I saw this video of Richard Feynman describing the gap between the words we use for things, and the things themselves.
I thought ... "Bingo".
Imagine having a conversation with someone about birds - while they insist that the range of beautiful, flying species must be described as "Bird".
Imagine them becoming violently upset when the French speaker calls it "oiseau". Imagine them becoming combative when the Spanish speaker says "pajaro".
Right-Wing News media, in particular, relies on provoking "culture wars" by manipulating this persistent gap in our realities - the benign space between our various languages and cultural diversities - to inject conflict and fear. FOX Corporate News consumers are daily trained into a zombie state of reality, reflexively confused and threatened by the simple variety of life & nature. Indoctrinated to experience hate and conjure judgement, rather than curiosity. Why? For content. For monetization, of course.
For political control.
Most of us live confidently in our inherited bubbles, with millions of names and labels and hierarchies and taboos and limits running through our minds. Easily excited and made anxious about labels and language ... but if we go deeper - dispense with categories and cheap narrative separations - you earn the opportunity to appreciate what things actually are. What they could be. The fullness of this moment.
Words are human created symbols, which serve to represent something much more complex, in real life. A mind that is too attached to the words, labels and definitions can be distracted by them, and fail to see what IS, in real life. The way way we experience reality is largely dictated by which narratives we've prior accepted.
Narratives taught to us by our families and peer groups, those written in the journalism stories, and perpetuated in official historical narratives.
We must begin to appreciate this invisible frailty of language ...
To do so is also to appreciate the indescribable brilliance of what actually IS. In 2025, it is unacceptable to be so deeply lacking in basic awareness ... to continue using language this poorly.
-Billy
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