The sickness of Earth requires us to become more radical. Because when we see that the system is unable to regulate itself to take care of Earth, it shows that the system doesnt work. The foundations has to change. The discussion has to be, how did the system lead us here? And how can we rebuild society from a healthy foundation?
Being radical is necessary.
But we are not radical in our language. Even those who conciders themselves radicals are very conservative with their word usage.
In particular, we keep on using words from academia, capitalism and classical left wing think tanks. The communist will talk about the borgoisie and proletariat - The climate activists will talk about co2 footprint, the consumer and overconsumption - The academia frames everything in terms of problems and solutions.
We need to examine the words we use, and allow ourselves to relight our language towards a remediated language. Where we stop being part of the machine, and start being part of the global networks of life in Earth.
Because without the willingness of changing your language, you show unwillingness to be the change you want to see.
In this spirit, I have made the thinktank oakism. Founded on 5 frames.
Cohold ٨٨ - To help those who needs it. Allmen ٨ - Let humans be in center of power, not grippers. Degrip 🪰 - To prevent grip. Nurture 🌻 To grow ourselves and our peers. Colife 🐝 To live with, not against nature and our peers.
Oakism is an approach to remediate Earth. To concisely pinpoint attitudes that remediates, and also makes it very visual. Because humans has easier to grasp words when they are visual.
- I know this post is kind of a mess, but I just wanted to post something.
It was a bit of a serious critique, but I’m glad you took it in stride. It wasn’t meant to be antagonistic.
To your point about academic words, it’s not that I don’t think we should critique them, it’s that it’s not a “language” for the common people. That’s why I mentioned the need for science communicators, of which there is a current deficit. If you changed or removed that academic language apart from them, you’d lose a lot of vital nuance.
We should absolutely be conscientious of the way we talk and what we’re saying, but I don’t really see a need or benefit to inventing our own terminology or trying to force a shift in the current terms, since that necessarily creates out-groups, and we need to be as inclusive as possible when it comes to solving the global crisis we face (i.e. this problem is everyone’s to solve).
What we need are ambassadors who can translate for common people. There’s a lot of bad actors who take advantage of people’s ignorance and utilize equivocation to their selfish ends, and if we can demystify the data, fewer people would be taken in by those charlatans.
“critique”
Don’t worry about that. I’m kind of asking for it when I’m such an language anarchist.
“Demystify”
To put it bluntly, the gripist attitude is why we are where we are today.
Our obsession with control over everything, to have a system that takes care of us so that we don’t need to understand the world. The gripist attitude has alienated us from everything and is the reason why we don’t stop the poisoning of Earth.
But a science communicator could never say that because it is outside the neutrality paradigm. Because nothing can be political, even when being political is the only way to make the message clear.
You clearly don’t listen to the same science communicators I listen to. 😆
I recommend folks like Forrest Valkai, Erika “Gutsick Gibbon,” and Dave Farina (AKA Professor Dave), to name a few. They have no qualms about making science personal and pointing out the bad actors and social issues that stem from disinformation.
Ill check them out then, thanks for tip;)