Language: 5,000 Year Failed Experiment

There is something which we must be firmly on our guard against, Phaedo. —What? —That we do not become hostile to the word, like someone else becomes a misanthropist. No greater misfortune can befall man.

And both originate in the same way of thinking: the hatred of the word and misanthropy… Wouldn’t it be deplorable, Phaedo… if he, I say, henceforth nourishes the hatred of the word all of his life, and thereby forfeits the truth and knowledge of real things? —That would certainly be sad in connection with God. —We must thus above all beware of, we must never allow the thought to arise in the soul that there is no reliance in words.

The purpose of language is to communicate. How’s it working out for you?

It doesn’t seem to work for me. It rarely if ever has, honestly. Does that give me the right to stamp it as defective for all of humanity? You don’t have to take the baton and strike about it. All of these words are a pretense; to wait and bathe in one’s own violence.

You could protest with some words of your own, but what did you hope to change? Okay, okay, you could debate it’s for thinking, but that’s a whole different conversation… and besides, something already made up my mind, you are enacting what already made up yours… though we could suppose diplomacy isn’t a sham.

With a bit dressing up and a long enough of a table, a small flag with an emblem custom made, each nation of one, one could wonder if we’d soothe these post-language tensions. Though I’m not sure how many negotiations you’ve attended. On the lower totem pole they usually all wind up the same: the same strife, with a bunch of conditionals and contentions unable to relinquish.

Well, let’s say we soothe this over and agree that language isn’t a failed experiment. We’re communicating now. What did you want to communicate?

Maybe we could get deluded and lick each other’s wounds about our identities, perceived failures and even pull out another book that finally cracks the code on the neurosis. But eventually you’ll catch on. To realize the wounds only get bigger the more you attend.

Let’s rewind. We’re communicating and our purpose is… gain, surely. The axiom of a man’s existence, surely: payoff for every action, even the deluded ones. There should be a payoff somewhere. Surely!

When I flip through the conversations of the last ten years I can’t honestly agree there’s ever been a tangible payoff. One could feel momentarily comforted, distracted, soothing the narrative sickness, but it’s always the same day. All of the payoffs happened in the background.

You can share your opinion on the layout of the next city, though did you have anything to add? Could transform it into a story, but there doesn’t seem to be any conflict and resolution other than the innate irony of the medium: the very vehicle of your story is leading you to destruction, and one could war with it through indirect means, like a search for meaning, though that’s the calvary charging toward the cliff it seems.

And you can spend a lot of time on all these Big Books made by Big People so Revered, and leafing through maybe you’ll finally snuggle up against the noumena so alluded… even though that’s antithetical to the definition along with the other five hundred you had to learn. What did it all add up to, do you think?

We could at least share our feelings and values however rigid they’ll remain. Lucky you could be, hearing “I love you,” though one could wonder if others ever tire of these phrases, seeing as it doesn’t fix anything internally. Tightens the knots, lays new tracks to trip over. Some momentary retreat from the irreducible falling and jellyfish stings.

Walking through a Taipei premiere bookstore while lamenting the fall of a “literary culture” back at home I couldn’t help, perusing the titles, but wonder what exactly there was to mourn. Literary culture reveals languages’ wonky emphasis if you think about our fundamental allure, now disfigured, self-help as the harbinger.

Knowledge. It’s knowledge. Or was. Now it’s trivia, or facts with no outlet, and language loves to gorge upon it. Language is for communication, but we only seem to trade in counterfeits, regurgitated and lukewarm maybes with gossip excessively.

But we all definitely, deep down, need some knowledge. A new book of changes. A day beyond smartphones. And such knowledge, though at times transmuted through a book, is often best demonstrated through an invention, perhaps, an engineer’s musings and end results… or a lifestyle. Fundamental shifts of reality only come through knowledge lived to personally witness.

If you cannot harvest new knowledge — if you only have access to nonsense that fuels language, whether bistros or new media, places, festivals, clubs and your ten million dollar condo or hobbies… as long as you forgo the marrow of life and hand it off to our universal system, our Metropolis, you have sentenced yourself.

There is no new knowledge to be had in any city. In all of modern life, for 90% of the participants. Even Suburbia. No book will save you, because you will always live the same, forgoing all alternative experience to learn from. Now we’ll tend to our hyper-tech fields, occluding the horizon where dandelions dance, holding their own scrolls. No, this is our shared deathmarch, language as salve and balm and chloroform. A place to go die.

Language and its illusion that it’ll reveal the next foot forward, or how you could warn ahead, preach the Good Word that we have access to all of these old books and philosophies and other nonsense, forces one to confess (however condemned a philistine), still, it all does not matter. I mean, we apparently have all these books of sages, and we all read and interpret them… how do you think it’s working?

Give me the smelt and forge, and let me build everything again from sand, stones. Maybe then we could have more ridiculous things. However many will say you’re deluded and it all converges toward the supermarket.

“You’re just LARPing.”

Well, I will live in my playground wasteland of one. You’re still welcomed to come along. While waiting, maybe in that isolated null, I will hear another directive from a mischievous deity, or handed a different fruit to unlock the deteriorating mind. Dissolution. Alchemy to renew and brewing.

Who knows. With enough terraforming one could grow a fruit of knowledge that comes with everything you need to know, nothing more. And who knows; with enough gardening and carpentry, stonework and struggle, one could construct an original of the Lyceum. For druids only.

The next Garden of Eden. One’s own tabernacle, and maybe the light that day will finally choke language into its rightful place.

A parasite to wrestle with.

Parasites to establish domain in others. Bending vertebrae by pure resonance.

Commandment.

So no, we don’t communicate. Maybe we once did, but that was a long time ago.

All we have is giving orders or delivering them. Slowly automated by LLMs. And this isn’t something you have a say in. You gave that up as soon as you secured an apartment, entered the world of empty repeat.

But if you pin that as “language,” whatever corpse you could make of it, then it’s working perfectly as intended.