Our cultures have strange problems with language where labels, models and tropes become reality in our minds. But reality is not like our tropes. One cannot, for example, ‘be’ some label. There is, truly, no written ‘Book of Supposed To’, that actually goes with reality or even the human branches of it — yet each culture has many such books, some of which they may demand are holy. These books kill people. They kill places. They are not what they advertise themselves to be.

Our vulnerabilities emerge most pointedly in two specific errors whose ubiquity cause them to largely replace the substrates of consciousness that might form the necessary underpinnings of intelligence. In such a state, we are denied the intelligence promised by the tools we were given to develop and, indeed, guarantee it. But there is rarely any internally obvious signal of this transition, whether it occur in the lives of individuals or collectives of any scale. Even where there is it will be obscured by the reigning pretenders to consciousness and intelligence in the person or collective in question.

The first example is the exchange of a model, description or narrative for one’s direct apprehension of or experience in reality. This move flattens an inordinately complex set of circumstances, relationships and temporalizations into a model, and declares this model accurate enough to ‘be the truth’. Usually these models are incredibly crude to begin with, and have somehow acquired profound authority due in part to their structural relationship with the minds and situations involved. This quality of the fierce demand that a description be taken as reality is a sign that we are probably in the presence of a peculiar form of cognitive threat: an idea wants to become the real, in and as us. Well, that’s possible. Inside humans and our cultures, this gambit often succeeds, and people begin to not only think through the filter of the incredibly crude model… they see with it, too. In the sense of seeing ‘what things and beings are and mean’ within themselves. This is a catastrophic danger for reasons I must hope become obvious upon reflection.

The second example is when we collapse something complex into something flat, throwing away the complexity. One can imagine a vast system of interpenetrating meanings and domains of meaning and identity, suddenly collapsing down to one. For example, ‘The left brain is where language happens’, or, ‘Only Republicans are real Americans’. A complex symmetry may produce a flat reflection through opacity and transparency if placed between a light source and a plane. If the plane moves, or if the symmetry moves, or if they both move, the shadow changes. But our collapsings are often not even of this type, but another which is vastly more crude and confusion-generating — and even if they were this related to what they purport to adequately or even universally represent… they would not be sufficient substitutes. The short version is that they can be used as heuristic toys but not as replacements for or descriptions of reality.

Why would we give our children language without protecting them from these two deadly dangers which destroy more lives than probably any other single threat we may throw money, effort and attention at?

How many of our deadliest problems might never even arise if we had accomplished a clear and developing understanding of these issues in our own lives and cultures?

Language is a result of concentrated cognitive representation. This is far more deadly than it is powerful when its implicit dangers are neither announced nor understood. It seems to me that representational intelligence is the single most dangerous force on Earth, for it’s the only one that is at the root cause of nearly every horrific atrocity that has ever emerged from the behavior of our species. And if you say, no, it is emotion… I will say… of what is emotion made? For is it not reactions to cognitive representations? Yes, I thought perhaps it might be thus.