“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” –Philip K. Dick
“Oregon discovered that Harley, a drug sniffing pot-bellied pig, was very effective both at finding drugs and at getting school children to pay attention to anti-drug messages. But when they tried to get funds from a federal program to train drug sniffing dogs to train other pigs and share their success, the bureaucrats decided the program was to train dogs and not pigs. I settled the problem by declaring Harley a dog.” –Al Gore address to Democratic Leadership Council on GOVERNMENT REFORM
“You live in a prison of words created by soft handed people whose only resource is the twisting of logic. Words are cast by spelling and statutory meanings and rules are all just words. That is the basis of your enslavement. Get clarification; legalese is the language of slavery.” —Mika Rasila
“The map is not the territory.” [The word is not the thing it symbolizes.]” –seminal semanticist Alfred A. Korzybski
“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” –legendary physicist Richard Feynman
“We didn’t see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was.” –Lakota elder Dan, Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog, New World Library, 2002 p. 165
“I was working for The Times [of London] in 1980, and just south of Kabul I picked up a very disturbing story. A group of religious mujahedin fighters had attacked a school because the communist regime had forced girls to be educated alongside boys. So they had bombed the school, murdered the head teacher’s wife and cut off her husband’s head. It was all true. …the [British] Foreign Office complained to the foreign desk that my report gave support to the Russians. [Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban guerrillas were fighting the Russians] …Because Osama bin Laden was [at that time] a good guy, Charles Douglas-Home, then editor of The Times would always insist that Afghan guerrillas were called ‘freedom fighters’ in the headline. There was nothing you couldn’t do with words.” –Robert Fisk: How can the US bomb this tragic people?
Once you’ve named something, Western language habits mean you begin to perceive it as the word you’ve named it rather than what it really is. Since words — including “names” — are by their nature abstract, your now word-defined-and-limited perception becomes static and seriously less complete than the complex dynamic scientifically implied sub-atomic “continuum of events” which is, as Bertrand Russell put it “theoretically more fundamental.” You hope the already existing and evolving differences between the abstract and static word — compared to the dynamic changing reality — don’t matter yet.
Next consider those names and labels that refer to things even more insubstantial than those physical “bodies” you’ve named and come to believe in which, Russell suggests, are “mere constructions.” That is, consider those even more insubstantial things that exist only as concepts, ideas AND WORDS in your mind and nowhere else. At the top of the list of those “even more insubstantial things” are “opinions,” “assumptions,” and most useful but dangerous and insidious of all, “predictions” and other less conscious anticipations of the future. It’s those insubstantial things that you spend most of your time thinking and talking about. –L. Reichard White, June 22, 2014
“The white world puts all the power at the top, Nerburn. … When your people first came to our land they were trying to get away from those people at the top. But they still thought the same, and soon there were new people at the top in the new country. It is just the way you were taught to think.”
“In your churches there is someone at the top. In your schools, too. In your government. In your business. There is always someone at the top and that person has the right to say whether you are good or bad. They own you.
“When you came among us, you couldn’t understand our way. You wanted to find the person at the top. … Your world was made of cages and you thought ours was, too. Even though you hated your cages you believed in them. …
“Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn’t look out, they would make us live in a world of cages, too.” –Lakota elder Dan, Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog, New World Library, 2002, pg.157
L. Reichard White [send him mail] taught physics, designed and built a house, ran for Nevada State Senate, served two terms on the Libertarian National Committee, managed a theater company, etc. For the next few decades, he supported his writing habit by beating casinos at their own games. His hobby, though, is explaining things he wishes someone had explained to him. You can find a few of his other explanations listed here.
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