Pigs and Pearls

My Social and Political Thought professor back in college used to reiterate a single statement over and over again till the words appeared as pigs in my nightmares. He said, “If you don’t know A, you will not ask about A.”

I encountered this again in another class by the following semester, but this time, I mostly yawned, doodled, and gazed out the classroom window in this Logic class. I think the statement above falls under Tautology (or something) in Propositional Logic. You can refute me, of course, if you majored in Philosophy. My knowledge of Propositional Logic now is as fuzzy as it was many rainy seasons and flash floods ago. All I remember is that there were alphabets, mostly As, Bs, Ss, and Ps (and it matters if the letters were caps or lower), and funny looking brackets and other quaint formulaic symbols. So, as far as I was concerned, I only knew that if you want to P, you go to the CR.

It was either that my Logic professor was utterly boring and ugly or that he wasn’t as nightmarishly redundant as my Social and Political Thought teacher a semester earlier. That, again, or the fact that the only thing I remember from my Logic class was “to know P, you must know not P” and that, if you look closely, is nowhere near “if you don’t know A, you will not ask about A.”

Well, so much for Logic, I majored in communication so the first three paragraphs are just to ‘reach out to you.’

In rhetoric, however (and that’s more up my alley), a tautology is an unnecessary (maybe, unintentional) repetition of meaning by using different words. It is nothing but saying the same thing twice.

Let me give some examples.

If someone can’t teach me (that which he thinks should be taught to me), he must have been teaching the wrong person.

If someone fails to educate me (that which he thinks he should educate me on), he must have been using an ineffective strategy by which to educate me.

If someone fails to convince me right away (that which he is convinced he should convince me on), he is wasting his time.

If someone shares his ideas to what he thinks is an uneducated audience (and the audience is unappreciative), he is wasting his time as well.

If someone shares something that he thinks is of value to somebody else (and the somebody else does not appreciate it), he is casting his pearls to swine.

Pearls and swine don’t mix. Pigs cannot appreciate pearls. Though that sounds derogatory, the thrower of pearls would do well to realize that it’s a huge waste of effort.

There is no such thing as universal audience. Already, there are at least two kinds of audiences: the captive and the captured.

There’s no universal message, either. There are only home truths – such as love, hate, peace, war. But even these are debatable as to the level of discomforting they render just so they can be acknowledged.

That is why epithets, platitudes, grandstanding motherhood statements, as well as rote dogma are just quotable quotes because often they are not immediately verifiable on the ground, and suffer the handicap of the audience variable.

Which goes without saying that pigs and pearls may not mix because pigs have no way of knowing that pearls are the precious calcification of oyster saliva which remains deposited in concentric layers over a period of time – and all that jazz.

So, if a pig does not know pearl, it will not ask about pearl.