Let me guess why most of you are here in the audience today.

You are here today because you expect to learn something new.

You are here today because you expect to be inspired,

to be entertained, to be enlightened.

Although there were a couple of guys there,

during the coffee break just now, that I saw that looked like

they were here mainly for the coffee breaks, (Chuckles)

and the lovely, young and intelligent ladies

that they hope to meet there.

A perfectly valid reason and expectation, I might add.

But what you certainly don't expect

is that you are going to be lied to,

that you are going to be subjected to a parade

of attractively packaged falsehoods,

you did not come here with the expectation

that the people up here on this stage

don't know what they're talking about,

or worse yet, are deliberately trying to mislead you.

This is, after all, a TED conference, right?

It's not a political party conference,

it's not a sales conference,

it's not a business meeting,

it's not even that perfectly innocuous,

seemingly innocuous, form of escapism called the cinema --

even though we're all sitting here today,

or standing, as the case may be, in a cinema hall,

the grandest movie house in Riga.

The Splendid Palace Cinema.

Splendid Palace...

that's the actual name of this place. Very nice, isn't it?

But before you get too comfortable in your Splendid Palace seats,

a word of caution:

My intention here today is to make you uncomfortable,

my intention is to make you sit up,

and pay attention to what is being said, to how it is being said,

and to what is not being said at all.

For it is my strong conviction

that our democracies today are disintegrating,

precisely because citizens prefer to sit back,

can be lulled into complacency,

prefer to sit back and watch colorful moving pictures,

prefer not to exercise their critical faculties,

prefer not even to develop such critical faculties.

It's just so much easier, isn't it,

to absorb the ideas of that bloviating pundit on TV, isn't it?

I am concerned that we are becoming shallower as a species,

I'm concerned as our vocabularies shrink,

as the word "awesome" becomes a one-size-fits-all term,

good for describing both your breakfast bacon

and the cathedral at Chartres,

our capacity and range of thought shrinks as well --

with disastrous effects for our democracies.

Now, none of this is new, of course.

George Orwell warned us already, back in 1948,

in his famous book: "Nineteen Eighty-Four" --

You knew that, of course, didn't you,

that the title of the book was chosen, the title "Nineteen Eighty-Four",

not because George Orwell thought that 1984

was precisely the year that all these horrible things

were going to happen,

but that the number "1984" was just an inversion

of the actual year in which the book was written: 1948.

You knew that of course, didn't you?

In any case, Orwell warned us not only about Big Brother,

but also introduced a new language, which he called Newspeak;

a language designed not to expand,

but to diminish the range of thought.

As Orwell himself wrote,

"Every year, fewer and fewer words,

and the range of consciousness always a little bit smaller."

The language of Newspeak was a key tool,

used by Big Brother to control the people.

Now, if you lived in this part of the world during Soviet times,

Newspeak was just not a made-up language in a book of fiction,

but it was a daily reality.

You remember those phrases and words?

"The prevailing dialectics of development."

"The irreversible progress of socioeconomic transformations."

"The maximally complete satisfaction of the needs of the people."

Those are real phrases from back then.

Orwell likened these phrases

to the sections of a prefabricated hen house

that you could stack together and tack together in any order,

without any concern for their actual meaning.

But tell me, did Newspeak really disappear with the fall of the Wall?

I don't know about you, but I watched with great amusement,

but also dismay, as former communist party members

who where used to repeating phrases, prefabricated phrases,

like "the prevailing dialectics of development",

once they saw the European Union opportunities approaching,

they switched seamlessly to parroting prefabricated phrases like:

"sustainable development within the framework of social inclusion".

You've heard that one, haven't you?

I believe the European Union played a very, very positive role

in putting Europe back on its feet after World War II,

and I fully support Latvia's membership in the European Union,

but there is something very, very wrong with an organization

whose language has become, or come to resemble,

the prefabricated meaninglessness of Newspeak, or worse.

Orwell wrote some seven decades ago, okay?

And he was reacting to the techno-jargon of his time.

But aren't things even worse today?

You know, the magazine "Forbes", they did a survey a year or two back

and they asked their readers to vote

for the most annoying and useless word or phrase in business.

The response was unprecedented.

And a lot of readers commented too, that this business jargon,

it had come to replace actual thought.

Do you want to know some of the winning responses

or winning words and phrases?

"Pushing the envelope", "leveraging", "core competencies",

"scalable", "sustainable", "boil the ocean"...

Boil the ocean. Do you even know what that means? I don't.

Do you have a phrase or a word that particularly annoys you,

in your line of work?

You know, Newspeak, gibberish, gobbledygook...

It exists in every field, with some fields prone,

particularly prone to infestation.

I have one of those words.

Actually, I have a lot of those words,

but I have one, which particularly annoys me,

and there's a reason for that.

Several years back, I left academia for a bit and went into NGO management.

Academia also is not a jargon-free zone,

it sometimes seems that academics strive to make things deliberately obscure,

and so I was really pleased to be in the concrete, hands-on world

of NGO -- that's Non Governmental Organization --

management.

All right. So, I find myself, one bright day

of having to interview new potential staff members.

Okay, so I ask the usual questions:

What are your strong points? What are your weak points?

And then I also asked: "Well, what do you think

might be the objective of your work here?

And how do you hope to achieve it?"

First candidate: "The objective of my work here?

Empowerment.

How do I hope to achieve this objective?

By empowering."

Second candidate: "We need to empower our grantees

in order to achieve our objectives of empowerment."

Third candidate ... well, I won't go on, you get the idea.

But I didn't give up, I pressed on.

And I asked them: "Well, tell me, please, that's all very good,

empowerment is a wonderful thing, but tell me, please,

exactly how are you going to empower this person

and how do you know exactly at what moment in time they are actually empowered?

And how can you be sure that this will actually help you

achieve your goals of empowerment?"

No response. Why?

Because a response would have required actual thinking

and not a prefabricated word.

And so I learned, I learned that there was not only Newspeak,

there was also a thing called NGO-speak, with the same inherent problems.

Now, what are the actual problems, you might ask.

What's the matter with using this jargon?

What harm does it actually do?

To illustrate the great harm that truly can be done

with the use of jargon and meaningless words,

let me give you an example from yet another field.

This time, the field of finance.

Pretend you're the head of one of America's largest banks,

and you're in a meeting, and one of your traders at your bank

presents you with the following proposal -- this is a real quote:

"Go long risk on some belly tranches especially where defaults may realize."

And: "To sell forward spread

and buy protection on the tightening move."

What do you do as the bank president?

I know what I would do, I would say I haven't a clue

as to what this trader is saying, because finance is not my forte

and could he please rephrase his proposal in plain English so I could understand it.

In this particular case, which is a real case,

the proposal was approved,

and JP Morgan suffered one of its largest losses ever

because the trader in question was concealing fraud and incompetence

with this jargon and meaningless words.

There are two main reasons why gibberish and Newspeak-type jargon are used.

Firstly: most people don't resort to words like "empowering" and "deleveraging"

and "delayering" because they don't know how to express themselves well.

They resort to these words, because they often have nothing to say.

Secondly: jargon is used to conceal what is really meant;

it is used as a cover-up.

If someone cannot express their ideas without using the jargon words,

perhaps there's no idea there to be expressed at all.

When you feel insecure about your grasp of the subject,

jargon words are a useful crutch.

When you are afraid of speaking unpleasant truths,

jargon's a tranquilizer.

"A negative patient outcome" ...

that sounds so much more soothing than: "He died." Right?

When you want to make it clear that you belong to an exclusive group,

that you are not an outsider, using the common lingo is a must.

When you don't want to make the effort to think,

-- forget about the box -- just think,

jargon words and lazy language are a very useful substitute.

Next time you hear somebody prattling on about "capacity building",

or "sustainable collective impact" or "robust action initiatives",

ask them what they're talking about.

Press them for a definition.

And I bet you anything they can't provide it.

Orwell warned against these duck-speakers -- he called them duck-speakers.

He warned against people for whom speech originates in the larynx,

without involving the higher brain centers at all.

Many of you here in this audience know of someone in your family

that was deported to the Gulag

or sent to the Nazi camps, as the case may be?

Elegant dress and soft hands,

that put you at your peril for the class-conscious Soviets.

But the deadliest liability for both the Soviet and the Nazi regimes

was evidence of civilized articulacy --

in any language. Civilized articulacy in any language.

Evidence of the ability to think for yourself,

and to express yourself in a language free of the prevailing jargon.

Be that as it may, you know, the Ancient Greeks,

they knew that democracy would be destroyed

not by totalitarianism or the oligarchs,

but it would be destroyed by a perverted form of itself.

Democracy evolved along with the culture of the written word,

and it is a creation of that culture.

Today's image-based culture addresses hidden instinctual hungers,

not the intellect.

And the language used today is but a pale reflection

of that used by the Athenians,

let alone that used by Abe Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address.

Democracies deteriorate.

Slovenly language and slovenly thought both corrode the republic.

A statesman known for his eloquence, Vaclav Havel,

spoke of his concern about the rise of demagoguery,

and of how susceptible young democracies especially

are to the rise of populism.

He said: "All my life, I've criticized the way of life made up of platitudes.

I've analyzed the language of platitudes,

and now I find myself facing the professional temptation

to resort to platitudes."