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Imagine a scenario in which there are two people talking. Person A says, “I am very thirsty” and Person B responds, “There is a store around the corner.” Now imagine a member of the secret police reading these lines in a transcript without any other information about the people. Stripped of all context, these sentences do not mean anything, and they are not obviously connected to one another. They could easily be viewed as random sentences or perhaps coded messages.

Of course, both Person A and Person B would understand the exchange because the receiver of the first message had a lot of other information. Maybe he knew that Person A had been exercising or that it was a hot day. That is why he mentioned that there was a store around the corner. Of course, Person A understood the response because he knew that Person B understood what he meant. These sentences made sense to both parties because of shared knowledge.

As an aside, secret messages work the same way. The messages are designed to make sense only within a specific context. The sender assumes the receiver will have the key that provides the context. Often, the key is the context that makes the messages intelligible. To someone without the key, the message is meaningless gibberish. In more sophisticated codes, the receiver needs the key as well as the larger context of the message.

Getting back to the example, that exchange is something called the cooperative principle, a concept from linguistics. The parties in a casual conversation rely upon a commonly held set of assumptions. In most situations, the listeners and speakers act cooperatively to facilitate communication. They mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way. There is an assumed base of shared information upon which their exchange rests.

This describes the cooperate principle of communication. The four maxims of this principle are quantity, quality, relation, and manner. Quantity is the amount of information communicated to the other parties. The quality of that information is the truthfulness of what is being communicated. Relevance is the relationship of the information to the topic or situation. Manner is the clarity of communication. Grice’s maxims explain how people efficiently communicate to one another.

This structure for how people communicate is vitally important in a society in which the people are expected to participate in the governing of society. In a monarchy, horizontal relationships are subordinate to the vertical social structures. One does not have to understand the king in order to understand the relationship. The customs and social structures provide most of what the king would ever need to communicate to the people and what the people need to communicate to one another.

In other words, in an aristocratic system, the context so dominates the daily life of the people that verbal communication is reduced to the pragmatic. There is no need to discuss, much less debate abstract concepts that require lots of additional information in order to make sense to the participants. In a democracy, those clear social structures are gone and what must replace them is a large common understanding. Everyone has to operate from the same set of truths and assumptions.

This gets to why America is in such an agitated state, despite the relative peace and prosperity of the age. The people in charge seem like they are not just speaking a different language but doing so from a different reality. That is because for the most part, they are using a different language and they do operate in a different world from the bulk of the people. The managerial class is defined by the managerial elite and therefore operates by a different cooperative principle.

Take the word “democracy” which is used all the time by the regime. To normal people, this means majority rule. In a democracy, the government does what the majority of the people want, with some exceptions. Normal people accept that some things like slavery are not up for debate. Even if the majority wants to bring back slavery, it is an immoral practice, so it is not permitted. Otherwise, normal people assume democracy is the will of the people expressed in the laws.

To the managerial elite, democracy means the process by which the majority or an assumed majority is convinced to support elite opinion. This is why they are inspired to redouble their efforts whenever they lose at the ballot box. Democracy requires them to work harder to get their desired result. Expediency may require them to go around this process using the courts or administrative fiat. The assumption is that enough people already agree so it is close enough to justify action.

This one word shows how the elite and the commoners do not share the same basis of understanding when it comes to politics. The elites see democracy as the process of working toward their desired end. The people assume it is the process by which elites discover the common will. These are two entirely different and incompatible views of the democratic process. Inevitably this leads to a large number of words and concepts lacking a shared understanding.

More critically, the managerial elite deliberately flouts the principle of commonality to trick the people into supporting the opposite of what they desire. Normal people are used to flouting the principle of commonality, as it is a central part of comedy, as in sarcasm or satire. The managerial elite, however, violates the principle in order to trick the common people, but also to signal intent to the rest of the elite. It is why every new social fad comes with new insider jargon.

The regularized flouting of the principle of commonality in political discourse is not entirely due to deceit, even though it is often a happy accident. The managerial elite in particular, but the managerial class in general, lives in a different shared reality than the people over whom they rule. More important, the managerial class is increasingly aware of the class difference. Much of what defines the ruling class is the shared knowledge of the difference between them and the rest.

This is why political discourse is increasingly frustrating, but also pointless. The gap between how the media, for example, talks about the Trump indictments and how normal people talk about it is too large to cross. The shared reality of the media imagines Trump leading an armed rebellion against the system. The shared reality of the normal people is of a man being tormented by the ruling elite. There is no commonality here, so the communication is cognitively meaningless.

What this suggests is that the clash between the rulers and the ruled is much more than a clash of interests. It is not simply about one side wanting different ends than the other side or wanting more from the result than the other side. Those sorts of conflicts rest on a set of commonly accepted principles. This clash is due to the managerial class living in a different contextual reality from the people. The current conflict is not a clash of interests, but a clash of incompatible realities.

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