Language, Conceptual Stores, And Mental Health

I have noticed through the decades how many people fail to understand the expressive styles of people from ages long past.

The average man seems to regard such styles as those even as recent as Victorian english as "quaint", at best; often "corny", and even "stupid". That of Shakespeare is indecipherable to most and even modernized interpretations of ancient passages such as Song to Inanna, what is generally considered the world's first poem, in the same ill-considered and ignorant ways.

So I will mention this: men of yore departed from us in two essential ways where language is concerned.

Firstly, they respected language, whereas most of us regard it casually, with disregard, and even dismissal. They understood the power of words; their central importance in the lives of humanity, whereas the contemporary meaner has little to no clue whatsoever. Sadly, it appears he has no desire to learn this most centrally important aspect of human life.

Secondly, men of yore were less beset by conceptual noise - the myriad of ideas swimming about in their heads that lead them astray from a more essential mental bearing. The people of ancient Sumer knew nothing of cell phones and the political idiocies of our contemporary times, such as communism for example. The swamping of men's minds with noise that separates them from essential thought cannot be helped, so far as I can tell. It is an unavoidable consequence of the gaining of new knowledge, for better or worse. As that body of concepts grows, the new knowledge and its attendant thought-volume revolves around the more highly-abstracted, newer ideas perforce because they seem more practically relevant to everyday living. This places distance between the mind of the individual and more basic considerations - ideas that were central to the mental lives of the people of ages past.

The farther back in time one goes, the less "polluted" were the minds of people, simply because the store of human knowledge was smaller.

While in some ways we find advantage in this augmented body of conceptual stores, there is a price to pay, which is precisely the fact that the most basic sense becomes foreign to us. My suspicion is that this presents a deep and abiding problem for humanity and my proof of this lies in the fact that the world of humanity is a hot mess and getting messier, rather than less so.

And that is why I have been writing about the basics, in the effort to at least make available little reminders of the most fundamental notions that SHOULD be serving as anchors for our mental and spiritual health.

We do still find such reminders in places such as in religious texts, but those suffer from serious drawbacks, mostly related to language, it's style and how that style deviates from our contemporary usage. Christian writings, the Bible in particular, is a good example of this. The catastrophic example is well represented in Al Qur'an, which has sown more destruction and misery than any other tome, save perhaps the body that represents communist/socialist/progressive philosophy and attendant thought.

The Christian church attempted, however ham-fistedly, to keep people well anchored through the imposition of their political might upon the mass of humanity under their aegis. This, of course, failed miserably in the end precisely because it was forcefully imposed and not made attractive such that people wanted to maintain virtuous relations with the sacred, rather than toeing a line due to fear of dire punishments, whether in this life or that hereafter.

The Muslims took the Christian model and stepped it up several orders of magnitude in error via sheer viciousness, the results being plain to see in places such as the middle-east, which is a study in human disaster.

An interesting aspect of this mental noise is that it is very effectively employed, consciously or otherwise, as a fog into which politico-social chicanery is injected into the minds of men, leaving them less able to understand the truer nature of what is being presented. This is how the scourges of all modern authoritarian thought and action have been so successfully foisted upon the people of the world since the twentieth century, at the very least. When people are separated from basic sense, they are less able to discern nonsense when presented to them, further leaving them unarmed and consequently unable to repel the assaults of the Tyrant upon their innate rights and liberties. When people do not know better, how can they even be inclined to fight the violation of their individual sovereignty?

Retaining the basics is essential to the health and prosperity of the human race. The depressingly absent health and happiness of men is the direct indicator of just how little we as a race of beings have retained of that basic knowledge. That we are so widely separated from the basics bodes deep ill for humanity's future, which is why my suspicion hovers about the thought that nothing short of reset will save the race of men.

Individuals can think their ways out of this sort of trouble, for illumination is the necessary condition for setting then right once more. But such enlightenment means nothing to men as a body gestalt if sufficient numbers fail to come to sense. By that failure are the good dragged into the pit with the rest, and so it appears to me at this time that reset is the only hope remaining to us; an even so deeply and unforgivingly disruptive of daily life that the choice becomes immediately clear to all but perhaps the most stubbornly dull among us: come to sense now, or have your name stricken from the Book of Life.

That, I fear, is the fate that awaits us because I see just this side of zero possibility of a critical mass of humanity so much as wanting to come to sense, much less making the actual effort to do so.

Perhaps none of it matters, but I cannot help but feel deep sorrow for the innocents, the children mainly, who will pay for the sins of the rest.

Ask yourself where you stand on this issue: do you want to know what is right for all men?; how to live properly amid the throng without destroying them and yourself, or being destroyed by the others... or does it just not matter? To that last question, I have no answers for you, but will suggest you turn your thoughts to those whom you love and regard with fondness and care and then consider the question once more.

Be well, and as always please accept my best wishes.