I'm going to assume that this is about to become a "language fluidity" discussion and let you guys have at it.
I think that this is a discussion about how human beings are viewed rather than about "language fluidity".
There is much around on these boards and in the media in general about how humans operate in the world as fully autonomous individual entities. In this view, we all as individuals freely make decisions in the world. Lots of things are based on this view.
The UK criminal justice system - when a crime is committed, the court's job is to find out if the individual who is accused has committed the crime and if they have then to punish them for it.
When UK and US soldiers are found to have been torturing people in Afghanistan, the individuals who have committed the torture are thrown out of the military and reported in the paper as being bad apples.
CBT and the growing positive thinking movement very much operate from that stand point.
So that's one way of looking at humans.
There is another - more complex and messy way of looking at humans. In this second way, autonomy exists, of course. People do have responsibility for their actions - but it is more limited. Autonomy isn't, in this view, as perfect as we would all like to think it is.
Autonomy is limited by lots of things. Past experiences, current living conditions, the media, other people in our lives, hopes and dreams.
One of the things that limits our autonomy is our tendency (at least in the US and the UK) to obey authority. Stanley Milgram studied this extensively. He set up experiments where people could be convinced to electrocute complete strangers in spite of them screaming in pain to the point where they would pass out. Most people would do this on the say so of a man in a white coat. A stranger to them who held no actual authority over them and in a situation where the people knew they could walk out at any point. Milgram famously said when being interviewed about his experiment that he reckoned he could staff a Nazi style death camp from any medium sized American town. The experiment was repeated loads of times and the effect of authority on people can be witnessed all over the place.
I hear it talked about most in dog training circles during attempts to console people when they realise that advice they've followed from an "expert" has been psychologically and sometimes also physically abusive toward their much loved companion.
The other factor that limits our autonomy in messy, hard to pin down ways is the effect the environment we live in has on us. Again, there are repeated experiments examining this. Phillip Zimbardo conducted one of the more famous ones. He set up a fake prison at Standford University. He selected a bunch of students - screened them all to make sure that they were psychologically healthy and arbitrarily assigned some of them to the role of prisoners and some to the role of prison guards. They were all fully functioning human beings.
The experiment was due to run for 2 weeks. He had to stop it after just one week because the prisoners were becoming depressed - none of them thought to leave even though they were free to do so at any time. The prison guards were becoming abusive toward the prisoners. This was a radical shift in the normal behaviour of these students who had been selected with the intent of making that sort of outcome unlikely. So - autonomy is likely to be more limited than we might imagine. I remember reading Zimbardo's book a few years ago and talking to people about how it is one of the most frightening things I've ever read. The stuff of nightmares, really. I read a lot of horror but that book was worse than any of it.
Anyway - romantic relationships are a good case to look at. From the moment we are born in the UK and US, we learn that romantic relationships are the pinnacle of connection between human beings. The message is repeated over and over in films, books, on the radio, from our friends and families. We make big deals of weddings. We are endlessly fascinated by people getting together.
People who choose not to engage in romance are seen as weird, suspicious, sad and lonely. The narrative about those people is that they are going to die alone and miserable at the end of a depressingly lonely life. That they miss out on human connection. In fairy tales they are witches. In documentaries they are hoarders who can't get into their own houses for piles of paper. In thrillers they are serial killers.
Not surprisingly almost everybody you meet wants to be in a romantic relationship. Or at least the semblance of it. People will pretend - sometimes for years - that they are still with a partner when in fact the relationship was over years ago. People talk about being in romantic relationships with folk they've never met who live on the other side of the world.
With all of that behind us, it is difficult to imagine that any discussion around romance is taking place from a neutral stand point. So - going back to the 2 fully functioning adults.
If Bob is opening his happy, strong relationship to poly and has done lots of reading about it and approaches Carl who he is friends with and to whom he's been attracted to for some time and suggests they enter into a poly arrangement. Carl - who's been single for ages and who is worried that he'll never meet somebody to share his life with - agrees. He's never heard of poly but Bob knows lots about it and talks about it positively and lends him a book or two that talk positively about it.
Carl is approaching this from a place of fear of being alone. A limited relationship is not at all what he wants. He wants somebody to share his life. His agreement is - at least in part - due to the authority that Bob's superior knowledge gives him and Carl's fear of being alone.
Taking the individualistic view of humans, that's Carl's look out. He's an autonomous, fully functioning adult and able to make his own mistakes and learn from them.
Taking the view that humans aren't as autonomous as we might think, it would have been kinder for Bob to get to know Carl well enough to understand what Carl wants from a relationship and then - as they are friends - help him to find it. Bob could have found his additional relationship with somebody who genuinely wants that sort of relationship.
I see that individualistic view of people as overly simplistic and I see it leading to a tendency for people to have a lack of responsibility for the possible outcomes of their actions. I'm not okay with these things and it isn't how I want to live my life. So I don't.
Complexity is fine with me. Thinking things through is fine too. I surround myself in work and in my personal life with people and situations that support my view of people (myself included) having limited autonomy and the care that needs to be taken as a result of that.
I think that the tendency to see people as individuals existing in a bubble who are responsible only for themselves is a big part of why we see so many really sad tales on here.
So - no. Not really about language differences this time.
IP