our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed When facing problems that feel too big to solve, we retreat to something easier to control: language. History and SocietyLanguageCultural StudiesPolitical PolarizationFree Speech In August 2024, I moved with my family from Chicago, Illinois, to Milan, Italy, to test out living overseas for a year. In the months after relocating, the American presidential race took an unprecedented turn with then-Vice President Kamala Harris navigating a late nomination to the Democratic ticket, Donald Trump surging to win the election, and Americans absorbing major societal shifts resulting from Trump’s victory.
Amid all these events, my news intake shrank. In Italy, TVs aren’t as common in public places as they are in the U.S., and where I did see them, they usually played soccer games rather than CNN, so my updates on American politics and society came mostly from browsing _The New York Times_ in the morning and barrages of texts from friends in the U.S. After several weeks, I realized I didn’t want to spend my year abroad on my phone monitoring the shifting status of policies back home, analyzing the minutiae of American politics, and contemplating the future of democracy.
So I came up with a simple rule: When I encountered a news story, I’d mentally set it aside if it was mostly about words. If the story was about action, I’d consider it worthy of attention. > American society has argued, fought, and debated over language for the better part of the 21st century, and we are due for a course correction in where to devote our energy. This somewhat arbitrary distinction between words and actions revealed to me three related insights.
First, despite a cascade of action surrounding the 2024 election, much of the news I encountered concerned words. For example: A second, more obvious insight is that the stakes tend to be lower for events related to words than for those related to actions. Consider what’s at risk when President Trump renames things — the Department of War, the Gulf of America, and Super Intelligence — versus when action is taken in these domains: the Minab school strike in Iran, lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea, and Anthropic’s models, running unsupervised, breaking into real-world computer systems.
My third insight is that, given this distinction in stakes, the amount of attention we devote to vocabulary compared to behavior is disproportionate. American society has argued, fought, and debated over language for the better part of the 21st century, and we are due for a course correction in where to devote our energy. Four times a year, the Big Think print magazine shows up at your door.
Big ideas from the world's biggest thinkers. The collective obsession with words relative to deeds is nothing new (remember the “War on Christmas,” anyone?), yet this focus may have accelerated in recent years. In his special _Red State Blue State_, comedian Colin Quinn highlights the centrality of freedom of speech to America’s founding but also pokes fun at its legacy: _Free speech, boy, did we take that one too far.
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