Communication!: A Radically New Approach to Life's Most Perplexing Problem

By Lee Thayer

This book is not about communication as it is generally understood, or as you may understand it. It is about how communication ought to be understood according to how it actually occurs. The popular understanding of communication is simply not consistent with the facts. If your concept of communication is faulty, you will frequently be perplexed, frustrated, and even angered. Our communication problems are not engendered by the world outside of us. They are engendered mainly because our common conception of communication just doesnt fit the facts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 31, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462836376

Lee Thayer

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Lifes Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.

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Copyright © 2009 by Lee Thayer.

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to KT, whose artful eye

and artful heart continue to be inspiriting.

Contents

Dedication

This book is dedicated to KT, whose artful eye

and artful heart continue to be inspiriting.

Essay Annotations

Introduction—Getting Oriented

Acknowledgements

1. What Communicates?

2. Purposes & Consequences

3. Identity

4. Fashion

5. Who’s Responsible?

6. Get with the Story

7. Games People Play

8. Explaining Things

9. Assumptions/Justifications

10. Candor

11. The Hypothetical Mind

12. Gullibility & Credibility

13. Questions & Answers

14. Power & Persuasiveness

15. Advice

16. Worldviews

17. Meanings & Definitions

18. Decisions/Choices/ETC.

19. Communication Competencies

20. Performing Life

Afterword

For Further Study

About the Author

Essay Annotations

1. What Communicates?

This gets into the knotty problem of what actually occurs when communication occurs, and the everyday problems that occur there when you don’t have the right handle on things. It was central to the concerns of Confucius and of Epictetus, among others of the world’s great thinkers.

2. Purposes and Consequences

Most everyday communication has no specific purpose. The long-term consequences of what is said or read are rarely considered. The question is not the hours people gaze at the television, but why? To what purpose? Scholars seem to be uninterested in the consequences of domestic squabbling or of talking incessantly but saying nothing of real relevance on the mobile phone.

3. Identity

The observers who write about everyday life don’t often relate the concepts they are playing with back to communication. An event without a communication infrastructure would be a bit like a virgin birth. Here are some of those concepts, but in this case uniquely grounded in the process out of which they grew.

4. Fashion

People who flock together communicatively (which includes ideologically) will think like, feel like, dress like, and talk or behave like their friends and acquaintances. Or in the way they imagine that role. In a culture like our own, what is fashionable has been substituted for what is meaningful. In general, it is more important to be in fashion than to be worthwhile.

5. Who’s Responsible?

More and more people are losers. Who or what is responsible for such consequences? More and more people are depicted as victims of this or that. This opens the way for a savior—someone or some government program to save them. Choice and responsibility are two sides of the same coin where communication is concerned. In the same way that there is no free lunch, there is no home-free communication.

6. Get with the Story

We must live our lives in the stories that we find ourselves in—whether our own or the one we fell into by default. People have reciprocal roles in every story. They literally got talked into them. If you were even capable of authoring your own story, which most aren’t, there would still be the problem of seducing others into playing a supporting role. All of this involves communication.

7. Games People Play

If life is a game (an improvised and ongoing story), you have to be in either a supporting role or the role of the one who calls the game. Wherever you end up in the game will depend upon your communication. Most people end up in bit parts because they are not good enough as communicators to play the lead or change the game.

8. Explaining Things

People are typically more competent at explaining why they didn’t do what they promised—either to themselves or others. They are more competent at explaining away their shortfalls than simply doing what needs to be done. It’s a primordial communication game. Buy into it and become your own victim.

9. Assumptions/Justifications

To understand anything usually requires that you make some assumptions. All communication is ambiguous. You have to fill in the blanks or connect the dots. Our failures to make the right assumptions often have to be justified. It is easy to justify your wrong assumptions or your resulting misbehavior. All you have to do is to find someone who will buy your justifications for your life if you buy theirs.

10. Candor

Candor is not about the truth. It is about following the rules where candor is not admissible or is frowned upon. It is about the freedom to express what you think or how you feel—without fear of retribution. It begins with seeing accurately how others see you. This requires some communication competencies most people do not have.

11. The Hypothetical Mind

All mental machinations are hypothetical—that is, they are hypotheses awaiting confirmation. Ingrained mental models that are not subject to correction or confirmation are an infinitely rich source of communication problems. A statement is merely an interpretation. An understanding is merely a hypothesis.

12. Gullibility and Credibility

It ain’t what we know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know that just ain’t so—which was received folklore long before Mark Twain. The more certain a person is that he knows everything, the easier it is for his predators to take advantage of him. That’s gullibility. You are always credible to the person who believes you. If that person is you, you will be in continuous jeopardy.

13. Questions and Answers

If you ask the question that needs asking, you open up to the world. If you don’t ask just the right question, you close yourself down. It is better to figure out just the right question to ask than to know all of the answers. There is no superior communication competency.

14. Power and Persuasion

Power persuades. If you haven’t got it—or enough of it—your only backup is your ability to persuade. And that’s a high-level communication competency. What you can’t develop in that department will live on as your Achilles heel. Whom you can’t persuade will persuade you. You will live by default.

15. Advice

Take my advice—I’ll never use it (to paraphrase a familiar standard). It seems that people who can’t or won’t take advice are full of advice. We all take seriously advice from ourselves. Then from those who most agree with us. The challenge is that of knowing the difference between good advice and bad advice. A person who can’t act on good advice will seek out bad advice that he or she can act upon.

16. Worldviews

We all live in a prison of beliefs and attitudes through the peepholes of which we interpret the world. What is observed is a refraction of the workings of the mind that observes it. There is no more than a minimally necessary (physical or social) correlation. We need our worldviews to navigate by. But they will take you where they go, not necessarily where you want to go.

17. Meanings and Definitions

Minds don’t deal with raw material. They deal only with the meanings of things. They deal only in human interpretations. All communication originates in someone’s mind, and often has as its target some other mind(s). Minds are opaque to the other. You can only guess what others mean by their interpretations of you. A dictionary definition is neither necessary nor sufficient to anyone’s cause. A definition is someone’s interpretation of what people might mean by what they say.

18. Decisions, Choices, ETC.

There is no way for you to have a problem without your complicity in it. You cannot have a problem that others do not validate or attribute to you. Problems and solutions come and go like any other fashion. Any choice leads to the problems that it brings on. If you can imagine a solution, you will attract the problem that goes with it. There is no solution that does not create future problems.

19. Communication Competence

People rarely grow their communication competencies beyond what is absolutely necessary. The minimum is the standard. Few are curious. They do not grow beyond who they were yesterday. If you don’t need it, fine. But people who want to achieve something in the world need the requisite communication competencies for doing so. Know Thyself means questioning what you think you know. What you can’t do communicatively, you can’t do.

20. Performing Life… Communicatively

You have a conscious life only in communication. So life is fundamentally a product of your past and present communication—with yourself, with others, with the world. Life is a performing art. You gain the role you have communicatively. Whether you can be who you want to be depends solely on the communicative competencies you have or can develop for gaining that role. Otherwise you will have to continue on in the role you’re in. A story that is not compelling to others is a story you can not live.

Introduction—Getting Oriented

First, some cautionary notes:

1. This book is not about communication as it is generally understood, or as you may understand it. It is about how communication ought to be understood according to how it actually occurs. The popular understanding of communication is simply not consistent with the facts. If your concept of communication is faulty, you will frequently be perplexed, frustrated, and even angered. Our communication problems are not engendered by the world outside of us. They are engendered mainly because our common conception of communication just doesn’t fit the facts.

2. Everyone knows by now that the best way to deal with problems is to prevent them. This book is mainly about how to prevent communication problems, and not how to deal merely with the symptoms.

3. Communication is not just something else we humans do. There is never a waking moment when we are not in communication—with ourselves, with others, or with the media or the events of the day. What gets ignored in trivializing communication (as we do) is this:

• It is in communication that we create and maintain each other as sentient human beings.

• It is in communication that we create, maintain, or alter all of our ways of minding the world and ourselves.

• Communication is a form of intercourse. It has some expected, some unexpected consequences. It is in communication that human minds conceive all of their products.

• It is in communication that we become who we are, and who we will be.

• Communication is the infrastructure for all that goes on in the human world.

4. Communication is not amenable to scientific thought and methods. You can neither utter nor comprehend what you are talking about except in terms of what it means to you. Minds are not objects. Their contents and machinations are private, accessible only to that person. Minds are subject to no logic known to mankind.

5. Communication begins and ends in its consequences. A theory of it would be like a theory of the wheel—as if where the wheel takes us does not matter.

6. Communication is minds at play. What they play and how they play depends upon their capabilities for doing so. The mind can never be found in the brain. So looking for it there is a popular waste of time. Communication can never be reduced to its component parts. It exists only in the whole system in which it occurs.

7. We say we fall in love. But we also fall into our understandings. The message the receiver interprets is ultimately a function of that particular receiver, at that time, in that context, given all of the hidden agendas at play, etc.

Shall we move on and attempt to change the way we understand this taken-for-granted process of communication?

You are who you are as a result of the communicative intercourse you have engaged in previously. The world you see is a function of your mind, which is a product of your communication encounters over the day, and over your time on earth.

Seeing communication rightly is the tool of self-empowerment that so many have sought for so long. It has never been a secret. You just have to be able to see it rightly after seeing it wrongly for many years. That will be our collaborative challenge in this book, if you are open to the facts.

Much of it is bafflingly obvious. For example, the almost universal model that we westerners carry around as a master assumption is that communication has to do almost exclusively with the sender and his message. That is, it is assumed that the sender controls the process. It doesn’t require much reflection to see that it is the receiver and not the sender who is in control. It is YOU who interprets what you see and what you hear. The world is meaningful to you because of the way YOUR mind works. The sender may have put something into your purview. But what you do with it is ultimately your prerogative [no matter that it is always within the limits of the way your mind works]. So all of the consequences for the real world come from how people interpret what was said—or how they collectively interpret the world they share.

It is fairly easy to see historically how this mistake came about. Communication was born in the modern consciousness in the early days of radio research and telephony and information theory. Those all sounded and were treated as if they were scientific. Science was riding high in those days.

Those all put the focus on the sender. They were disguised command-and-control systems. They were rational in the extreme. So most educated folk got caught up in the appeal of the scientific disciplines, and tried to emulate them. Thus we began the serious study of communication with the transmission model of communication: somebody said X to somebody else with Y result.

But human communication is not a control system. The lesson in our book of Genesis is that God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A&E talked it over, with the help of the serpent [who does not appear in the story until a much later telling], and decided that it was okay to disobey a direct and clear order from above—if they decided they had a reason to do so.

Human communication is like that. It is how people interpret a demand, a comment, or a happening that matters. Human language itself is a denial of the real world. The word elephant is not the same thing as an actual elephant on the savannah. The word means whatever we people agree it means. Because we are language-users first and last, we are not constrained by any actual reality. We can create our own [as in I love you—I love you too.] And the worlds we create with our various languages for doing so—from cave art to music to satellite and salon images—can only mean that we live communicatively in open systems.

So we humans live [necessarily] in a world created by interpretations of things—in a world where the receiver’s interpretation counts for more than the sender’s. What something means is what it means to some specific person. I love you is not a message of the sort, To whom it may concern, as are our attempts at mass communication. It is directed to a specific person at a specific time in a specific way.

It’s hard to get from a transmission to a receiver-centric view of communication. That’s a real change. But it is far more consistent with the everyday reality of communication than is the sender-centric model. Most of our so-called communication problems come from this faulty transmission model of communication. In this book, we will attempt this radical change by shining a spotlight on different aspects of life, of being in the world communicatively. We are not robots. Most of us don’t want to be.

Human communication is largely about feelings, or about the private thoughts people hope to influence other people with.

It is inescapably the case that all such feelings and all such thoughts are private. No one else has access to them, except as the person who has them tries to describe them. When you do describe them, it is the other person who has to assign meaning to what you say. What you say means something to you, of course. But the only meaning it has for that other person is the meaning he or she is able [or inclined] to attribute to what you describe.

This fact may suggest that it is sometimes very difficult to get across something that is totally private to you, totally inaccessible to the other. Experience cannot be shared. It can only be described. So it comes down to how capable you may be of describing your experience, and how capable and/or sympathetic the other person is. This makes it possible for either one of you to deceive the other. She could say she understands, when in fact she doesn’t. Everyday life is like that. It all depends on how the receiver interprets what you express.

We can’t comprehend any of that with a sender-centric model of communication. We need to radicalize our understanding of the very process that makes us human—communication. That’s the purpose of this book.

This may be a good place to set the scene for what follows.

Communication is first of all about interpretations. Nothing comes to us with its meaning inscribed on its back. What something means to you or to me is always an interpretation.

Our minds are not equipped to deal with reality as such. Our minds can deal only with interpretations of it. Whatever we say of it, or believe about it, is ultimately an interpretation. The mind traffics solely in its own meanings for things.

Everything we humans can think about, or speak of, is an interpretation. As you read this, you are interpreting what I have written. As I wrote it, I was interpreting a lifetime of thinking about communication, of studying it, of researching it. Beyond that, I was faced with how best to package my hard-won perspectives so that your interpretations could be of optimal value to you. No mean trick, as you may have experienced.

It will take the best of both of us.

It is our minds that are in control—not us. Whither they go, we go.

Where they cannot go, we cannot go.

What we can remember, what we can imagine, are enabled and constrained by our minds. Everything of which we are conscious got there via communication with others or with ourselves. We can understand only what we are capable of understanding, and only in our ways of doing so. We will understand something as our minds make possible—and necessary. Our minds, having the structures and functions they do, mediate the world for us. They interpret the only world they know about… for us. And they interpret us for the rest of the world. Our minds are in the communication business, delivering interpretations, but only insofar as they are capable of doing so. They are the sole source of what we know, what we say, and how we do what we do. They scan the world and interpret what is said or done on our behalf, but only as they are capable of doing so. They are our window on the world. It is the only window we have, or can have.

We humans are born twice—once biologically and once communicatively. The first time as capable of a few sounds or of that puzzled look you often get when they look at you, as if to say, "Who or what the hell are you??" Babies and toddlers are literally talked into having a mind. They can’t participate in our world if that doesn’t happen. Those around the babe talk her into having a fledgling mind, which will grow wildly in the early years, then slower, and finally ossifies (referred to as senility).

To engage in communication of any sort requires exposing your mind to other minds. These mutual challenges/influences go on throughout life. Some people continue to grow their minds. Others assume they have nothing left to learn. To grow one’s mind has risks. If it gets changed in its content or its workings, you can’t be the same person you were. Most people are reluctant to take that risk. At some point, they prefer to go with the mind they have, no matter how dysfunctional it may be.

The point is that the mind is a living thing—utterly pliant and eager to grow at the outset, often utterly intractable later in life. For most people, the quest is always for confirmation of their minds. They seek out people who think like they do, acquire media that confirm their beliefs and their interpretations, and avoid those communication encounters that would challenge their mental status quo.

Communication—how the mind engages in encounters with other minds —is seemingly not subject to the laws of evolution. How good a mind has to be to survive depends on how dangerous is the world in which it has to maneuver. The most vigilant, smartest, fastest learning critters are those that are up against life-and-death-situations daily. We humans insulate ourselves from such environments—social and physical. We prefer our comfort zones. Most of us prefer the familiar, the predictable, the effortlessly comprehensible. So we arrange our social worlds that