When Words Die, Worlds Die

sticks and stones hurt the body but words attack the mind

Conspiracy researcher Meryl Nass, whose long history as a truthmonger includes exposing the anthrax fear-mongering, expressed interest in a post on words. Words matter! In an early video called What Is the Matter?, I quoted from Ursula K. Le Guin’s book of essays, Words Are My Matter. In my YouTube playlist on the nature of ultimate reality, I explore whether words ARE matter, whether ideas and the communication that words symbolize are all that exists. If we are not separate minds housed in separate bodies, all of perception can be a shared illusion of a single Mind. If we approach spirituality with the same rigor as science, it’s a hypothesis that can’t be ruled out by the data, and should therefore be held as an open possibility. To do otherwise and believe dogmatically in the ‘skin-encapsulated ego’ is a religion no different than any other.

Therefore, words matter. Whatever approximation of truth is shared in words determines the ‘operating system’ of our society. Without the words to express a concept, we can’t discuss it or even think about it. Words are like the materials to build a house—if we only have bricks, the range of possibilities is limited. In the same way, all of our imperial languages are vocabularies of conquest. They’re like train tracks that channel our thoughts—which is itself an example of the mechanistic metaphors dominating our imaginations.

In Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken writes in a chapter called Indigene:

Areas of the world that are the most biologically diverse are also the most diverse in language, yet the rate of language decline is greater even than that of species loss. Since the conquest, half of the world’s languages have disappeared. Of the remaining living languages currently in use, more than three thousand are dying. There are today 362 critically endangered bird and animal species and 438 critically endangered languages with fewer than 50 speakers. … At the rate of decline we are now experiencing, half of our living cultural heritage will disappear in a single generation. As cultures disappear at the rate of 30 a year, we find ourselves placing our species’ cultural eggs in fewer and fewer baskets. [93-94]

He writes about the strong bias against a polyglot world (excellent word, polyglot!) and cites anthropologist Wade Davis who:

… argues convincingly that a reductionist view of language, one that views it solely in terms of vocabulary and grammar, misses the point. Language is nothing less than the living expression of a culture, part of what he calls an ethnosphere, ‘the sum total of all the thoughts, dreams, ideals, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the imagination since the dawn of consciousness.’ … Language also represents ‘breathtakingly intricate beauty,’ aesthetic and intellectual wealth contained within the invisible folds of sound. Despite languages’ preciousness, one perishes on average every two weeks. [94]

What Paul sees in the “canon of lingual unity” is a view of indigenous cultures that’s “patronizing, if not simply dismissive.” My book, How to Dismantle an Empire, is about creating what could be called polyglot micro-economies, and I think there’s a similar dismissal of a future that’s small and diverse. ‘Balkanization’ is a one-word argument that ridicules the notion of small-scale sovereignty without the need to engage with it. We can’t imagine the freedoms other cultures took for granted: to develop our own calendar, festivals, numbering system, rites of passage, style of government, religions, education, sports, morals, clothing, music, art, dance, money.

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In another example of words being used to dismiss and demean without an argument, let’s examine this message from the FDA:

Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19 

You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it.

Is there anyone at the FDA who you’ve heard using y’all in their peer-reviewed scientific articles, their prestigious conference addresses, or their well-compensated academic lectures? Why are they adopting this aw shucks, down-home, country slang now? The language of y’all is set against a photo of a blue-scrubbed vet with a horse and a white jacketed doctor examining a spectacled, collared and masked older gentleman.

It contrasts this professionalism to backwater hicks out in the boonies with their crazy superstitions. It ridicules users of ivermectin as ignorant hillbillies from Appalachia or Texas or Trump country. And it does this with a patronizing shoulder nudge, like talking to a kid brother who needs to grow up and stop joshin’ around. As one of the boys, it laughs at these rubes and invites civilized people to do the same.

Never mind those people dying behind the curtain.

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As I’ve recommended in previous episodes, Unlimited Hangout has published an essay called Covid 19—Mass Formation or Mass Atrocity? They talk about how language is used to normalize violence:

A means of distorting reality so as to maintain a system-justifying worldview is to morally disengage. Moral disengagement is a psychological process by which a specific event, such as mass extermination, can be placed outside the boundaries of one’s usual moral frame (Bandura, 1999; Opotow, 1990). A common device for achieving this is sanitizing language (Bandura, 2002; Cohen, 2001). Wrapped in the balm of neutral and forgettable terms, harm is rhetorically cleansed (e.g. Poole, 2007), the reality fails to emotionally register, and indifference is invoked (Passini, 2017). Hence, the banality of evil. Just as sexually assaulting victims with medical equipment was described as “enhanced interrogation” in the War on Terror, so mass killing is disguised using anodyne-sounding medical language for the War on Covid-19™. …

In keeping with the language of atrocity, The Psychology of Totalitarianism describes the carnage of Covid countermeasures in detached and minimizing terms. For example, Desmet uses the military euphemism “collateral damage” to refer to “people who fall victim as a result of the measures” (p. 102) … The victims include those who died in care homes, those who died because of postponed medical treatments, victims of domestic violence (which increased during “lockdown”), and, most tellingly, “people affected by side effects of vaccination” (p. 102). “Side effects.” Those two soothing words are as close as Desmet comes to considering the hundreds of thousands to millions maimed and killed by the so-called Covid-19 “vaccines”.

It’s an odd phrase from Desmet: “people who fall victim” even without the military term of “collateral damage.” Collateral to what? Who was the target? If someone is a victim, who are they a victim of? Who is the perpetrator? People don’t just fall if they’re a victim, they’re pushed. And a side effect means that there’s a main intended effect that was accomplished. What was that with the vaccine?

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But while bland words are used to gloss over atrocities, atrocities are then used to ban the use of words. So Glenn Greenwald explains in Equating Rhetoric with Violence to Blame One’s Political Opponents for Mass Murder Sprees:

All of this, in turn, is based on an even more insidious premise that words do not merely express ideas but are themselves violence. This is the rotted premise, the principle one that is causing more and more people to embrace the virtues of censorship. The idea that having centralized state and corporate authorities ban certain ideas is necessary to keep us safe because those ideas themselves are violent. For people who think this way, there is no difference between expressing an idea and pulling the trigger of a gun because in their worldview, as they themselves say, words are literal violence. Literal violence. 

The past three years have seen the death of words in a way unprecedented in my life. The pockets of uncensored speech have become both small and fractious. I don’t know what this means or where it’s leading. I don’t know who is leading and where.

But I want to end with Blessed Unrest again and the Fuegian people, the Yamana, about whom Darwin said, “I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.” A missionary orphan named Thomas Bridges spent 21 years putting 32,000 of their words into a dictionary before he died; Shakespeare used 20,000 distinct words in his entire collection. It has more verbs than English. These describe subtle nuances of everyday life, from marrying someone selfishly or with impure intent to two people looking at each other, hoping the other will do something that neither wants to do. The word for depression is the same as a crab molting its shell. The word yamana itself means the highest form of life, living, being alive. [92] There are now only two yamana speakers, Paul Hawken reports, and they don’t talk to each other.

I don’t think we have a chance to be fully alive, to become fully ourselves, living in the untethered world of the internet. I can’t explain what I mean by this but I think that one true, deep conversation moves the world forward. Without question the internet can be a place for that but maybe so can meditation. The lockdowns gave us a taste of slowing down, expanding time, having leisurely talks and walks—it wasn’t altogether a bad thing. If it had been intentional, as a way of families, neighborhoods and then communities taking care of each other, it could have revived worlds within world, the intimate worlds that are dying from neglect.

Words are the lifeblood of relationships. When muffled by masks, socially distanced, fully isolated, psychologically manipulated, and turned against each other, words stop flowing from one heart to another. But these worlds are only dormant, underground for the winter. I have no doubt they’ll bloom again, in a profusion that will take our breath away.

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To follow this up, I suggest We Need to Agree to Agree on the principles of real dialogue:

As Ukraine and the Great Reset wreak havoc, we need to share a purpose, a process to separate truth from lies, and a plan. And perhaps, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, we need to consider six impossible things before breakfast. I look at things I never thought I'd question, like climate change and Elie Weisel. I debate good vs evil, big vs small, Franklin vs Hamilton, and Trump vs no one. And I wonder how to bring together the dozen journalists left who aren't deluded: Matthew Ehret, Robert Malone, Aaron Mate, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand.

and an older, fun one on Matt Taibbi and Russell Brand looking out how to NOT be manipulated by journalism, on which Matt is doing some excellent recent work:

I respond to Russell Brand's Under the Skin interview of Matt--two of my favorite people on the planet! I talk about the power of laughter, 'domestic threat agents,' yokel-bashing & the scolding class, trusting Allah but tying your media camel, the sanctity of sinecures, and humility as a spiritual principle. This is a fun commentary on a fun interview between Russell and Matt where the extremes of government actions are seen, not as a sign of strength, but as flailing on their way down.

and this is What Is The Matter? mentioned above with the Ursula K. Le Guin quote:

Responding to Russell Brand's interview of Iain McGilchrist, I discuss time & space, brain hemispheres, love & hate, knowing & not knowing, New Age annoyance, and child prophets. I use a Crow Tarot deck to illustrate infinity and make my pitch for why the crow should represent the Wholly Spirit. Why should doves have all the fun?