It is said that until we have named an experience it might not even exist for us. Naming something brings it into existence, even if it did not exist a moment before. Giving a name to a relationship suddenly makes it so. “I love you” and suddenly it is so for the speaker. By doing this you will define your reality. It is not unusual for the speaker to express surprise at the realization that comes with the naming.
This mighty creative power of naming through words is frequently abused when we do “linguistic flips”, as in saying that the opposite (or contrast) is equally true. One of my favourite authors and philosophers, Albert Camus, writes the following: “Each day I would leave this cloister like a man lifted from himself, inscribed for a brief moment in the continuance of the world… There is no love of life without despair of life.” He does not necessarily mean despair is an opposite in this linguistic flip, but he implies the inevitable relationship.
Life cannot be described in linguistic flips, I think. Life is rather like shades, curves, intricate chemical formulas and advanced mathematics. It might be fractions, multiplications, formulas valid in certain contexts where changing one variable gives a complete newness.
When language used to imply that the “opposite” is as true as the original, it kills and complexifies experience beyond the damage habits can cause. Habits?
Habits may do what “naming” does. Camus says: “Indeed, our principles tend to harden into habits and although habits give shape to our inner lives, they can mutate into the rigidity of routine and create a kind of momentum that, rather than expanding our capacity for happiness, contracts it. In the trance of routine and principled productivity, we end up showing up for our daily lives while being absent from them.” (Camus, Albert: (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) in his notebook).
And? Who else are surprised by the chaos of the literature on leadership. This day, there are 178,046 titles on leadership available at Amazon. Which one will you read? Another question: why so many? Answer: because we can name it. There was a time when “research” was a rigorous discipline. Research has been replaced by the “validity” of one person’s experience. The one person “names it the way they see it” and the book is the collection of names. The subscriber to this collection of names, for the duration of this collection being “it” cannot pay attention to other names. Furthermore: to “name the name” for enough content to write a book, don’t be too surprised at the number of linguistic flips you would have to read. These flips are hidden in terms like: the real leader, the good leader, the authentic leader, the servant leader. The implied inevitable relationship of naming is in the flip: if you are not “it” you have to be the linear opposite.
Much is said about organizations and what makes them effective, or allows people to fail them. We, as the reader, has an obligation to consider words as “unverified rumors” until we have done our own verification by checking that we see things as they are, and have given everything it due: the shades, the curves, the formulas, the fractions and the multiplications.
How can we not be amazed?