Culture Shock Therapy: On the Use and Abuse of Language in Small Town Politics

If you’ve attended or streamed any recent Ojai City Council public meetings, scratched your head, and watched in disbelief as certain speakers took to the podium to vent their frustrations and hurl accusations of collusion at the mayor and paint vivid images of a local conspiracy in which acts of corruption are an almost daily occurrence, then you’re not alone. Ojai experienced a bizarre election just a few months ago, which eerily mirrored the 2020 presidential election in the breadth of the allegations of nefarious deep-state machinations and voter fraud resulting in a campaign of high-school-level character assassination and Twitter-like pile-ups. Depending on where you socialize your media, the US may have an illegitimate president, and Ojai may have an illegitimate mayor. Sites like Nextdoor have become avenues for the aggrieved to air their dirty laundry on local hot-button topics from the election to the affordable housing debate. Nothing is off-topic. The latest Ojai Nextdoor’ crisis’ seems to have been over the possible abuse of a sheepherding dog in the 4th of July parade. As with all such debates, an inordinate amount of facts, details, and insider knowledge from all sides pour in, but nothing is solved in the end. 

Ojai City Council meetings have often been reminders of the ways that online culture invades the real world. The meetings have become an extension of Nextdoor shouting matches and a public forum for the political psychosis gripping the nation.

Each camp is ready to attack with its own truth, its own facts, and statistics. Conversations about the simplest of things have become toxic battlegrounds. Ojai City Council meetings had become a mirror for the culturally and socially isolated local set lost in the maze of the ongoing culture war. Here manners and tact have eroded away under the conservative pressures to ‘own the libs’ and the liberal desire to ‘complain to the manager.’ In Ojai, as indeed all over this country, the citizenry had bifurcated into a binary coalescence of aggrieved parties: 

• Homeowners vs. Renters

• Capitalists vs. Workers

• Business owners vs Customers

• Republicans vs. Democrats

• Property owners vs. the Dispossessed

• Haves vs. Have-Nots

• Conservatives vs. Progressives

• Managers vs. Employees

And yet, the deep divide over political issues is not what is most troubling here in Ojai. Rather it is the use and abuse of language in the service of ideology that should be noted. All sides, including the council members, are equally guilty of issuing platitudes and peppering their speeches with words like ‘stakeholders,’ 'innovators,’ ‘experts,’ ‘buy-in,’ ‘visioning committee,’ and so on. It is often difficult to tell the difference between a statement made by a public representative, a concerned citizen, or a charlatan Silicon Valley CEO. 

These are subtle but important language games that have deep philosophical implications. One could say that an ongoing, protracted ideological war of language is happening under everyone’s noses, and it is heavily favoring the owners, landlords, and business class. The end result of this language war is almost total. We no longer think of ‘freedom’ but of ‘financial independence.’ We are no longer ‘citizens’ or ‘residents’ of a city or town but ‘stakeholders’ and ‘consumers.’ The language of capital and business has insinuated itself into every crevice, nook, and cranny of our lives, including and especially online.

This is, of course, nothing new. In the 1930s, the Public Relations strategist and nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, was given the impossible task of selling cigarettes to women. At that time, only men smoked. To get around this gender gap, Bernays used his uncle’s psychoanalytic discoveries as an aid in getting women to smoke. In order to rebrand the act of smoking, he began to call cigarettes’ torches of freedom’ and tied smoking to the burgeoning suffragette movement, whose goal was to give women the right to vote. Bernays paid young attractive debutantes to appear smoking in public, always in the presence of the media, ready to document any resulting controversy and splashed salient propaganda pieces extolling the virtues of smoking across newspaper headlines. Before long, women were smoking as much as men, and Bernays became the leading media manager and propagandist of his day.

The key to successful PR, advertising, selling, branding, image manipulation, perception management, and propaganda is the careful consideration and use of language. Language establishes the rules of the game. It draws the invisible lines and borders beyond which one isn’t supposed to tread. It imbues certain words with moral value and ascribes to others the opposite, moral corruption and dubious ethics.

We easily accept words that have a perceived high ethical quotient because they are attached to things that are themselves seen as ethically good. In the US, this usually means business and capital-friendly language. It is in business where we find words like ‘consumer’ substituting for ‘citizen’ and where ‘incentives’ play a major role in the mobilization of the captains of industry against the lower and middle classes. 

The problem is, of course, that this sort of language game is just that, a game, and games have rules that favor some and disfavor others. Games are inherently anti-democratic, very few games are cooperative as opposed to competitive, and this favors industry and corporations, who have become used to the concept of financial incentives to gain an advantage against their competitors. They know that in the concept of the zero-sum game, incentives for some are punishments for others. In a world where money is equated with a speech in the wake of Dodd-Frank and Citizens United, the industry can use financial incentives and capital flow to leverage their influence not just over the democratic process but over the use of language in the public arena. Corporations have the means, time, and resources to pay for studies, research, and development and employ teams of experts, academics, lawyers, and analysts, all things that the public citizen cannot do.

On March 14, the Council passed the highly contested rent stabilization ordinance with three votes for the measure and two votes abstaining. Like the election, rent stabilization became a hot war over the nuances of the tenant-landlord relationship. Regulations of this sort are unusual and difficult to implement. The fact that it passed always meant that a wave of resentment from the owners of real estate was coming. 

The use of words like ‘stakeholders’ was meant to poison the political ground against measures like rent stabilization. Unlike citizens or residents, who have implicit accountability and responsibility for their community, stakeholders are accountable only to other stakeholders. In the housing debate, renters were resoundingly NOT thought of as stakeholders, and if they were, their stake was diametrically different from those of the owners. Business-friendly terms like stakeholder and consumer form the basic reality for most ordinary citizens. It is a reality in which the purpose of the consumer is to consume (products, services, and so on), and the stake of the stakeholder can be accounted for and quantified. The higher the stake, the greater the purpose and influence behind the stakeholder and vice versa. 

Whether business-friendly language is used consciously or subconsciously is immaterial. It only matters that it IS being used. Pro-business interests, the owners and landlords are fine with this social order because they benefit from the current arrangement. We have all become accustomed to thinking of houses as stocks, marketable products, and components of investment portfolios, a phenomenon I started calling the ‘lizard brain fog’ thinking. Houses are no longer thought of as shelters; this would present philosophical ramifications for the expansion of basic human rights to include homes. Instead, houses are ‘financial instruments,’ the raison d’etre of capital markets and of modern Western civilization. This is precisely what was imagined under the notion of the debt-based economy that was inaugurated along with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. The dissolution of the Great Society also precipitated the end of the ‘citizen’ as a force in local and international politics, establishing the rise of individualism and consumer culture. This is a deeply rooted problem that presupposes that all human relations are essentially transactional, and one of the most basic human transactional relationships is between landlord and tenant, even if that relationship is built upon mutual trust and respect. 

It is interesting, but not surprising that during the rent stabilization debates, the two sides had different sets of studies supporting their claims. The stakeholders claimed that the majority of residents of Ojai own their homes (53%), while the pro-rent stabilization crowd claimed that the majority are renters (56%). Something doesn’t quite fit, but in both cases, the numbers are essentially the same, half owns while the other half rents, presumably from those who own. The difference is negligible on paper but massive in terms of how each side viewed the predicament. The stakeholders claimed that since the majority owns, it makes no sense to introduce punitive measures for the owners. 

Conversely, the renters claimed that since the majority rents, it makes sense to provide measures that would keep the community stable.