What if they staged a world, it was a republic, with citizens who spoke a language?

I think I figured out why I have had so much trouble with many people. Most people, especially in America (a lot less so in fact in Europe, where I have also lived), expect that something that you say to them communicates as part of the message something that is a bit like flattery. This also explains why it is the common opinion among Americans that the "communication" they presume (it's part of "communicative capitalism") that is essential for all interpersonal and social life is most importantly unconscious and done through "body language." So that we really are not -- and this is also a common place notion in American culture - very different from other animals. We just have bigger brains. That is the conclusion reached by any psychology that does not take into account language, which along with premature birth and bigger brains is a feature that distinguishes our species.

There is a myth afoot of "autism," whose supposed prevalence in today's society must be suspected.  I do not have the autist's private auto-referential symbolism or sense of enjoyable entrapment in a solitary universe.  I simply am a person who is more attentive to language than anything else I observe.  I became a lover of cinema and a film critic, and I also greatly love music, and in these and other ways I am probably as sensitive to perceptions as any person, but as it happened I learned to speak my first language in contexts where what was said in its verbal content was more important an interesting somehow (to me anyway) than anything else.  When I am speaking with someone and concerned to understand as clearly as possible what they are saying, I may, deliberately and tactically, look away just to not confuse my focus on what they are saying with their facial expressions or anything else.  This seems to me quite fitting in those occasional contexts where what is said in its linguistic content is what is most important.  I do not do this on dates or if I find the other person particularly attractive looking at them.  On dates I usually engage in fairly thematically involved and even complex conversations, topically, or try to, but I know that the larger context is that I'm curious about the person and she about me, so there it makes sense, even if you are discussing Shakespeare or a claim in philosophical logic, to try to connect to the person visually and otherwise.  But it is of course a pure prejudice to say that any way of interacting is normal and then supposedly privileged therein.  A therapist once said to me, I know what your problem is; you are not schizoid or autistic, you are an intellectual.  Be careful, he added, many people will hate for you that, and think you abnormal and inferior.  Now a lot of people use speech and interaction strategically to try to get something they want from people.  I had a roommate who would become enraged because he would say something that suggested some kind of civil argument, because he wanted something and also wanted to tell me that something pertaining to what he wanted was true and important, and why.  So I asked some questions about this, and then looked aside momentarily while he answered.  But he did not know the practice of civil argument, which may be something that is being lost in our culture.  He only understood, apparently, that I was not obeying him, still, and that suggested that I still didn't get it.  Frustrated with my non-compliance with his expectations, he immediately would ratchet up his demonstrable affect to a great pitch of intensity and rage.  No one had taught him the civility of conversations in which people disagree, but, loving their neighbor who is neigh or near to them enough to desire to understand, the desire that Aristotle begins the Metaphysics by referencing, will be interested and want to know more, like, what do you mean, and why do you say that, why do you think this is true?  

What I have found is, however, something even deeper than this, in a way.  Most people seem to need an affirmation when you address them.  Imagine that there are two or more (let's say two) beings, persons, who have bodies, extended in parts of space, and in a larger space (a room, for example) that they at the moment both occupy.  Now imagine that there is a message, a pure message, that is singular and simple, as perhaps most messages are not, containing not just what may seem noise from the point of view of the presumably most important of the plurality of messages being communicated in the instance - a single message.  It could be: The cat is on the mat.  Imagine that you are both in a military unit or a work unit of any kind, and the set up is that, for whatever reason, cats on mats have some special significance relative to the common project.  Maybe it is, at the moment, to wash all the mats with scalding hot water mixed with bleach, so that they will be clean.  This might be so that someone could sit on it, or for whatever reason.  Now a cat on such a mat will be in the way.  You don't want to scald the poor creature nor even bleach him or her.  So this is the message, and that's all there is.

My simple hypothesis is this.  In some cultures more than others, and in American culture in particular, if you want to tell someone that the cat is on the mat, even in a context where such a statement is expected as a possibility, unless you are appealing to some concern of theirs more urgent to them than the conveying of a piece of information, or a question, of interest to you, and possibly to them, normally you cannot just tell them this little bit of possibly true information.  This is not normally a successful communicational move in American society.  Instead, you must also convey some message to the effect of, well, say, a smile.  Something that has the informational content of a smile must be communicated, or the other person will think you are hostile.  This implies, I think, that Americans at least and perhaps many people, expect it to be highly probably that someone speaking to them without some prior authorization or permission will be communicating hostility.  

I have confirmed this with psychologists: Americans in particular need to know when you approach or speak to them in almost any context: that it's ok.  I'm ok, you're ok, it's ok, the world is ok here and now, etc.  It's not a crime I am about to commit, I am not accusing you of hating the Czar or stealing the tarts of the Queen of Hearts.  I don't hate you, not even, for example, for your special demographical social category to which you have a personal attachment that is very dear to you and of a tenuous and shaky possession.  Americans normally require this.  There are verbal gestures, which young people with some amount of liberty from the mature obligations that many people get bogged down with will devote much attention (and some anxiety) to.  One of them is the word "cool."  That doesn't mean attractive or "great," which actually is a stronger synonym of "cool" that means "I like you (or the thing, whatever it is)."  Cool means acceptable, alright, ok, not a problem, not a threat.  Americans are security-conscious people (and of course women and girls more than men and boys, unless they are artists of some kind and of certain very assertive dispositions, as many young woman are today).  They need reassurance.  

I may have wanted reassuring too, but I grew up in its absence.  I was one of the many kids from the middle class who were in some ways under-socialized by family and school.  Some people will never like me because of this, thinking it a disease, which it certainly is not, because they don't tolerate abnormality, because it makes them nervous, because then they worry they are not ok, or you aren't, or the world isn't.  I can assure anyone who wants to know that the world is not ok.  The world has manifestly been not ok in a very great way at least since 1945.  That was the year that the so-called Holocaust, 11 million people asphyxiated in concentration camps built in Europe by the government of a country that briefly conquered most of that continent.  Though actually I happen to be in on the secret that the world was always ok sometimes, in local and temporary ways, and very much not ok in others, which is evidenced by all the things that could kill you, one of which, it seems guaranteed (for all we know, there have been no exceptions to. this rule), eventually will.  And all the things that can make people inevitably or rightly unhappy.  The world has (at least relatively) safe spaces and times, evidenced by the survival and manifest or apparent comfort of persons in those spaces and times, but larger than all of them is the unsafeness of the space and time of the world and all possible experience in it (or not in it, if you have some unworldly imagination).  

America is a security-oriented society because it is rather conservative, and it has a history now going back some decades of trying to rule the rest of the world on it's, or it's government's, own terms.  It does so by pretending to keep peace, which supposes the constant possibility of war, and promote liberty, democracy, prosperity, and "human rights," which supposes above all the possibility of their absence or denial, while it does so largely through wars that it often has called police operations.  Domestically, we have not only by far the world's and history's largest prison archipelago, but we have lots of policing.  It is everywhere in schools, families, work groups, reparative therapeutic and medical contexts, the media, friendships and acquaintanceships and social interactions among people of all ages. Some of it is needed, of course.  But social scientists have documented, for example, that many middle class and suburban parents today freak out a little bit if junior rides a bike or takes a walk or anything.  If he falls and skins his knees, is the sky falling?  Or what about the strange man or woman who sometimes walks down the street on our block, well after the dinner hour, seemingly talking to himself; could he or she be the bogey-person? In relationships, beginning in childhood, we worry.  We ourselves, not just our parents and teachers thinking for us, don't want to fall into the hands of the Big Bad Wolf or whatever.  And there are many anxieties, often taken up by advertising to motivate us to want certain things (beauty, health,...) partly in order to avoid others (ugliness, disease, bad breath...).  

An anxious people who fear the stranger: this is your brain, this is your mind, which is your brain on language, and this is your self exposed to the neighbor who is a stranger who could be toxic or fatal.  And this, above all, is your modernist lifestyle on a lot of rather conservative thinking.  Which has its rationale, and cannot just be wished away.

So this is my theory.  I never really gave enough lip service to the timidity of most people in my society, and so I might say something to someone or ask something, only when I do it, I don't approach them in the usual expected way.  Hello, I just want to say that I disagree with you completely.  I think opinions such as you have just expressed can have terrible consequences, including in helping to usher in repressive governments that commit crimes against their people.  But first, rewind, before saying that I smile.  I smile in the expected way.  I say something that's like a genuflection so they know I'm speaking as one genteel gentile gentle person speaking only gently to another, not in criticism because I don’t mean to offend you, or cetera, and I curtsy and bow and with sugar on top in my statement to you as a fellow citizen.  Do you think if I taught myself such a normal, expected way of interacting that it might work?  I don't think it would make any difference.  

But isn't my way of thinking abnormal?  In what kind of society would people just speak to others, just like that?  Try this as an experiment sometime if you doubt it, but don't do it if a member of the President's cabinet is speaking to a crowd you are in, because then you will be tasered, arrested, charged with assault, and maybe locked up as a crazy.  They will imagine things about you and suppose them true, quite possibly getting some expert to prove it based on statistical correlations between your behavior and what is in some diagnostic and statistical manual of odd behaviors, of which there are a large number, increasing with every congress of professionals that votes on them, each constituting a syndrome of documentable abnormality. It seems today most people are abnormal, which is a strange way of organizing a normality if you think about it. Which you are not necessarily expected to do. Wait till someone speaking to some group has said something that you could possibly either disagree with or ask a pointed question about, as a journalist might.  Try it until you have got it down in situations of little consequence.  You will notice what happens.  You will rapidly be surrounded by people standing there just to lend support to the speaker in case he or she is attacked by you violently.  You might get taken out and taken aside, to be given a lecture to.  In that case, of course, you are treated as guilty of an infraction, not something to be judged as a result of an accusation, but swiftly to cause you to be expelled so that you can get some special treatment as a malefactor who needs reparative instruction in the social norms.  Why?  

Because you just spoke to someone, just like that.  You can't do that.  Even Socrates would always start with a long (to me, boring) paragraph saluting the city's Gods and recounting in pleasant terms recreational activities with persons like the honored ones present, and with these and other gestures of what we might call ‘prophylactic annunciations of civility’, has reassured the audience that: I'm ok, you're ok, it's ok, the world is ok, there is no immanent Holocaust and no one present is going to die as a result of a statement made as if we lived in a social world consisting of adult citizens who could, just like that, approach others who are citizens like them, with some such question.