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Daniel Schmachtenberger was pointing out that the English language has vastly more nouns than languages from the indigenous tribes it supplanted. In doing so we separate one thing from another and from ourselves. He chooses Tree as an example. We freeze it in a constant form that denies its living nature, the uniqueness of each manifestation of its kind and its connection to the air and the soil and the flora and fauna that lives in and on it.

We need a different lexicon for a different view. Wildness and structure are not isolated states sitting at opposite ends of a spectrum but part of a story where they wind around each other in constant movement, shapeshifting, dissolving and remaking in successive iterations.

We need words that describe a process that doesn't stop, that don't try to tie it down to a specific form but allow for the infinite variety that life throws up and places us in the middle of it.

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Words have power. Some refuse to accept this simple fact. The right combination of words, said in the right way, at the right time, to the right person, can alter the course of history.

I thought the mass adoption of the internet would allow us to use that power to form incredible societies of equity, harmony, and togetherness. Unfortunately its a double edged knife, and the power of words can be used to divide, conquer, and destroy.

Gorgeous speech, you have a wonderful way with words!

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All genocidal and ecocidal outrages are preceded by otherising hate speech.

That is why I take seriously the dark triad behind the 3 Ministers of my NZ government who are writing themselves as the Law in the "Fast Track Approvals Bill" proposal that brought 20,000 onto the streets of Auckland last Saturday in a March for Nature, and mass rally in Wellington and Christchurch against the cuts in civil services and landlord taxes, the assault on the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and the use of Māori language, and the silence, collusion and complicity in current wars.

Tomortow (Wednesday 12th June) there's a confrontation planned outside the Oil and Gas Conference in New Plymouth, as regime change promises a rush of foreign investment into fossil fuel search and extraction in this fragile South Pacific corner of surviving pockets of birdsong in the Empire of Ignorance, Lies and War.

Last week the Luxon government signed a 20 year contract extension giving CRA exclusive and non-transparent but cheap access to 20% of NZs hydropower from the bomb-proof machine hall of the nearly 1MW Manapouri_Power_Station in the remote south end of NZ to smelt Australian bauxite into aluminum ingots... as geopolitical wagons circle around war resources - aluminum, coal, oil&gas, Titanium&Vanadium, Manganese in (mostly continental shelf) Aotearoa-NZ, nickel in Kanaki-New Caledonia..gold and copper in Wedt Papua etc etc. The Nutmeg empires 500 years down the track.

Hate speech towards Nature comes almost daily from the mouth of our Minister for Regional Development the Rt Hon Shane Jones. Ecocide and authoritarianism is in the air. The Falcon circles in a widening gyre.

The good news is these corrupt, manipulated (Geostrategic and plutocratic) and man

ic opportunist excesses, from the minority but surprisingly dominant Coalition parties NZ First (radical right populist) and ACT (Atlas Network), are waking up and energizing resistance based in sanity, community, care,creativity, humanity and ecology.

A new syntax is indeed necessary.

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“We are...lost in a world that doesn’t make sense anymore”.

Yes. This resonates as true.

The social contract that is supposed to bind us all together, in society, through economy, is fundamentally flawed, and failing.

Our sociology of social choosing is incomplete.

Our social narrative of being human in an artificial world that we make for ourselves in which to live, through our technologies, out of the world of Nature into which we all are born, is obsolete.

Our times have changed, but we have not.

The stress points in society are being strained beyond their breaking point by the increasing tension between our out-of-date expectations and our right-for-our-times lived experiences.

“We need to rewild the commons”

Rather, we need to update and upgrade our expectations for what it means to be human in the world at the scale of the 21st Century.

We need to evolve our social narrative, fill out our sociology of social choosing and renegotiate our social contract.

The hard thing is, we need to start with Money. And Finance. And Fiduciary Money as a new kind of global commons, and fiduciary finance as a new point for social activism for holding our institutions of agency and authority to shape the enterprises that shape the technologies that shape the choices that shape the economy that shapes society and our human relationships with ourselves, with each other, with Nature and with the Future as the New Frontier for being human using money on a planetary scale in the 21st Century, and beyond.

Because we have lost our will to hold those institutions accountable for faithfulness in their institutional exercise of institutional power true to their institutional purposes.

And they have lost their way.

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We have lost our ways, so we have lost our will to hold anything that we “benefit” from accountable. It is not so much that things are lopsided and chaotic - surely we have to start somewhere - but the real problem is the attitude towards not embracing change when change is the only thing that is constant.

I wholeheartedly agree with your comment. Especially love the point being stressed about starting with money. As long as humanity survives, there will be corruption. We need to redesign our “ecosystem” (aka “our house”) so that humans’ basic physiological and safety needs are met for the majority.

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Elegant beautiful language, unfortunately in a time of climate collapse, and in a massively overpopulated and overconsuming world. We are now 3,000 times more numerous than were our ecologically balanced and self-sustaining Hunter-Gatherer ancestors, who, when hold-up in their ice-age refugial painted caves and Mammoth bone steppe tents, began the symbolization journey we are on now. Meaning exudes from a direct connection of our lifeways with the natural world and all living things, which explains why now it seems so unmoored and lost in space. We slid down onto our present course when we adopted sedentary agriculture and experienced food surpluses, obviating the migratory ways of our ancestors and giving rise to written language, numbers, and symbolic territory in money as well. My favorite source on this transition is from the late anthropologist/archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, "Before Writing, Vol 1". It's a critically important source for anyone tracing the birth of modern urban societies, and our injudicious embrace of cities and massive competition ridden urban populations that have become our downfall, as we have set about to consume all of the natural resources on our finite planet, and started looking for other planets to consume as well. Given Rachel's marvelous "way with words", the discovery of written language by a little known female archaeologist is a profoundly revealing story worth reading. Thank you, for all of your wonderful writing and efforts in the symbolic realm!

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Thank you for this poetry, Rachel. Ah, the language of violence, the violence in our English Language. I always find curious the "corporate speak" has the ability to deliver cruelty and hierarchy with the most banal of phrasing: "right-sizing," "pecking order," "waterfall structure"... And I still get exasperated at so many leaders' ability, business and political (or are they different still ? lol) to say nothing by saying a lot... Just musing with some personal thoughts and feelings here.

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Wow! Rachel, your essay has captured much of the essence of our global existential predicament in how language interplays with, and is too often in conflict with Nature and its complexity.

As I read it, I was visited by an 'Aha!' in relation to my own critique of Artificial Intelligence as the latest and most powerful form of intellectual alienation from Nature and ourselves.

It is precisely MEANING that makes AI output so empty, no matter how effectively it mimics human expression in language.

As Jeremy Lent put it, we must distinguish between the 'two AIs,' that is, artificial intelligence and ANIMATED intelligence. In several places in your essay, that distinction seems implicit. The Artificial kind of AI, being a mere statistical compilation of words, without reference to lived meaning, is inherently flat and, well, meaningless.

For humans, words have meaning, which is attached to existential realities, and even as meaning is subject to dispute, it is lived meaning embodied in spoken and written words. Artificial compilations of words as in large language models, (and in bureaucratic documents as well) are produced without reference to lived experience, and are therefore quite appropriately labeled artificial. That whole AI process and its fad-like adaptation to more business applications than I care to track, is really just a subset of the societal loss of attachment to and understanding of Nature's Complexity, as you so eloquently express.

Good on you!

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Beautifully tragic and tragically hopeful. I cling to the hope that we could evolve into a society in symbiosis with the world we rely on.

Your thoughts on finding the right language reminded me of Gsndhi’s satyagraha, the divine truth of the universe, of which the way of non violence (ahimsa) is just a part.

I am Christian, so a Hindu or Buddhist could better explain it, but Dr. King saw the truth and necessity of it. Balance, co-existence, and active resistance to violence in a nonviolent way. Anything else leads to mutual self destruction.

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Bravo on expanding your audience, Rachel!

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Beautifully written. If you haven’t read him already, I think you would like Cormac McCarthy.

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I want to smoke what you smoke 😊

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Beautiful wild words.

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