Language comprises a form of technology to which we are subjected by adults and our cultures. Those who accomplish this subjugation are almost never endowed with mastery of this technology, and, in fact, most of them are slaves. They do not even recognize it as a technology in most cases.

It thus turns out that they confer their slavery upon us, all the while whispering to us of its magical powers. Some of those powers are real, but it is also a self-aggrandizing and mercilessly hungry technology of representational abstraction, which will tend to reduce impossibly sophisticated identities and relationships into crude and easily manipulable tokens.

On the one hand, this is a powerful capacity that can reveal to our awareness features of experience, identity, and relation which would otherwise be nearly impossible to apprehend or relate with. On the other, the process of tokenization carries implicit dangers for which we are unprepared and about which most of us will remain ignorant throughout our lives.

A serious problem here is that the dangers propagate themselves madly at our expense, and are, in a sense, aggressive, domineering, contagious and virulent. Conversely, the aspects that represent undiscovered opportunities are relatively timid, and will tend to obscure themselves from our awareness and the onslaughts their polarity so commonly deploys against them.

For this reason we must each take a deep and personal interest in these matters, so that we can together discover and amend processes which not only inform (or cripple) the character and function of our personal awareness and intelligence, but profoundly impact our social constructs and activity.

The survival-critical functions and character of our relationship with the living planet, the nature and functions of our educational and security infrastructures, and the character and activities our governments depend implicitly upon our relationships with language and knowledge — we can no longer afford to take these relationships for granted. We must accept the challenge of more deeply understanding, amending, and transforming them together… for ourselves, and for all future generations.