away from you or he's going
to want to hit you or do something to you.
He's no longer getting the message.
He wants to give a message and his message is going to be unpleasant.
Well, these are areas you want to avoid.
Good communication avoids both the torrid and the frigid zone.
You move into the temperate area and by doing this you practice good manners.
You realize that you're talking to another human being who probably knows more than you
do in many areas, is just as sensitive as you are, and has got as many things to say
as you have, and perhaps could even say them better than you are saying them.
Now when you get that attitude and then get their attention and operate gently within an
area that avoids the extreme pressure of excessive heat or excessive chill, you can get a two-way
communication going and it becomes a great joy.
There's an unfolding that occurs between both communicants.
It's one of the most vital and deeply meaningful things that we can do is to enter into a
a real exchange with another party who is being assisted by you to that same type of
exchange.
I recall an instance, it's quite vivid from my early childhood, well I wasn't really
a child, I was about 15 I recall at the time, and my mother had a friend, an older woman,
to me a vastly older woman, she was probably in her 40s, but to me she was very elderly
What she did, the minute anybody showed up and wanted to talk to her, she immediately
dropped everything else and focused on you with her mouth slightly open and her eyes
sparkling, looking right at you as though what you had to say was at least on the level
of Holy Writ. I mean, nothing could have been more important than what I wanted to say to
her when she showed up. At least she conveyed that impression. I thought she was great.
So did everybody in the family. We all thought that she took a special interest in each one
of us personally. Now that I look back at it, I'm not sure she took any special interest
in any of us. But she was good at communicating. And as I look back, I don't think she ever
lectured me at any time. Almost everybody else did, but I don't think she ever did. At least
I can't remember it. And yet I can remember learning things from her. So she must have had a
very subtle way of making the exchange a two-way street that always built me up. And I loved it.
She made me important. She was at once sympathetic, eager, there was a ready smile,
a willingness to laugh, to be amused, and yet also a deep feeling of sympathy and rapport so that
you felt she understood, oh, this gal was great as a communicator. And you know, I speak of her
because thinking back, I've only found two or three more in my lifetime that were as good as that.
And fundamentally it was this ability of tying in on an attention wavelength, keeping out
of the frigid and the torrid zones and then just opening up and being a free recipient
of ideas and bouncing them back as I'm sure she did and this was a very rewarding experience.
It's something we can do and should do.
This becomes particularly important when we're talking in terms of abstractions such as liberty
and authority. These are very, very meaningful abstractions. And I don't think we take
enough time when we're in school learning about abstractions. We tend to take up English,
of course. We spend a lot of time learning English and we learn the parts of speech including
Nouns and Verbs and Adverbs and Adjectives and so on.
But when we get to nouns, there are several types of nouns, but there is the type of noun
called an abstract noun, a word that relates not to something that exists in reality, not
to a concrete or proper thing, but to a concept, to an idea.
And when we're communicating at the level of abstracts, it's very difficult to convey
How do we understand the other abstract terms that we use? There is a way of dealing with
abstractions that we ought to focus on for a moment. It is a method of setting up a scale
of comparison. We learn what we're talking about at the abstract level in part by learning
how to exclude the things that we're not talking about. In the abstract level, we actually
We only have a four-part scale, a four-point scale that tells us about the area we want
to get into.
What we seek is things that are identical, things that are similar, things that are different
or dissimilar, and things that are opposite.
Let me give you a quick illustration of what I mean here.
Let's take the word hot.
Now what does that mean? Well we all have a general idea of what it means. Hot is a temperature
condition that relates to an increase of heat over and above some other amount of heat.
There's nothing very precise about it. Something is hot compared to something else that isn't
quite as hot. That's about all we've got to go on there. The word is very indefinite.
And yet we use the word all the time, and in general we know what it means.
Now if you had never heard that word before, how would I let you know what hot is?
Well, I couldn't say, well, hot is just like hot, because that would be comparing it with
something that is so much like itself that it's meaningless.
So I say, well, hot is like hot.
I've said nothing.
Well, I could help you a little bit if I said, well, hot is a little more hot than warm.
Now we've got a little bit of a basis of comparison.
You get the idea that warm has heat in it, but hot has more heat than warm.
So you now know that hot is hotter than warm.
You've got a little bit of a comparison.
But I could do even better if I said to you, well, hot has a great deal more heat than
cool.
Well, yeah, now we're beginning to get a little broader base of comparison.
And suppose I said, well, hot is the opposite of cold.
Now we've arrived at the point we want to arrive at.
You see, what we've used here are four words, each word relating to a different point on
On our comparative scale, too hot are identities. Hot and warm are similarities. Hot and cool
are differences or dissimilarities. Cool is going down the scale. Warm and hot are both
going up. Warm is warmer than normal. Hot is quite a bit warmer than normal. Cool is
below normal. But now I say cold. And that is a mutually exclusive term. When I am talking
If I'm talking in terms of what is cold, I have excluded hot. If I'm talking in terms
of what is hot, I have excluded cold. And that's what we try to do when we communicate
in abstractions. We try to find what it is we're talking about by identifying what it
is we're not talking about. And then we exclude all of the gray area in between, the excluded
You see, when I'm talking about a table, getting back to a concrete noun, the minute
we identify the table as what it is, that's an extreme identification. Once a table is
known to be a table, we automatically exclude everything else that it isn't. We know that
A table is not a bed, a lamp, a horse, a banana. It's a table. There's no argument about it.
You don't compare it with anything. In fact, with proper nouns, you don't try to exclude
anything. You don't say, well, to understand what a table is, you have to understand what
a table isn't. You don't do that. What's the opposite of a table? There isn't any opposite
to a table. Or there are many opposites to a table, any way you want to look at it. We
We don't think that way. But at the abstract level, we think in terms of opposites because
that helps us polarize our thinking so we know exactly what we mean. Now, this is very
important when we're thinking in terms of human liberty. Because liberty would be the
opposite of that which is not libertarian. And what, pray tell, is that? Well, when we're
After dealing in this area, it would be important to realize that the word liberty or the word
freedom tends to polarize in two directions, and that's the reason so many people are confused
about it. If it only polarized in one direction, we probably wouldn't have the difficulties
with it that we do. But today I find, for instance, many people are afraid of freedom,
Many people tell me that they don't fear it at all, they love it, and yet I have a sensation
that they're talking about two different things.
You see, if I'm thinking about my freedom, I love freedom because it's a part of my
nature to be free.
I want to make up my own mind, I want to think my own thoughts, make my own decisions and
Act on the basis of things that I know are meaningful and constructive and creative for
me. So freedom, to me, is on the plus side. It's a great thing.
But now what about freedom for you? Well, I'm not so sure about that. What would you
do with your freedom? I know what I'm going to do. I'm a high-tight fellow. You know,
I wouldn't hurt anybody. But what about you? I don't know what you do. And so when I began
When thinking about freedom for you, I'm not quite so certain that it's a desirable good.
Now this is what I run into when I talk with other people.
And I use the word freedom or liberty.
It depends on where they're focusing.
If they're focusing on themselves, they light up and they say, boy, that's great.
Freedom is a great thing.
But if they're focusing on other people that they're afraid of, then their mouths drop
I think perhaps Lincoln at one time said this about as well as it's been said. I don't have his quotation
The world is very much in need of a good definition for liberty. With some, it seems to mean the right of a man to do as he pleases, with himself and the products of his labor. And with other men, it seems to mean the right of a man to do as he pleases, with other men and the products of other men's labor.
Now, these are both called freedom, but in point of fact, they are opposites and therefore
they must be known by opposite names, and if the one is freedom, the other must be tyranny.
I would have to agree with Mr. Lincoln on that point.
We are going to have to learn to recognize the difference between freedom, which is essentially
self-authority, the authority of the person over himself and what is his, and non-freedom,
which is authoritarian and the authority of the other party over a person that is not
him and over the property of the other party.
This is the area we're going to have to learn to communicate in.
It's an extremely vital area, and that's what we want to concentrate on.
Thanks very much.
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