On issues, problems, the sayable, and the unsayable in public political life

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to Carina Chocano, “Everywhere you look, we’ve downgraded problems into mere ‘issues’,” New York Times, July 18, 2018,

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/magazine/everywhere-you-look-weve-downgraded-real-problems-into-mere-issues.html?comments

In terms I would like to call philosophical, I find it unclear precisely how Chocano understands the issue/problem distinction. But it is clear that problems can be solved and issues are like problems we have because we cannot solve them, or lack the guts to, or are expected not to. This is one way of understanding the theory/practice distinction (which immediately becomes anti-intellectualism: "just do it"), but it is also the place of Sophism (the view that there are no truths, only opinions) in a democracy, or a pseudo-democracy where, in the Internet age more than ever, everything must be discussed, and one must have an opinion about everything, but the really important issues cannot be. They can, interestingly, be theorized or made the object of commentary, but the will to think and the compulsion to form opinions and argue are distinct. Often, it seems, individuals have issues that are psychological problems. These are personal imperfections one ought to attend to, with or without expensive treatments, usually drugs. And many are the situations where one is expected to say, or think, something, but only in accordance with tacit institutional or professional norms, any other statement, which might be more honest and true, being met with great intolerance. It's tempting to conclude that the real problem is that we have a society which wants to be democratic and knows it cannot be.