I’m making a worldview that I call the oakframe. I like to make my own words, so feel free to ask what I mean by my words.
I don’t have much time to discuss this further, but I would ask if you choose to continue to advocate for these ideas, that you do it somewhere other than !anarchism.
It seems like you never wanted to have a proper conversation after all. I would have respected you more if you would have told me that right from the get go instead of wasting my time like this.
You claim there is scientific consensus, then you at least should be able to refer to a single scientist or somebody who communicates about science.
When you feel like you are having a bad day, just feel blessed that you dont live in america.
To be clear, ‘we’ are okay with these words because the scientific consensus is that a word’s etymology doesn’t have a strong relationship to the thought it represents.
My thesis is that because people pay so little attention to word etymology in the process of communicating thought, the entire exercise in thought shaping through extensive use of neologism has little actual benefit. My thesis is supported by the existing research on language relativity. I think your project primarily serves to make the speaker more alien to any outside audience and increases the mental effort required in speaking and writing.
You have repeatedly asserted your belief as fact when it is contradicted by science on the subject: the etymology of words have a powerful influence on the thoughts of casual speakers who use them.
Could you be more specific? Are you referring to a specific study or a statement from a scientist? I don’t want to argue on cloudy grounds.
People who use ‘enlighted,’ ‘insight,’ or ‘outlook’ unless they’re poets or wordsmiths aren’t consciously choosing to use vision-based metaphors for knowledge. The prevalence of this metaphor in language is the result of a longstanding historical bias against the blind, but the existence of the words aren’t the primary cause of this bias, they are a symptom. If we could remove social biases against blindness, these words might possibly disappear but more likely remain as linguistic artifacts of a less empathetic time because their actual effect on how we think about blind people is negligible.
Listen… If transferring senses to other contexts are ableist, then it goes much deeper than a critique of light as an analogy for knowledge. Expression like “Listen to your heart.” “I heard that your mother was in town.” “I feel like we are on the same page.” “I can’t stomach it.” “The music wasn’t my taste.” “He had a warmth”. All these expressions transfer senses to other contexts; Would you deem them as ableist? Or is the light analogy for knowledge somehow different from these? Or what is your specific reasoning here? Is there a specific critique you are reffering to? Is this a specific critique from the blind community? You suggest that we use the light analogy because of ableism, could you elaborate on this? Please elaborate your stance, otherwise I’m not going to take this critique seriously.
And even if your critique turns out to be legitimate, that doesn’t change the fact that your critique is hypothetical as of now. You have not linked me to any resources strengthening this claim. You have not reasoned why you have come to this conclusion. You have neither come with an alternative analogy for light as an analogy to knowledge.
I find your casual dismissal of blind people in your brave new words alarming and abhorrent.
This comes out of nowhere. I don’t see how your reasoning implies that “I dismiss blind people”. This comes off like mud throwing than actual fair critique.
and yet chose to expand and reinforce the existing linguistic bias you believe is harmful to them.
I simply entertained the hypothetical critique. I didn’t say I agreed with it. I thought you used it as an example to emphasize your point about that we should scrutinize neologisms, which I agree with.
Based on your belief, I find your lack of interest in supporting heliocentrism disappointing.
I believe in heliocentrism. I challenge your assumption that the word “sunrise” implies that the sun revolves around Earth.
Based on your statements, you do believe it will steer society’s attention away from their value as people,
No, I don’t. We should steer people towards the meaningful and away from the harmful. Towards nature, personal growth, community, solidarity, mutual aid, and so on. Away from materialism, leaders, machine, capitalism, nation states, coldness.
The word radical comes from the Latin radix, meaning root. Thus the saying ‘being radical is grasping from the root’ - treating society’s problems by disrooting their source rather than treating the problem’s symptoms. The word etymology people use today is a symptom of the way people historically thought when the words were invented. Changing the way people think now is much more effectively done by rational argument and demonstrating the effectiveness of new ideas.
This is where we diverge. I believe that the words we are using today are misguiding us into supporting the machine, normalizing nation states, forwarding coldness, support dehumanization, support hierarchies, support robbing of other countries, alienate ourself from nature, alienate ourself from personal growth, disempower us, and yada yada. Our words are not neutral and all words paint our world and how we bond to it.
If we want to bring about lokening of Gaja and our societies, we need to scrutinize our languages in fern to understand how we are being sighsteered.
Before answering you, I’ll have to say that I have to delve a little deeper into the topic and explore the naming further. Especially getting familiar with horizontalism as practiced in Argentina through horizontalidad, and whether there are other conceptions of it. It seems to me that what is different from horizontalidad and my conception is that horizontalidad focus on being a non-ideological, that’s not my appraoch. I focus on an umbrella horizontalism where responsibility of unwellness lokening is put upon each tradition under the umbrella. When I say horizontalism from here on, I refer to umbrella horizontalism.
I’ll edit the post afterwards to share what I need to focus more on.
There are strains of ostensibly ‘anarchist’ movements that attempt to enter the anarchist umbrella, and through consensus among anarchist movements have been rejected. If the umbrella was not important there would not be an incentive for entryists to try and usurp it. De-prioritizing the value of the umbrella leaves it vulnerable to future entryism. Fascists in particular love to copy anarchist aesthetics, and opposing this requires vigilance.
That’s certainly true. Gatekeeping is necessary. I think this gatekeeping should be done from individual traditions. Each tradition should gatekeep it’s own tradition, but they should also challenge other traditions to be consistent with horizontal values.
And as absurd as your example may seem on the surface, it is not unusual in practice. All three are engaged an a morbid game for control for the levers power within a state. In this high stakes contest, the people cannot be said to be honestly represented by any party - they are the chips the players throw into the pot. Anarchism seeks to stop the game, replace it with one that isn’t predicated on casually discarding human lives. Like rival gamblers towards an outsider who has come to upend the card table, the players are more likely to unite in opposition to anarchists than to concede their justice.
That’s true. They powder hierarchies as democracies.
If you’re not currently aware, you may want to read up on the concept of Linguistic Relativity. This is a concept that has been explored by many anarchist adjacent authors including George Orwell, Suzette Haden Elgin, and Sonja Lang.
I am very interested in linguistic relativity. I call my approach language bondframe as in how language bind us to everything that is around us. I have looked into George Orwell, but I don’t know Suzette Haden Elgin nor Sonja Lang. Thank you for recommendations:)
While there may be some correlation between the structure of language and thought, the scientific consensus is that relationship is not strong. Old words primarily carry their modern connotations, and thus any malformed word can be re-purposed by consistent transformative usage. People rarely think of breakfast as the breaking of a fast, for example. More importantly, people who use the word ‘sunrise’ are not more likely to view the word as flat, or the center of the solar system – as its early usage and etymology implies.
I’d say the way we refer to something says something about our relationship to it. I refer to this as the language bondframe.
If I say that I do juggling as a hobby, you would probably think that I do it for entertainment. If I say juggling is one of my masteries, then you would probably think that I practiced juggling actively in the pursuite of becoming a master. If I say that juggling is my growth, then you would think that I did it because I feel growth from doing it. Or that’s how I would view it.
Some words normalize structures of might or romanticize them. Being rich for instance is usually seen as something dezirable. The myth of the rich is that they are wise, well dressed, hard working and deservant of their wealth. This myth makes us think of the rich in a favourable light. Even in a term seemingly unrelated to the rich such as “vitamine rich” the word rich refers to “being abundnat”, but we conceptualize this abundance through the image of the rich. That’s how I view it at least, but it woulnd’t surprise me if I have some blindspots in my reasonings.
I’d claim that a word like sunrise doesn’t imply a flat earth regardless of how the sun moves relative to Gaja, from the earth perspective, the sun does move upwards.
Something I would say about the word sunrise is that it is a poetic word in that clearly shows how it’s composition into the knots “sun” and “rise”, each of these knots has clear images, and the knots are used actively in english in other contexts. The word sunrise is therefore partitionable, has imageclearity and is submerged into the language structure. These qualities strengthen our ability to take guidership for our language in the sense that they increase the general insight into the langauge, increase the word creationability and increase the flexibility of the language. They move the language away away from memorizing towards creativity. This is in contrast to words like “composition”, “components” or “quality”.
Meanwhile new words of the type you are suggesting are subject to increased scrutiny, based on the implied acceptance of the framing that language determines thought. For example your new vocabulary like ‘relight’ and ‘sightsteer’ could be seen as linguistically re-enforcing existing negative biases against blind people or worse intentionally privileging people with sight as more cognitively capable.
And rightfully so. A word should be challenged, regardless of whether it is rooted or sprouted.
I believe as long as we are okay with words like enlighted, insight, outlook, then making words from these knots is fine. It is fine to challenge light as a symbol of knowledge, but then it isn’t about challenging the new word, but challenging submerged structures.
To be clear, I am saying that we as anarchists generally should focus on activities that are likely to further our goals, the ultimate goal being a more just society that collectively respects the importance each of its members’ individuality. I think building alternate vocabularies and languages are less effective means of achieving those goals. Despite that, I also believe your experiments with vocabulary are charming, and if you can absorb my criticism and still find it a worthwhile activity, I hope you continue.
The reason I think language is so important in our struggles is because words steers our attention. By being language aware, we can more effectively control our attention to combat the machine and forward the meaningful.
This is the best way to use a car.
#ZeroCarz
My intention with saying anarchism is being heavily painted is that it is an umbrella term which shouldn’t be the focus of struggle. It’s as absurd as if fascists, democratic socialists and tankies united under a hierarchist ideology. We shouldn’t brand anarchism, but the individual traditions under anarchism. That would strengthen every tradition.
Having a negative aura in itself is fine; We need to oppose that which is bad. And to use a negative aura with solidaric intent is to be celebrated. There is nothing wrong with opposing the machine, opposing patriarchy, opposing transphobia or opposing racism.
Speaking for myself, the negative aura is creating unnecessary friction in my own thinking and makes me more reluctant about talking about it. I know because I have been self identifying as an anarchist for the last 6 years.
You are welcome to self-identify as horizontalist here, but understand that you are not rebranding anarchism, only creating an offshoot identity that signals its willingness to co-exist with the society that structurally must suppress anarchists no matter what term they use to call themselves.
Our goal must not be to increase the amount of people who identify themselves as anarchist or horizontalist, but rather normalize this way of thinking. To make mutual aid common sense. To spread the warmth and samhold of people. To not fear that our humanity is not respected.
Anarchism is inseparable from the concept of choosing to use dysphemism over euphemism, and generally speaking plainly, truthfully, and without guile. While most of the world has moved on to using terms like ‘public relations,’ ‘spin,’ or ‘fair and balanced reporting’ for their self-advocacy, many anarchists embrace the old term ‘propaganda’ to describe their own activity. Anarchism is the opposition to what is destroying the world, and the willingness to use negatively loaded terms in a positive way is effective propaganda.
Feels like an offshoot, but I have made my own word for propaganda :D I like to relight propaganda to sightsteer. To take attention with the goal of changing attitude. This is a word that makes it much more obvious how society steers our sight through advertisements, media and politicians, while at the same time strengthen us to use sightsteer ourselves through chalking, singing and storytelling for instance.
Firstly I’ll just say that the term anarchism is sexy. It makes at least me think about fighting cops, antifascism, throwing molotovs, revolution, covering our face and stuff like that. It’s sexy as fuck. And sexy is very attractive. But we don’t normalize sexy. Sexy draws in a lot of people that want sexy. But in the long term, stability is more attractive at least to most people. Horizontalism goes away from the sexy to the mondane. It’s like meh… It’s boring and normal.
In contrast we should turn might and machine sexy. Relighting the term sate towards beatling, economy towards machine, leaders towards lords and so on. By turning it sexy, we make horizontalism seem far more attractive.
Do you think the, by now century-old, propaganda efforts against anarchism couldn’t be redirected to a new term?
By embracing horizontalism as a lightly painted umbrella term we encourage people to dive deeper into the specific horizontal societal models. It encourages us to commit to a single societal model and explore it’s philosophy and structure.
You would also be distancing yourself from historical and ongoing anarchist struggles and efforts, which I personally think are an important way in which people get to known anarchism in a positive way.
It is true that I would distance myself away from anarchism, but I would also get closer to democratic confederalism which is my focus right now.
Dragging under the same banner is far less important than actually normalizing horizontal way of thinking.
It is important though to be a bit careful about radically redefining a bunch of terminology. Subcultures that do that tend to produce cults.
If you see some red flags, let me know ;)
Also the “circle A” symbol comes from an anarchist Masonic lodge. It is rooted in European culture, but it’s a little more complex than that. It’s also connected to the occult, which includes both orientalist appropriations of Jewish symbolism as well as honest Integrations of traditional Jewish philosophy.
Ah, interesting. Couldn’t find anyting about it on the internet though.
So specific forms of anarchy such as anarchocommunism rightfully places the negation first. You have to keep stepping away from the structures and see whether they are doing what you want, and if (your perception of) communism doesn’t have the answers then you leave communism behind.
I think as long as the societal model is using the negative stance with concent there’s absolutely no issue.
I could see ‘horizontalism’ being warped into a deference to peers - a lynch mob is a horizontal structure, after all. I could see it taken as a prescription to wipe out inequalities like talent or disability. I don’t know if these are fair, but I do know that if horizontalism became the dominant term then 100 years from now there will be people making these complaints. Because it is the nature of words to absorb the felt meaning of what they represent. There is a long list of words for mental disability that are now slurs or slurs old enough to be mere insults because people in the English-speaking world and elsewhere have been trained to feel revulsion at (mental) inability, and no matter how carefully a word is chosen it will absorb that vile intent.
To defend against warping, we need to be authoritative about language. When we see somebody abusing a term, then we should speak loudly and clearly against it. This is what anarchists does all the time. If somebody claims to be anarchist, but use exclusionary and xenophobic language, we would reject them. Or that’s how it should be at least.
In fern to make it easy to defend against warping, we need to make it easy to use our language. Less academic words, more poetic words.
However, I don’t think one person behind a desk imposing a name on dozens of non-white ideological currents based on a western anglophone vibes-based analysis of their supposed shared concepts is a good starting point for reducing white supremacy or dismantling colonial attitudes towards non-white cultures and philosophies. If these currents even have any interest in being grouped together into a single worldwide term, then let them name themselves.
Fair.
I’ll settle with that I’m comfortable with using the term myself.
That would be one of the benefits with this symbols. You can easily combine it with other symbols.
Thank you for the positive response, I’m really glad it resonated with you 😁
Language plants the seeds for independence. Maybe the change doesnt come now, but if it takes roots the change will come slowly but decisively.
anarchism is easier to achieve than you think
we just need to withdraw ourselves from top down structures anf embrace bottom up structures
only a corrupted language stands in our way from realizing that
You are probably right.
The reason why I still posted here is because I believe in the transformative potential of language through the bondframe. It enables us to change how we bond to our world through language, and thus strengthening our change force.
I was originally going to post to philosophy@hexbear.net, but it didn’t work.
At least I should have made some changes to make the article more relevant for this community.
Anyways, it’s fine. It works like a reference for the future.
Ill save the video.
The word nation was made to connect people to the beatling, so for this reason I think it should be weeded out, but I dont know what to replace it with. Im tasting root at the moment. A child born from an syrian and a norwegian parent could then say their roots are of syria and norway. But Im still thinking about whether it makes sense.
Im using words I believe reflect reality better.
Using machine instead of capitalism to emphasize structures of might, and using unwellness instead of problem to emphasize looking at our world as living rather than an engineering project.
I don’t like to use the word might/power when discussing our horizontal influence. Instead I like to distinguish between might and force. Might is to influence from above, whereas force is to influence from below. We can see from this that might and force are opposites, but we also see that we should strive to have force rather than might.
By embracing our force, we move away from authority based influence, towards concent based influence.
Quote from Margaret Killjoy in the video:
There are two sides to this struggle: rapid response and mutual aid. Rapid response networks organize to identify and track ICE vehicles and agents and to disrupt abductions in process. Mutual aid networks organize to get affected people food, medical care, rides, vet visits, company… whatever they need. These are two seperate webs of networks. The mutual aid side is more secretive in its organizing, of course, because it is taking care of the people who cannot leave their homes without being kidnapped… Partly because there’s no central organization, it’s hard to get a sense of the scale of these networks, especially the mutual aid networks. There are tens of thousands of people, at least, being cared for by these networks… When I ask people where all of this came from, the answer was never some specific organization or network or coalition. Organizations, networks, and coalitions are part of this, absolutely. But the core of the resistance is just neighborliness… I can’t emphasize the decentralization of theese networks enough… Decentralizaed networks are harder to inflitrate and harder to destroy. This movement is not leaderless, but leaderful, and there are no few specific people who could be arrested to stop the movement… Noen of this works top-down.
In norwegian we have a word for non-authoritarian leaders, which is called “los”. It comes from somebody who is helping with navigation of ships. I guess it could be translated to guider. You don’t have to listen to the guider, but if they are reckognized as capable, you trust them.
this is what I call dreaming!