Translator: Linda Anderson Reviewer: Reiko Bovee
My name is Cheryl Heller, and I have an addiction.
It's not to gambling, or to drugs, or to booze,
or to playing video games, or even to sugar.
I have an addiction to trying to find words
to describe things that are hard to describe.
And I'm not looking for some cathartic moment up here
that will trigger me kicking the habit.
I don't want to be cured.
In fact, I want to infect you.
I want to ignite a whole society of people
addicted to trying to find powerful words, instead of empty and confusing ones.
Words that will connect us, and help us understand what we're doing here.
I was asked to take a risk here today.
And so this is not what I normally talk about.
It's something that's very important to me,
but I have no idea whether I'll be able to find the words to move you
in the next eight minutes, or ever, but I will try.
There's a man named Jon Rea, who is head of Schumacher College in England,
and he said, a couple of weeks ago, that, "No one alive or in history
would have planned to be where we are today, as a species."
Climate, environmental degradation, economic instability, war,
poverty, terrorism, to name but a few.
So how do we change our direction?
How do we agree on where we want to go, when we can't even agree on where we are?
The longer I live and the more I work,
the greater conviction I have that it all begins, and maybe ends,
with language, one not-so-simple thing.
We used to think that ours was the only species that used language.
How funny now.
We know that even bacteria talk to each other,
not to mention elephants, and crows.
We are likely the only species that uses words so abstractly,
that we no longer have access to the truth.
For example, a story in The New Scientist magazine,
about how our language locks us in an outdated world view.
Turns out, Europeans and all English-speaking people
have an almost impossible time grasping the concept of quantum physics.
We just can't get it into our head.
Which means that we can't understand the nature of life.
So scientists were trying to figure that out.
Until the physicist, David Bohm, became suspicious of language.
So this sentence, "The cat chases the mouse,"
contains fixed objects or nouns connected by verbs,
just like classical Newtonian physics
deals with objects located in space and time.
It turns out that Native American speakers had a much easier time
grasping the way the universe works,
because their language doesn't divide the world
into categories of objects, like fish, and trees, and birds.
In their language, a song is alive.
Singing is happening.
Everything is moving, and fluid, and in process,
and so they could much more easily grasp quantum physics.
So, our world view, that we think of as an incontestable fact,
is archaic, because of the structure of our language.
A beloved economist named Alfred Edward Kahn,
said that, " If you can't explain what you're doing in plain English,
you're probably doing something wrong."
So clearly, that fell on deaf ears on Wall Street.
(Laughter)
The collapse of the housing market was due, in no small part,
to words used to misrepresent value.
And it cost trillions of dollars.
So, here's a new one - it's called, "Negative Interest."
And it's not when an institution plans to give you interest.
It's when it plans not to give you interest, and in fact,
take a little bit of the money that you decide to save with them.
We have euphemisms for war that allow us to avoid the reality of it.
We have plenty of words for doing good,
that make us feel good without holding us accountable at all.
New research is proving
that shallow words make us shallow and dumb.
Reading online blogs, reading headline news, reading entertainment news,
especially articles with all those lists
that everybody reads about what we need to do,
they make us stupid and disconnected.
And deep words deepen us, and teach us empathy.
They add reflection, and analysis, and subtext, and make us human.
Here's a tweet from someone you all know,
and I'll let you decide if it's shallow or deep:
"The only people who are not interested in being the V.P. pick
are the people who have not been asked!"
So think about that.
There's nothing true there.
Is anybody in this audience interested in being the V.P.
even though you weren't asked?
I'm not going to ask for who.
(Laughter)
There is a very different example, and it explains that tweet
as symptomatic of our contemporary malaise.
It's by Charles D'Ambrosio,
in a collection of essays, called "Loitering."
"In a leveling climate of summations, crowded with public figures
who speak exclusively from positions of final authority,
issuing an endless stream of conclusions,
I get a wary sense in my gut of a world that's making its appeal
to my indolence and emptiness,
asking only for surrender."
In 1946, George Orwell said that the purpose of political language
is "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
Robert Macfarlane wrote an article in Orion magazine
about new entries in the Oxford Junior Dictionary,
including "chatroom" and "committee" and "MP3 player."
Perhaps it is of vital importance that children learn what a committee is.
But he also talked about words that were omitted,
like "acorn" and "bluebell" and "newt" and "willow."
Are committees and MP3 players meant to take their place?
Is it no longer considered important that a child know what an acorn is?
When words are powerful,
they clarify so that we can see the same thing and act together.
There's a man named Lance Lindblom,
who has had an illustrious career in philanthropy,
and he came to speak to my graduate students.
And he walked into the room, and he said,
"How many of you are interested in social change?"
Everyone put their hand up as high as it would go.
And then he said, "Who can tell me what it is?"
And everyone tried to hide their arm.
The definition that Lance gave us made everything else sound like gibberish.
He said, "Social change is redistribution of wealth and power."
This is the root cause.
This explains why it's so hard to do.
It's also a measure we can hold ourselves accountable for when we try to do it.
1500 years ago, Confucius was asked what his first act would have been
had he ever achieved power in the empire.
And he said, "I would rectify the language,
and I would make words mean what they're supposed to mean again."
So wise people have been telling us the same thing forever.
Much closer to our own time,
Hunter S. Thompson used his own words when he said,
"Not much truth gets told between nine and five."
All change begins with language.
Every new idea that gets acted upon, begins with a conversation between people.
We can find the words,
and we can accelerate the things that matter.
Emily Dickinson, the mistress of powerful, unworn language, wrote that,
"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in your soul,
and sings a tune without the words, and never stops at all."
If you can hear her words without feeling a flutter in your chest,
you have been reading too many blog posts.
(Laughter)
I've been to lots of TEDs.
I heard Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Al Gore.
And one of the most memorable talks I heard
was a five minute talk by a guy with multiple PhDs.
And he came in and said, "I'm going to help you stop losing things.
When you get out of a chair, when you get out of a taxi,
when you leave a room, turn around and look behind you."
(Laughter)
So, I've been thinking about what simple thing I could leave you with.
And it's this:
That words are the only power we have to change things.
So, let's use them wisely.
Thank you.
(Applause)