Examine How You Use Language

Examine How You Use Language

Consider the everyday gendering of speech. Courage doesn’t grow between your legs, but what do we say. That person has a lot of balls. No they don’t. They have a brave heart. Or the name we give to a person having a lack of facial expressivity. It is really Resting Glare Face. But that’s not what we say. What are men told when they are being chastised for being fearful? Don’t be a… But having a vagina (or not) is not a determinant of fortitude. Our casual biases shows up in language all the time. We can go very deeply down this road, and it is extremely relevant, because language is our programming. What are the synonyms for evil? Darkness, blackness…How does this damage Black children? We say, as a matter of course, dark comedy. Of course, we say, that wasn’t my intention to harm you, to demean you. It doesn’t matter. In this work, we focus on impacts.

Let us turn our linguistically sensitive attention to the business of the modern world. When we are getting ready to complete a negotiation, we say we are "closing a deal" but aren’t we really opening it? We say that we have a deadline, but if the project is coming into birth, isn’t it actually a lifeline? When we are victorious, we say we crushed it, but why do we want to crush anything? When we complete a contract, we say we want to execute it, but why don’t we engage it? In contract law, when we obtain the rights to license someone else’s material, we say that we request the right to exploit it. Why exploit? Why not share? We say that we are acquiring intellectual property. Why not esteem wisdom? When we get part of the business in place, we say we’ve locked it down. Why haven’t we liberated it?

Here it is, hidden in plain view, baked into our speech, the everyday language of dominance and disconnection. In this model, our success always comes at someone else’s expense. We talk about profit and loss, about income and expense–but relative to what? If the income on my balance sheet is at someone else’s expense, is it really income? If it is at nature’s expense, is it really income? We’re like cells in a body that don’t know we’re part of a body, each of us wanting to be king. I want it like this! I’m the center! We build a million tiny McMansions, each on a postage stamp of land, each with a swimming pool, each a redundancy, each an island, instead of sharing resources. What that looks like in a body: cancer. Be that body a person, or the earth: cancer. Look at a suburb from high enough up, juxtapose it against an image of a tumor. Not much different.

Both out of place, both arising from a denial of relationship to place. Our calibration is faulty. We are broken scales. Every time we start up our cars we shit in our mother’s mouth. Is that success?

And we are so completely acculturated to the norms of this dissociation we can’t help ourselves. Our best solutions–mindfulness!–are deployed at scale by Facebook, helping engineers to work harder, make Zuckerberg richer, and undermine the stability of global geo-political institutions. Facebook: a surveillance engine disguised as a nest.

Business, capitalism, is the mafia. State-sanctioned. That’s all. It’s very simple. Let’s not pretend. Let’s just tell the truth. Any company with a single bottom line is designed to externalize costs. When corporations were granted personhood, it enshrined in law their lack of accountability for the impacts of their actions. Corporations are by legal design unconstrained in their behavior. All Trump is saying is, Let’s all be criminals like me! Won’t it be great. We’ll just rape and pillage and steal and burn and squander and belittle and crush and disrespect and lie all the time and not be able to tell our lies apart from the truth. And then you can all be stable geniuses like me. You can all have the GREATEST MENTAL HEALTH IN THE WORLD, JUST LIKE ME!