Art came before language

Prior to narrative, images in caves and cave paintings signaled the start of the Cognitive Revolution, demonstrating our innate need to explore, to grow, and to create. So art came before language.

Words rob things of their intrinsic ambiguity and magic

“Language is best used to lie,” said the late ethnobotanist Terence McKenna. “That is what it is best at. Because it’s a kind of betrayal. It’s an incredible flattening of reality. [Imagine] a child lying in a nursery in a crib and a bird flies into the room and for the child this moving fluttering thing of light and sound is a miracle that has many many dimensions to it. But the child’s mother comes into the room and sees what’s happening and she says it’s a bird, it’s a bird, baby, bird. So what happens is that this irreducible complex of light and motion is changed into a word, and the word is like a little tile and that word is affixed over the bird and now comes the bird and by the time [the child is] 6 years old [he’s] been handed enough of these small tiles that everywhere [he] looks it’s seamless tiling. [He] has a word. This is a chair. This is a bird. That’s the sky. That’s the river. And the word robs the thing of its intrinsic ambiguity and magic, and yet the word is how we communicate to each other about the thing. Now we are speaking about the unspeakable. Let me point that out to those of you who may wander from the subject. So there’s a tension and a paradox there. Reality is most itself in the absence of language, but can only be communicated through language. Therefore language is an enterprise in need of perfection.”

The name that can be named is not the eternal name

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
…”

Laozi (Lao Tzu), in Tao Te Ching Ch. 1, as translated by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English (1972)

Language is philosophically inferior to a study of things themselves

A century earlier than Laozi, Socrates and Plato came to similar conclusions via a more analytical path. Socrates demanded that we look to reality and not words. Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus believed that names arrived from divine origins, making them necessarily correct. Socrates challenged this theory and ultimately rejected the study of language, believing it to be philosophically inferior to a study of things themselves.

In Plato’s work “Cratylus”, Socrates delivers his conclusion to the young Cratylus:

How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect, beyond you and me. But we may admit so much, that the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. No; they must be studied and investigated in themselves.

Names don’t constitute knowledge

Like Socrates and Laozi, The Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman unsurprisingly favored investigations over naming.

In a BBC television interview Feynman said:

And when you know all the names in every language, you know nothing, but absolutely nothing, about the bird. And then [my father and I] would go on and talk about the pecking and the feathers. So I had learned already that names don’t constitute knowledge. Of course that has caused me a certain amount of trouble since because I refuse to learn the name of anything. So when someone comes in and says, “Have you got any explanation for the Fitch-Cronin experiment?” I say, “What’s that?” And he says, “You know – that long-lived k meson that disintegrates into two pi’s.” “Oh, yes, now I know.” But I never know the names of things. What my father forgot to tell me was that knowing the names of things was useful if you want to talk to somebody else – so you can tell them what you are talking about.”

The interviewer then asked, “The basic principle of knowing about something rather than just knowing its name is something that you have stuck to, isn’t it?”

Yes, of course. We have to learn that these are the kinds of disciplines in the field of science that you have to learn – to know when you know and when you don’t know, and what it is you know and what it is you don’t know. You’ve got to be very careful not to confuse yourself.

Meaning depends on use

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, words gain their meaning through use.

“We are engaged with a struggle with language,” he said. “Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953, § 118

“What is the meaning of a word?” Wittgenstein asks in The Blue and Brown Books. “Let us attack this question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of a word; what does the explanation of a word look like?”

He later applied this same investigation to the meaning of sentences. Ultimately what the sentence means thus also depends on its context of use.

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,1953

To allow meaning to emerge, preserve ambiguity

We are meaning making machines. We need to preserve ambiguity in order to allow meaning, we need to engage in the narrative within our lives rather than taking it as a fixed pattern from which we cannot deviate. Above all we need to embrace its ambiguity, the ability to hold us in a [liminal] state is suspension between fantasy and reality to allow meaning to emerge (Snowden, 2018).

Imagination expands the limits of human language, and thus human society

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Wittgenstein

If we sit patiently, however, on the threshold between the unknown and the known and observe, and wait for our curiosity and imagination to awaken to the wonder of the unknown, we will eventually expand the limits of our thought and language, and by consequence the limits of our world.

For what cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

Wittgenstein, 1916

The more we can imagine, the more we can say. And the more we can express, the more creative and fruitful our community.

Stories are fractal — self-similar

At all levels (whether society, community, or family) fractal stories are self-similar (like the branches of a tree) and you often find them in organisations, they generally inherit with variations from strong myth stories or common metaphors (Snowden). Even more metaphorically, your thoughts become a tree of riddles whose branches trail off into the dark (Murakami, 2018).

Humans shape and are shaped by the narrative structures of their existence.

We made language and then it became its own sentient thought form entity, and it is now making us. Since Fisher (1984) anthropologists have used the phrase Homo narrons, rather than Homo sapiens, to describe us. Narrative or Story is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human, it’s a lot bigger than its practitioners (Snowden, 2007).

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein (1914)

Stories have greater agency than individuals

A system is any network that has coherence, a spider’s web, a social network, an ecosystem like a rain forest. An agent is anything that acts within the system.

Now in human systems stories have higher agency than individuals. The stories that we grew up with control the way we think. The differences between us are the entrained patterns of the stories in our societies in which we grew up.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

Wittgenstein, Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, p. 133

Anthropologists do not see agency as just people. This has implications. Stories fundamentally guide-pattern human beings. This is essentially what Terence McKenna meant when he said, “Culture is not your friend”.

The most powerful way to change a society is to change the patterns of its stories, because stories have greater agency in human society. If we change the story we change the community, we change the system.

Through narratives we constitute our social identities

It is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities. All of us come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making. Everything we know is at least in part a result of numerous crosscutting relational storylines in which social actors find or locate themselves (Margaret R. Somers, 1994).

As the separation between self and system is illusory, exploring the behaviors, interactions, and relationships within the system is central. Thus exploring and mining the patterns of stories in the individuals in the community, whether they be personal, familial, communal or cultural, is critical.

Storytelling is a vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances. To reconstitute events in a story is to actively rework them, both in dialogue with others and with one’s own imagination (Rodolfo Maggio, 2014). Storytelling can also function as feedback loops or community care (Nenad Maljković in a comment, 2019).

Narrative allows us to transcend genetic evolution

Narrative was a fundamental defining feature of human intelligence because it allows us to transfer knowledge independently of genetic evolution and imitation appearance.

Niles (1999) offers a more elaborate working of the idea that humans are fundamentally shaped by and shape the narrative structures of their existence. We know that the ability to pass knowledge between humans through story was, and still is a distinguishing feature of human evolution. No longer dependent on genetic change and imitation of parents, abstract knowledge and practical wisdom could be distributed, mutated and blended to speed learning and adaptation. Narrative remains the principle mechanism of learning and knowledge transfer within an organisation (Snowden).

Most of human behavior is shaped by idea exposure

We can consciously reason about which flow of ideas we want to swim in, according to Pentland (2014), but then exposure to those ideas will work to shape our habits and beliefs subconsciously. Exposure, both direct and indirect, is the primary factor in forming both habits and preferences. For political views, spending more time with a crowd that feels comfortable shifts exposure to a different flow of ideas in a way that hardens beliefs and habits.

We all sail in a stream of ideas, ideas that are the examples and stories of the peers who surround us; exposure to this stream shapes our habits and beliefs. We can resist the flow if we try, and even choose a different stream, but most of our behavior is shaped by the ideas to which we are exposed. The idea flow within these streams binds us together into a sort of collective intelligence, one comprised of the shared learning of our peers.

Want to make a lie seem true? Say it again, and again, and again

“Repetition makes things seem more plausible,” says Lynn Hasher, a psychologist at the University of Toronto. “And the effect is likely more powerful when people are tired or distracted by other information.”

Repetition is what makes fake news work, too. It’s also a staple of political propaganda. It’s why “communication specialists” feed politicians and CEOs sound bites that they can say over and over again.

Even Adolf Hitler knew about the technique. “Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.

Joseph Goebbels and Edward Bernays also employed the methods. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) even wrote about the propaganda model for the manufacture of public consent, describing five editorially distorting filters, which are applied to the reporting of news in mass communications media.

When people attempt to assess truth they rely on two things: whether the information jibes with their understanding, and whether it feels familiar. The first condition is logical: People compare new information with what they already know to be true and consider the credibility of both sources (Dreyfuss, 2017). But researchers have found that familiarity can trump rationality—so much so that hearing over and over again that a certain fact is wrong can have a paradoxical effect. It’s so familiar that it starts to feel right (Polage, 2012).

“When you see the fact for the second time it’s much easier to process—you read it more quickly, you understand it more fluently,” says Vanderbilt University psychologist Lisa Fazio. “Our brain interprets that fluency as a signal for something being true”—Whether it’s true or not. In other words, rationality can be hard. It takes work. Your hardworking brain finds comfort running on feeling.

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 464

As with any cognitive bias, the best way not to fall prey to it is to know it exists. If you read something that just feels right, but you don’t know why, take notice. Look into it. Check the data. If that sounds like too much work, well, facts are fun. Facts are fun. Facts are fun. Facts are fun (Dreyfuss, 2017).

Humans pick up new habits after receiving repeated doses of social approval

When multiple exposures show that a new behavior has a good outcome (such as social approval) we are likely to pick up the habit as our own. And depending on how often we activate our slow deliberate reasoning mode and how well we know ourselves, some of us could even circumvent our principles, morals, and beliefs.

For factual beliefs (e.g., “The dinner starts at 7:00 P.M.”), a single exposure from a trusted peer is usually sufficient to convert a person to that belief. In contrast, to change habitual behaviors, preferences, and interests, it usually requires several exposures within a short period of time (Pentland, 2014).

Exposure to the example behaviors of other people predicts human behavior

Idea flow depends upon social learning, according to Pentland (2014), and “indeed, this is why social physics works: Our behavior can be predicted from our exposure to the example behaviors of other people.” In fact, humans rely so much on our ability to learn from the ideas that surround us that some psychologists refer to us as Homo imitans (Meltzoff, 1988). Through social learning we develop a shared set of habits for how to act and respond in many different situations.

Individuals first select an idea flow and then absorb the habits of their chosen group.

Daniel Kahneman recognizes two ways of thinking: one way is a fast, automatic, and largely unconscious mode, and the second way is a slow, rule-based, and largely conscious mode. Fast thinking develops associations among personal experiences and the experiences learned by observing others. In contrast, the slow mode of thinking uses reasoning, combining beliefs in order to reach new conclusions.

In practice, individuals use deliberate thinking to determine which idea flow to which they will expose themselves, and then they use automatic-learning tools to absorb the relevant intuitions and habits of their chosen group (Pentland, 2014).

Changing just one core fact, assumption, or rule, can switch our entire system of beliefs dramatically

One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief. If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely,’ it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Pt II, p. 162

Our individual, conscious system of beliefs is formed by deductions from facts and assumptions. If we change even just one core fact, assumption, or rule, however, then our entire system of beliefs can switch dramatically. Such profound changes often occur when people go through army boot camp or are inducted into religious cults. In such cases, a person’s entire system of beliefs can change in the course of just a few days or weeks (Pentland, 2014).

At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.

Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 1969

Consumer culture, social atomism, and egoism has produced an epidemic of cultural infantilism

Perhaps almost nobody wants to discuss collective beliefs because most adults suffer from cultural infantilism (or neoteny), meaning they assume the role of unthinking children while simultaneously crippling the imagination of the young (Shumaker, 2018). “I find it funny (i.e. weird),” tweets Bob Marshall, an organizational psychotherapist, “that almost nobody wants to discuss the role of collective beliefs and assumptions in organisational effectiveness, productivity, profitability, success, etc.”

Umair Haque’s latest essay “Thanatos and Eros in the 21st Century” strangely echoes Shumaker’s article on “The Personality Crisis”.

In short, if we build a society on Thanatos [the need in us for superiority, for conquest, for primacy], we end up eerily and precisely, with modern day America. In every respect we can think of — from school shootings, to massive deficits of basic things like medicine and retirements, to a rejection of modernity itself, denying kids vaccines and lunches and so forth. It’s every person for themselves. Why should I care about your kids? They’re competitors — and this, our society, is just an arena for brutal, bloody combat. Therefore, everyone should suffer — the one who can take the most suffering wins. And the one who wins is the one who can pull everyone else down the most, hardest, fastest — and climb atop them. Does that sound like a pretty accurate description of what went wrong in America? It’s because Thanatos — aggression, self-preservation, egoism, domination — came to be the only force in society whatsoever.”

Umair Haque, “Thanatos and Eros in the 21st Century”

Another line from Wittgenstein seems fitting.

I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Wittgenstein, as quoted in The Beginning of the End, 2004, by Peter Hershey, p. 109

Through conversations we change the system

A new theory of change according to Dave Snowden is about determining what needs to be done to have more stories like this and less stories like that. It is about combining individual agency with collective intelligence. Trying to change individuals without addressing the system of relationships is a waste of time. It is not only time-consuming and impossible but unethical and unaesthetic. If we desire systemic change we need to facilitate conversations and ethnographic inquiry, more specifically what Snowden calls “self-ethnography”.

Shared cultures can divide groups of people just as much as they unite them

The late comedian George Carlin once said, “I love, love individuals. I hate groups of people.” Over the years he expressed this sentiment in various forms: “I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.” On a separate occasion, he elaborated further:

People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose’. ‘Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you’re really looking.

George Carlin

One of the reasons that groups of people are able to bond together is because of the shared culture that they have created. This culture is essentially an invisible presence that contains knowledge about what a particular group values, how they conduct themselves, and where they want to go (Rana, 2019).

Movements have a culture. Companies have a culture. Families have a culture. It’s the glue that binds us together. It’s what adds context to our discussions, it’s what inspires us when no one is looking, and it’s what moves us to action.

That’s not everything, though. It’s also what divides us. In fact, most cultures are built around distinctions. They highlight what it is about them that is different, and they then use these differences to attack each other.

In large groups, with mature cultures, this is more prevalent than in small groups, with blossoming cultures, which explains George Carlin’s distaste for the former (Rana, 2019).

Friendships are built one conversation and one shared experience at a time

The interesting thing is that individual relationships have a culture, too, and a connection is about nurturing that. And the beauty of a culture between individuals is that it doesn’t have the downside of group cultures.

Bonding with someone is like sharing an “invisible stream of consciousness with each other”.

It’s mostly where the good stuff in a relationship comes from. The intimate secrets. The shared vulnerabilities. The inside jokes.

When forming a friendship with someone, outside of a group setting, you’re creating unspoken rules about your relationship in a dynamic way. One conversation at a time. One shared experience at a time.

Over time, this allows an organic connection to form — whether or not we agree on big issues or small — because every future conversation we have will be defined by the context created by past conversations.

The culture created in a two-way relationship is far more nuanced and open than a culture attached to your identity because of your affiliation to a group. It allows differences to exist without them getting in the way (Rana, 2019).

The magic of a strong relationship lies in creating the right kind of culture.

The creation of art (in its most all-embracing sense) expands our awareness

Paintings on cave walls signaled the beginning of our Cognitive Revolution. The development of language has not only made us human but also allows us to develop collective intelligence (regardless of how often we appear to demonstrate collective ignorance).

And despite all of our ideas and all of our artifacts, in essence everything we have ever created, the inherent limitations of human language has left us living as cave-dwellers, troglodytes to varying degrees, stuck in Plato’s allegorical cave. In the cave, we were born, and in the cave, we still remain.

And what are the most promising tools which have emerged to navigate our way out into the light of clarity, freedom, and autonomy? Through the skilled application of philosophical inquiry and scientific experimentation, and the continuing “perfection” of the development and application of language through narration, and perhaps more importantly through courageous exploratory play, even occasional silliness, and the awakening of wonder and the imagination.

• Banner photo by redcharlie
• Intext photo by Joshua Sortino
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