Paradoxes Versus Truisms

Excepting the occassional creepy, nearing-thirty year old lurker such as myself, Yahoo Answers - or at least, judging by the general immaturity - is populated by teenagers.

I often visit this website to guage the opinion of the demographic which I no longer belong to. One particular question posted by an inquisitive young man on Yahoo Answers was

Why do people hate Jews?

The response to this question, posted by a (presumably) teenage female, that lodged in my memory was

It's called anti-Semitism - Educated yourself.

Maybe I have nothing better to worry about in my life that I became particularly rankled by this reply:

The youngster who started the thread asked an intelligent question, a question with no readily apparent answer. Without an answer to this question, it is impossible to understand the most important historical event of the 20th Century - World War II, its preamble and consequences.

To which, some haughty young strop, with an assumed air of intellectual dominance, gave an unwarranted, unhelpful and dismissive reply.

I notice young people use "educate yourself" as a suffix to any topic-of-discussion to engender a feeling of well-read superiority, a form of quasi (it's kwozzy not kwayzai, I tell you) intellectual bullying, but that wasn't, in fact, the crux of my annoyance.

My annoyance is directed at the misuse of language. To answer the question "Why do [some] people hate the Jews" with "It's called anti-Semitism" is a truism. The thread-starter was not asking for a synonym of Jew-hating. Effectively, we can render the dialogue nonsensical Why are people anti-Semitic? Because they are anti-Semitic.

Not that I mean to pick on youngsters for their linguistic failings. After all, the misuse of language is a staple of the US Presidential Campaign. Both Democratic forerunners, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama make overtures to America's voters that "The time has come for change" and "If you vote for me I will take the US forward".

What other ways are there to go, precisely? Time being linear and change being the only thing that's constant, why should the American people accept this bit of axiomatic fluff from their presidential hopefuls? Though accept they do, and it is not really much of a surprise when much of the communication people are weened on these days is condensed lowest-common-denominator advertisements and commercials.

(Britain's own ex-PM Tony Blair was a master of meaningless-lingo, delivering soundbites with as fewer verbs as possible. Labour's campaign slogans caught this bug:

Your family better off; Your community safer; and Your children with the best start)

If a truism is the most wasteful and vacant form of language, then I posit that the converse is true: That linguistic paradoxes are the most fulfilling.

I believe that the very essence of the universe is paradoxical - for instance light as both wave and particle, the seemingly implausible beginning of time, consciousness, Zeno's paradox and so on - therefore the most accurate language is must also be paradoxical.

This is nothing new. I am making overtures to ancient Chinese thought, in the main Taoism and Zen. I have always abstained from an enthusiastic study of Eastern philosophy because I hold a certain contempt for Westerners (and Northerners, Southerners, Easterners) who misuse it.

By saying this, I explicitly recall Lynne Franks acting moronically in I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, flailing her arms about and spewing garbage as some sort of benefactor of Zen (conflated awkwardly with a number of other Easterly philosophies and religions). Equally anathemic to Franks jungle nemesis Janice Dickinson as it is to me, is her self-help book which cherishes helpful truisms such as "Be Yourself".

I digress. If truisms are the burden of language then paradoxes (when used correctly) are its liberators. Having very little in common, they both possess one same quality: That neither requires explanation.

A paradox I encountered recently, which I have developed a fondness for, and shall leave you with:

If you want to climb a mountain, begin at the peak

Or, if you really prefer truisms, I give you Vyvyan (photograph, first from left) from the Young Ones and his entry for the competition "in ten words, what do Cornflakes mean to you?"

Cornflakes, Cornflakes, Cornflakes, Cornflakes, Cornflakes, Cornflakes, Cornflakes, Cornflakes, Cornflakes, Cornflakes