Conversation On The Problem Of Words

By Basil Fernando -February 28, 2014

Basil Fernando

You’ll never know how grateful I am for you listening to me. The reason for such great gratitude is the very reason that I have been telling you over and over again; that is, I am talking to you because among the human beings there is no one willing to hear the things I am thinking about, that I am now talking about.

I told you that in our species we use words to communicate. The problem today is that these words no longer carry common meanings. This simply means that what I say does not make any sense to anyone who is listening to me. When I hear words from others it is almost impossible for me to make sense out of what they say, no matter how much time I may be willing to spend pondering over what they said.

That is not merely regarding communication between one person and another as fellow beings, but also to communications between the Government and the people, the people and the Government. Therefore people don’t even want to be bothered about whether there is any sense in what the government says; nor does the government worry about whether there is anything sensible in what the people want to or do say.

Let me try to show this to you by way of an illustration or two. There was a man called Gerald Perera, who was a young man of about 40 years. He was arrested one day by a group of policemen and brought to a police station. Without saying a word, they hung him up on a beam and started beating him with iron and wooden rods. This affected him so much that he suffered renal failure and, at the end of it all, the policemen said that he was not the man that they were after.                                                         Read More