Every age gets the words it deserves. In some cases, the words are not new; the sense in which they are used is. Take a word like ‘optics’. In an earlier time, you would be excused for thinking that it had something to do with eyesight. But in today’s context, we know what it means.
How things look and not how they are. Politicians talk about it, as do business leaders. The act itself may be terrible, but as long as the optics are not bad, who cares?
Other such words abound. Take framing. Or narrative. Or performative. Either perfectly normal words are twisted or rendered into a twisted version of themselves.
The person using it is not being cynical, or not only cynical. They are thinking, genuinely, carefully, about the situation at hand. And yet, something new is at work here. The conversation wears new clothes and reveals a new way of seeing the world.
These are second-order words to describe a reality that is second order. Actually, even ‘second order’ is part of the same vocabulary. The first order of existing is to live life unselfconsciously, without constant self-awareness.
The second order is us looking at us living our lives. They all refer to how our lives are constructed rather than lived. They come from the vantage point of analytical tools, using the vocabulary of critics and theorists trying to see through surface presentations to the machinery underneath.
They sit outside the performance of reality, and from that outside position, they show us what is really happening underneath the performance.
Now everyone is a theorist (and therapist, but that is another article).
The politician no longer just lies. He frames his message so that it lands appropriately. The CEO in crisis doesn’t only manage the damage. Her first concern is the optics. The public figure caught in a scandal doesn’t feel regret.
He rues that he has lost control over the narrative. The second-order perspective has been so thoroughly internalised that it precedes the first-order experience of things. There is no separation between performance and analysis. There is only the performance, now equipped with its own analytical running commentary.
If we look at the world largely through the lens of optics, how does it look? To think about optics is useful when we use it to understand that there can be a gap between what we do and how it is received.
Doing something we think is good does not necessarily translate into it being seen as such. Optics is a way of putting ourselves in other people’s shoes.
But when optics becomes the primary lens through which a situation is understood, the gap inverts. The question of how it looks becomes more important than the question of what it is.
The person who has genuinely harmed someone begins to think about the optics of the harm before they have fully come to terms with the damage they have caused.
Not because they are monsters. But because they have a sophisticated modern vocabulary that makes the second-order question feels like a serious, professional, intelligent, natural question to be asking.
The first-order question, what actually happened, who actually felt what, what is actually owed, begins to seem almost naive by comparison. Almost raw, the product of a simple mind.
This is not the same as lying. The liar is aware of their deceit. The person using second-order language does something else— they skim over the surface of truth and land directly at how it appears and how that appearance can be managed to their advantage. They don’t deny what happened; they just shrug off responsibility by focusing on framing it smartly.
This is why the performative selfaware apology has become such a precise modern art form. It is insincere, but difficult to argue with. It gets every note precisely right. It shows the right proportion of self-deprecation, mixed with a seemingly genuine acknowledgement of harm.
It presents the mistake as an opportunity to learn and correct one’s ways going forward. It makes rejection of the apology difficult, although at one level, it is transparently hollow. There is no feeling beneath the words.
What it forecloses is the possibility of genuinely learning one’s lesson, of being humbled by one’s mistake, of feeling the full weight of the consequences one’s actions have brought about.
Language shapes what is thinkable. When a second-order language becomes our default mode, the reality that it seeks to describe also changes. The map becomes the territory, not by accident but by deliberate intent.
Being concerned with first order reality then feels a little quaint, as if the people asking about this haven’t received the latest memo. They are still operating under the illusion that the first order is where the truth is, that what happened and what was felt and what is owed are the serious questions. The world has moved on; all that matters is not what happened, but how it can be presented.
Perhaps every civilisation develops the vocabulary it most needs. Ours has become astonishingly fluent at talking about representations of reality.
We can analyse a gesture before we have made it, anticipate its reception before anyone has seen it, and prepare the apology before we have committed the offence. Somewhere along the way, we have become experts at observing ourselves living. And we have found the right words for it.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
