How To Read Without Getting Triggered

Language runs deeper than ideological camps

Language is not about words and their supposedly direct connection with physical objects. Sure, there are limit cases; but for the most part, that’s not how it works. Language is about connecting to larger thought forms, and sharing a “pointer” to that thought form with others.¹

This means communication depends on our access to these “thoughts in the cloud,” as well as the other person’s access.

When communication succeeds, both people’s use of language more or less connects to the same thought complexes. Keep in mind that this is a holistic affair: we don’t walk around with an Excel sheet in our heads, assigning words to ideas.

Rather, we connect with the thought forms using our whole being—our life experiences, our feelings, our drives, and so on. We don’t read, or listen, only with our dissecting intellect. We read and listen with our hearts, our embodied being, as well. All of that is a process, a movement of the mind.² In that sense, language connects us to the deepest well of our existence.³

This also explains why we can often communicate the same general idea, or “thought form,” using different words and languages. On the flip side, we often totally misunderstand each other even though we are using the exact same words—often without realizing it.

If we are rational and nerdy, that is, dominated by the left-hemisphere and its need for definite closure and unhinged abstraction, our first impulse to clear up any misunderstanding is often to define words. But if we accept the “cloud model” of language, this is a mistake: words don’t carry with them a definition. It’s just not how language works in most cases. When we say something, we don’t “resolve” words to their definition, not even unconsciously. Indeed, if we pay attention to our experience of language for a moment, surely we must realize that we are connecting with something and trying to make that connection accessible to the other person.⁴

Sure, it helps to ask, “what do you mean by that?”—but if the connection to the relevant thought form simply cannot be made by one party, a connection that depends on much deeper things than mere definitions, then communication can only fail, no matter how many definitions we provide.

Different Words, Same Connection

If we accept the model of language I outlined here, then it becomes clear why there are so many emotionally charged misunderstandings, especially when it comes to politics and religion. Essentially, we get triggered and fail to connect to the thought form the other person wants us to connect to.

To give an example, those who feel alienated from the power structure of the Western world use a variety of words to convey their grievances. In the US especially, people like to call what we are living through “communism” and “Marxism.” Others, more often so in Europe, talk about “global capitalism” or “financial capitalism.”

Oftentimes, the different camps use such words to express the same, deep-rooted agony towards a system that can only be described as soul-sucking oppression of all that is True, Good, and Beautiful. And yet, “communism” and “capitalism” have an entirely different meaning as far as dictionaries are concerned.

The reason is that different people with different backgrounds use different words to express their connection to the same thought complex.

As a German, for example, the words “communist” or “Marxist” simply don’t evoke the same terror, the same image of totalitarian oppression, as they do for many Americans. We didn’t have a Red Scare, and for geographic and historical reasons, Cold War rhetoric never reached the same pitch in Europe as it did in America. Marxism is associated in my mind with a bunch of old professors and intellectuals, who, to be honest, always had a certain fascination for me. It’s a milieu I’m familiar with, which makes it hard to turn it into the bogey-man. In fact, one of the teachers I loved most at school was an open Marxist. These were the best history classes I ever had.

The word “communism” always had a stale ring to me, something silly even, having to do with small, authoritarian cult-like groups funded by the Soviets who were completely irrelevant in the West. To the degree they were functional, they were probably infiltrated to the brim with agents from the internal intelligence services. Hardly a danger to freedom and democracy! Stalin’s heirs infiltrating the West in a grand, intergenerational plan to make it part of the Communist International? Please!

Of course, I understand why people often use these words to describe our global apparatchiks and their incompetence, their violent utopianism, insane bureaucracy, and utter disconnect from reality. And I’m not saying my background gives me a better understanding; it might be the opposite. But it is what it is, and therefore I cannot intuitively connect to the “global soul-sucking demonic power grab” thought form using words like “communism” or “Marxism.” Not that I prefer “global capitalism,” but others do—it just comes more natural to them. The important thing is that we connect to the same overall thought form, this elusive thought-feeling-body-cloud that we grasp instantly and intuitively without using any words.

Now, some people use such words to connect to other thought complexes. For instance, many people say “capitalism” not to talk about an insufferable, global, soul-sucking control-freak elite, but about traditional Western culture standing in their way of doing whatever they want while getting free money. On the other hand, some neocon types may use “communist” or “Marxist” to talk about Putin’s Russia that supposedly wants to enslave us all, or about normal people who are just sick of US imperialism and want their tax money spent within their country. Or those who don’t like Big Business calling the shots.

Again, this is not about definitions. It is about the connection to much more far-reaching concepts that are grasped with our whole being. Or not, in which case communication must break down: there is simply no basis then in experience because the thought form in question had never been apprehended before by one of the parties prior to the exchange. Or have you ever tried to explain to someone who deeply believes everything is just fine with our Western governments why some of the WEF drivel about green energy, smart cities, inclusive language, and pandemic responses literally makes your soul cry out in agony and pain?

Another good example for how language works that way are the familiar fist-fights around religion, God, atheism, theology, and so on. Again, it is about “thought-complex experience” rather than fictional word-object relationships. There are people who call themselves atheists who can deeply connect to the metaphysical, and there are “believers” who don’t have the slightest experience of the transcendent. I think I don’t need to flesh out this and other examples; you get the idea.

This dynamic is one of the many reasons why the downfall of the humanities has been such a tragedy. In the great Western literature until about the postwar era, including the classics of antiquity, the transcendent and reason came together. At their best, the humanities had been a way of connecting to the deepest and brightest of thought complexes, and keeping the connection alive even as words and language change. Poetry and more poetic forms of essayism and philosophy are ideal vehicles to bridge the gap between people with very different backgrounds who nevertheless share access to thought forms of the highest order.

These works, and the discussion of them, can touch the well of our existence for those capable of such feats, no matter their superficial preferred political or religious words. When such people come together, and weed out those who connect only to very base, superficial, and shallow thought forms unhinged from truthful experience of the cosmos, no matter on which side they are on, then there is much hope.

I’ll leave you with an optimistic quote from Ernst Jünger:

It is an old mistake that one can infer from the state of language whether a poet is to be expected or not. Language can be in full decay, and a poet can burst forth from it like a lion coming out of the desert.⁵

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1. See my essay: The Confusion Around Language for details.

2. I’m not talking about a Platonic world of forms here. The problems with Platonic thinking as it is often understood is that a) there is too sharp a line between the worlds when in fact they are intertwined and form a whole, and that b) the Platonic world of forms is often imagined as static, dead, and abstract.

3. In the words of Ernst Jünger: “Language is not only like a garden, at whose blossoms and fruits the heir refreshes himself until his highest age; it is also one of the great forms for all goods in general. As light makes the world and its formation visible, so language makes it comprehensible in its innermost being and is indispensable as the key to its treasures and secrets.”

Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang, Klett-Cotta, 2014, p. 96 (Translation via DeepL)

4. The postmodernists have thought about such things in connection with literature and its interpretation. In fact, it appears Derrida and others came close to recognizing that a theory of literature may require a theory of telepathy. However, the postmodernists’ rationalistic view made them ignorant of such things, and so they couldn’t go there. As George P. Hansen put it: “[Derrida’s paper ‘Telepathy’] is a confused hodgepodge of fragments of writings from Freud … It is even more obscure than Derrida’s usual writings.” See George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal, Xlibris, 2001, p. 26 & 380

5. Der Waldgang, p. 34, translation mine.