Governments are not their people.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple years about words and the ways that a poverty of language might shape our feelings.

Particularly I’ve been thinking about the valence of nationalities and the way our language might emotionally sort us into one tribal affiliation rather than another.

For example, most of us empathize with and support the Iranian people against their government. But when we say, “the Iranians did X,” we combine those two groups. We lump the people of Iran in with their government. And the Us vs Them immediately feels like Americans vs Iranians.

The same can obviously be said of the Chinese and supporting the people of China while detesting their government.

It’s hard to believe something as emergent as language would be designed to do this. But for whatever reason, it has bubbled up in a way that is far too convenient for powerful governments and far too inconvenient for the people.

My worry is that this lack of vocabulary drives emotions, and those emotions, in turn, drive positions. We then reason backwards to invent arguments to justify positions based on feelings — all while tricking ourselves into thinking we are being logical.

If emotions are truly in the driver’s seat, and the availability of our language affects our emotions, I think it’s incredibly likely that this lack of adequate language could lead us to misidentify who are our friends and who are our enemies.

Of course, you can always be specific and say, “the Iranian government,” but it’s cumbersome and unrealistic to expect that sort of linguistic discipline.

I don’t have a great answer here, but maybe being conscious of it is a start — simply knowing that an American plumber is emotionally pushed, by happenstance of vocabulary, to identify with Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, or the US State Department more than he is to identify with an Iranian plumber.

Governments are not their people. And I think it’s high time we had easy, colloquial language to reflect that.