Lingoism



Language is conditioned

We are trapped in Language. Everything that we reason is done in words, humans read reality through words. When we learn to speak, we are conditioned to relate words to reality. Every time we name something we are associating a word to that something; to learn is to associate language to reality. Since the first moment in our lives we start this training; our parents start pronouncing sounds and we learn to associate those sounds with events by repetition and trial and error. We cry we get food, we smile we get rewarded by clapping and smiles, we are named and we get conditioned to respond back to the sound of our name.

Language bipolarizes reality

The act of naming something implies splitting reality in two. 'house' implies non-house, a name implies the complement of such name. Language imposes a complex grid of divisions where things are put into categories so a white house implies all the things that are not houses and are not white. The more words we use to describe something, the finer the grid becomes but such grid is always bipolar: what it is and what it is not.

We confuse what we point at with the pointer

Every time we see something, our brain associates the viewed with a point in the linguistic grid; this happens (due to the earlier conditioning) at the subconscious level and therefore we are not aware of this process. Functionally, the thing seen and the name associated with it are equivalent.

Our thoughts move at the linguistic level. We live in this linguistic world created by us through conditioning. We are not able to differentiate what we name with the name given to it: at the thought level they are the same. However, the named and the name are different.

The linguistic grid is arbitrary

Our culture creates signs and conventions that we learn and condition us. Our linguistic grid is arbitrary and therefore the splitting of reality imposed by language is arbitrary. Reality is not bipolarized by itself; what bipolarizes in arbitrary ways is language.

We confuse the concrete with the abstract

At the linguistic realm, abstract words such as liberty are in the same level as concrete words such as table : they are just nouns. Abstract and concrete words can be exchanged with each other in any sentence and language operates equally on them. Given that we reason in language and the translation from sensed stimuli into words is transparent to us and all nouns are treated equally in language, we end up thinking that linguistic beings that exist in language only are present in reality as well. Freedom, life, energy, justice, goodness, evilness, patriotism, etc. have not concrete existence; they are just arbitrary points in the linguistic grid and have no counterpart in the realm of senses.

Our social life happens at the linguistic level

Our cities are the distillation of our language; our manufactured surroundings mimic our social conventions. We live in an attempt to make real what is imaginary: our language.

Our lives and behaviors are shaped by the symbols and arbitrary linguistic rules we have created; from a simple traffic light to a complex Supreme Court decision.

We have paved nature; covered its chaotic patterns not describable with language with straight lines and boring vanilla volumes like spheres, cubes and pyramids which are the only ones our poor languages can name.

Our manufactured objects have replaceable parts, just like the nouns in our linguistic constructs. Our clocks, computers, washing machines and cars are the only creatures in nature with replaceable components, in contrast to the irreducible quality of the organic.

The way we describe ourselves as part of our communities is bounded to the denaturalizing nature of language. Reductionism is the limitation of our tool to communicate. The purpose of a knife is to dissect and to kill; by applying our linguistic edge to ourselves what we accomplish is social hara-kiri: the dehumanization of society.