Bill Lind’s most recent essay has kicked up a great deal of excellent discussion. I’ve given Lind a hard time a few times in the past, but on this topic he is making a great deal of sense. Lind argues that

Concepts and doctrine are now developed through layer after layer of formal, structured meetings, invariably organized around PowerPoint briefings. Most attendees are there as representatives of one or another bureaucratic interest, and their job is to defend their turf. PowerPoint briefings not only disguise a lack of intellectual substance with glitzy gimmicks, they inherently work against the concept of Schwerpunkt. Slides usually present umpteen bulletized “points,” all co-equal in (lack of) importance. In the end, what is important is the briefing itself: the medium is the message.

Sonny weighs in with some first-hand experience:

Technology is rarely the problem. The misuse and abuse of technology is what bothers me. You might have some piss-poor analysis supported by fucked-up assumptions, but if your PP presentation looks good, and is formatted right, you are golden. If you slides look kind of crappy because you spent most of you time actually reading and analyzing the problem, you might get in trouble. “Is that Times New Roman I see in that slide? Oh no! Arial is the correct font, goddammit!”

Bingo. A related dynamic I have witnessed is what I’ll call “bureaucratic buzzword bingo.” This is where a presenter uses a word, such as “capability,” in a different way than memo X9184-4.13B did and somebody in the audience makes it his business to inform the hapless briefer about this egregious error. “You can’t really mean ‘capability,’” the sharpshooter will say, “because CJCS 3170.01B defines a ‘capability’ to be…” Sometimes, if the presenter is really lucky, there will be someone else in the audience who can cite another memo with a different definition. By the time the dust settles, whatever the briefing’s original point was will have been forgotten.

One could view this as rigorous attention to detail (after all, if we can’t agree upon what words mean, how can we hope to communicate?), but appearances are deceptive. Like a theatrical set, these discussions only appear to have depth. Their lack of substance becomes clear if one attempts to actually walk into that beautiful garden or that grand medieval hall. Instead of worrying about the ideas being conveyed by the words, these discussions are concerned with enforcing excessively stringent definitions of the words. Writing, speaking and briefing becomes an act of maneuvering pre-assembled formations of words, instead of an exercise in thinking about one’s ideas and then carefully choosing the best words to express those ideas.

Orwell diagnosed this problem more than fifty years ago in “Politics and the English Language:”

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line…” When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases… one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying…

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.

Substitute “DoD” for “political” and I think Orwell’s words will resonate uncomfortably with anyone who has spent time in the military-industrial system.

Clear writing, clear speaking and clear thinking all reinforce one another. Original thinking cannot be expressed with unoriginal images. Creative ideas cannot be described with words overburdened by the weight of intitutionalized definitions. Arguing over fonts keeps us from engaging the actual ideas expressed by the words written in those fonts. This inverts the proper order. All mediums of communication exist only to serve the ideas they express.

Orwell’s path is difficult to walk is because it demands actual thought, and introduces the risk of having one’s ideas criticized. When a briefer is simply parroting back a stream of pre-assembled images and pre-defined words, he has no ownership of his content. Thus, if the content is challenged, he has no personal stake in its worth.

The resulting environment is extremely hostile to creative, thinking individuals like Sonny or the Marines mentioned by Lind in his article. Their frustration is clear and understandable.

But I believe that there is hope. I am optimistic that collaboration tools like blogs and wikis can lead us towards a new environment, one far more open to rigorous and original thinking. It is an idea that keeps me going when I get frustrated.