Watching the ramshackle parade and rickety cart of human civilisation bumping and bumbling along the deep corrugations of this muddy dirt track (of history) that it has never quite managed to effectively transcend, I am struck much less by the cyclical percolation of idiots and tyrants to positions of power than I am that we serially fail to recognise and acknowledge that it is almost an inevitability that such catastrophic ineptitude arrives time and again to haunt our collective doorstep. The selfsame language and (now, by extension) integrated technological communications systems with which we seek to coordinate a well-navigated path through this forest of facts is the cause and sustaining variable in the generally disordered race into irrelevancy that most political and ideological narratives invoke.
The grand irony here is that the language and (other ) symbolic systems we use to communicate and negotiate reality are quite poorly-equipped to the task of either describing the world or of constituting the reflexively cognitive (narrative) systems with which we must inhabit, represent and engage it. In this endless almost but never quite good enough communications tool we find the probable cause for much of the hardship, horror and selfish insecurity and terror the world endures.
It is the enigma of a symbolic system of communication that optimally self-propagates as a function of its failures to communicate, that generates more of itself as a product of difference and distance or tribal and ideological dissonance, that we are yet to successfully resolve. It is an unpalatable resolution most typically avoided (or ignored) because to disentangle the little selves we all come to inhabit through this tool of language and narrative cognition, to improve our collective lot in life or to invoke a sustainable as manageable peace, we must not merely dissassemble the languages and the inadvertently-alienating taxonomies they incur – we must at first disassemble and then reassemble our subjective selves.
It is not a enter world we need, it is a better self and that – being curated in the language and narrative cognition that flies further and faster by dissonance than harmony – is a task that I am uncertain we will ever be ready to successfully negotiate.
Daedelus Kite 