Is that really appropriate for LinkedIn?

As you all know, over the past 18 months LinkedIn has played hapless and confused host to an influx of refugees from other social media platforms. The rapid escalation of the pandemic, hot the heels of the BLM riots, closely followed by the Ukraine conflict, obliged a similarly rapid expansion of the machinery of propaganda so as to manufacture consent for all the actions taken by those most likely to benefit from these tragedies.

The internet is still free and spongy enough that we can also wander around the side of this machine and watch all this frantic peddling inside through a glass wall created by the stellar analysis and commentary from people like Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand and the boys at Triggernometry. Unbelievably we are seeing the realisation of things that Orwell produced as fiction.

The refugees have arrived from places where the suppression of views and deletion of identities that failed to support this or that official narrative has finally become intolerable.

It has caused disruption among those who were comfortable with LinkedIn the way it was. But nothing ever stays the same, let alone social media platforms which are far more the product of a million inquisitive inner children gaming the algorithm than they are a function of the creator’s vision.

LinkedIn was pretty stale for a while there, but it now shows signs of becoming interesting.

Not everyone is happy though, with some long term and judgemental members expressing distaste and archly scolding that this or that post is not “appropriate”, and apparently yearning for the old days when all you ever saw was self-congratulatory announcements of awards, promotions and virtue.

At the risk of creating a division, I think I have worked out why some are for and others are against the expanding palette of opinion.

The latter group take as granted that they exist within certain non-negotiable structures. That their personal fulfilment will extend no further than these structures allow, and that success relies on adept exploitation of the connections and networks and values that are dispensed by these structures.

The structures are businesses, corporations, regulated industries and Government bureaucracy. This group is made up of employees.

But that is only part of the world.

The former group are not wholly contained or constrained by these things. Most typically they are business owners themselves and are happy to live and die on their relationship with a relatively free market and with new ideas. They take risks.

This group is not vulnerable to the propaganda and revels in disruption. And they are excited by the prospect of LinkedIn shedding its fealty to the official line.

I am anyway. As a business owner I am cautiously pleased to observe that LinkedIn is starting show signs that perhaps even more than “interesting”, it might get philosophical.

Let me share with you a chapter from my company manual. Note: This is directed to my employees all of whom suffer my guidance and pressure to develop as individuals, as professionals, and in our case, as translators and interpreters.

Philosophy

Don’t be afraid of or apologise for philosophy!

Everyone is a philosopher, everyone engages at some point or another in philosophical enquiry, they are just afraid to say so out loud, lest they commit themselves to doing it well. They are afraid of having the results of their efforts judged and possibly rejected. This is the same reason many people don’t start up businesses or learn a second language or become stand-up comedians or artists or ask that attractive person for their phone number. But everything glorious in this world was produced by firstly overcoming those fears.

Philosophy is the search for meaning, and of all the occupations, of all those who go on to dare to ‘profess’ to the world and call themselves a ‘profession’, surely it is translators above all others who must concern themselves with what things mean, and in particular what sentences mean.

If people don’t have the well developed habit and ability to confirm the meaning of things, then they will be exploited. They will rather be trained to respond to mere words as noises like sheep, known to them only as audible triggers of behaviours or the sources of social results that are more or less desirable.

But the person who tends to hesitate before speaking, or before reacting to the speech of others, if they are not sure what the words mean, pausing to ask ‘Well wait a minute, what exactly does that mean? And why should that whole argument make sense?’ these people are not so vulnerable to political manipulation.

And translators spend most of their working lives answering those questions.

Those who are uninterested in enquiring into these matters will be found in the mob following the person saying ‘Come on let’s get the “person of another race”!’ [edited for LinkedIn] just as surely as those in the mob following the person saying ‘Come on let’s get the racist!’. And those who would silence the enquiring mind by calling them ‘pedantic’, ‘hair-splitters’ and ‘fence-sitters’ are the conniving foot-soldiers of the anti-intellectual vertebrae of politics and warfare that relies so much on large numbers of biddable simpletons.

So are we clear? Philosophy = good and noble. Anti-philosophy = barbarian dickheads.

As professional translators we have, moment-by-moment, an ethical duty to make sure we understand exactly what each sentence means before we translate it, so to suggest that philosophy is irrelevant to the work of translators is absurd.

To dare to call yourself professional is also take on responsibility to decline no avenue of enquiry whatsoever, and that is literally philosophy[1]. It is only because a person hates or fears the responsibility that comes inevitably with greater wisdom that when they arrive at a difficult question, or one no one else has ever asked or answered, or an internal contradiction, or logical fallacy, they treat it as an official road block, a convenient thought-stopper, they happily turn around and go back to their unenlightened prejudices.

There are many individuals who live their lives that way and that’s fine. A personal choice. An expression of who they are.

But if you offer your professional services to the world in general, you no longer have that luxury. It is no longer about you.

You are offering to take on responsibility for managing a client’s interests (to the extent that they are imperilled by the language barrier in the case of translators) and their interests can be threatened by a range of circumstances well outside our ability to predict.

Therefore we will inevitably have to traverse new ground, learn new things and solve new problems and we need to be happy and enthusiastic about that. We need to have the practiced skills and techniques for this journey. We need to have theory and support to carry out those professional duties. We are taking on a chunk of someone’s life and life can be very messy. We need to know what we are doing. When we called ourselves ‘professional’ we claimed at that point to know what we are doing, and if we intend to invoice for our services at that point we must back up that claim.

If this is off-putting to you then you are simply not cut out for professional life. And there are many excipient people in this so-called ‘industry’ with very limited interest in learning and therefore low ability to back up that claim.

That is not what we stand for at CPT. We stand ready to deliver a service in the full knowledge that each job might oblige us to at least consider and analyse and comment on and base action on some unforeseen topic that springs from every field whether health, psychology, politics, culture, values, economics, ethics and so on. A professional translator must grab hold of someone else’s words and perform their work to a defined standard, and they will be dragged by the words and that commitment through everyone of those fields.

And here’s another thing.

I often say ‘It isn’t just about the money. Not everything is about money’. As long as CPT has a sustainable income that allows us to live and develop the business, I am happy to forego income because I stand for some or other principle. Standing for a principle is philosophy. It is doing something for a reason, a reason that you can explain, and which will inevitably be linked to other ideas and all put together they will make up an argument that is the result of philosophical enquiry.

There are people who have been internally damaged by Marxist indoctrination who will characterise ‘Capitalism’ as ‘The pursuit of profit no matter the cost to people or the environment’. This is a ridiculous fever dream that just shows they've never run a business, and it is especially untrue of CPT. Past a particular level of profitability there are other goals I wish to pursue and they are all philosophical. That applies to most people. Everyone strives to make enough money that they can afford to say ‘no’ to people and propositions that offend them for philosophical rather than financial reasons. Everyone wants to define themselves and come to be known for something over and above ‘Did whatever they could to make money’.

There’s money, and then there’s ‘everything else’. The fact that it is everything else without limitation, again means that it is philosophy.

Philosophy means you have no barriers to enquiry. If you treat a mystery or a riddle or a problem or something that makes you uncomfortable as a convenient excuse to not think anymore, but rather permission to submit to some ready-made set of rules or external authority, then you become an automaton, a mechanical tool living an unexamined life in the service of another. If you do this while claiming to be "professional" it is professional negligence.

My criticism here is directed specifically at people who on the one hand dare to call themselves ‘professional’, but who then spend so much time complaining about their income! This is a badly structured idea. It is internally contradictory, if the person has any insight it is also hypocritical. This is the perfect example of how translators spend half their time complaining about the world and the other half creating that world. In what other branch of the ‘professions’ are there people who complain about their income and say with pride that it is beyond their powers to do anything about it?

If you are a professional the solutions to all the things you are complaining about are likely found past those roadblocks, and as a professional you are the very person with the competence to go and find and seize and implement those solutions. It is fear holding most people back, fear that they will find something that will oblige them to change. But if we are charging money for our services we are no longer at liberty to allow our own fears to govern our behaviour. We have temporary custody of someone else’s interests and it is to them that we have a professional duty that must override all our personal fears.

So as we invite the world to bring to us their language barrier problems, as we deliver our services, and as we develop those services and our skills and understanding, we never apologise for being philosophers.

[1] If you are literate in Greek: φιλοσοφ?α ‘Love of wisdom’