It is by far the most common technology we employ; yet nearly no one has even the most simplistic understandings of its nature, dangers… and the hidden opportunities the dangers preclude our access to. In this sense, we are like children who have discovered a cache of deadly weapons on a world where there are no adults. And these weapons keep going off in our hands, destroying us, our minds, and our world. We call this ‘evil’. Maybe it is. But the lion’s share is basic, unadulterated stupidity in the face of our own technologies. We’re practically made of this; but this is not enough — we are inflamed with hubris about our own intelligence. The coupling of these two forces has been ripping our species and our cultures apart for centuries. And language is deeply involved in this mess.

Language (I here include the extant pools of language-based knowledge) is like a soup of broken intelligence elements. As children, we are thrown headlong into this muck (they call this a gift), and the elements attack us, attempting to form small cohesive units which function, within us and our cultures, almost like intelligences with their own goals. Most of these are insane, since the cohesive identity resultant from these assemblies are not actually intelligent (yet); but they are incredibly dynamic.

Here lies the rub.

Alternately, one might imagine that the little pieces of units are explosive, and there are two basic kinds that tend to assemble themselves within us (and our cultures): The first causes actual explosions (atrocity). When these assemble in and as us successfully, we become… weapons of nonsensical annihilation. The second causes explosions of insight, which do not necessarily preserve their instigators (like those that cause atrocity often do).

So it falls to us to either be the victims of the former or the avatars of the latter; yet in order to proceed intentionally at all, we must first be aware of the basic nature of the situation(s) we find ourselves in, and have some (hopefully insightful) way to explore and relate with them. However crude they may seem superficially, models that give us a conceptual grasp these circumstances can be unexpectedly powerful assets in this situation.