Recently, I read the book “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” by Maryanne Wolf. A very good book that made me think of a piece of my philosophy (Maciolekism) I developed long ago. If I were to adapt a religion to build and maintain a modern society, this would be the foundation.

Language In A Community

There are four modes of language:

1. Artistic
2. Common
3. Official
4. Programming code

All four are the same language, but each has increased rules in syntax and grammar.

A healthy community uses all four modes, but sets rules and conditions for when and where each is acceptable. Thus, it is important that each member of a community has a functioning understanding of all the modes of their language.

Community Building With Language

When teenagers bond, they create their own language from a lexicon of shared emotional experiences. Because of their inexperience, these are mostly from modern pop culture; song lyrics and movie quotes. When young parents bond with other young parents, they too develop their own language around shared emotional experiences. Anyone without those experiences is excluded from the group. Not intentionally, but because they do not speak the language.

For an entire community to be healthy and sustainable, all the members must be schooled in the same collection of stories to create a lexicon of shared emotional images. This could be a religious text like the Bible, or classic literary works such as Shakespeare. This will not remove all the spaces between adults and teenagers, or parents and non-parents, but it will create a foundation for all the members of the community to stay connected.

Language Routines For Building Better Communities

People who can read and write are better off than people who cannot.

People who read regularly are generally better at listening and understanding complex issues than people who do not.

People who write regularly, compose letters and essays, are generally better at communicating complex ideas than those who do not.

People who read and write regularly are generally better at problem solving.

Thus, a community benefits when its members have consistent routines of reading and writing throughout their lives.

Art

Art is to the community, the communal mind, what dreams are to the individual mind. A means to process new experiences, both logical and emotional, into a shared language,.. even if we are not fully aware of the experiences we had.

Gossip and Reactions

Over the millennia, men have adapted to be hardwired risk takers, to act on instinct without thinking too much. Which has positive or negative attributes. And women have adapted to be hardwired social calculators and politicians, to read signals and find indirect solutions. Which also has positive and negative attributes.

In our modern society gender roles have melded. Thus, Risk Takers (typically men), should never listen to the gossip of Social Calculators (typically women).

Gossip is the outward processing of social calculations and maneuvering.

Advice and opinions from Social Calculators should be listened to and respected, but not gossip. One of the first things a Risk Taker must learn is to tell the difference between advice, opinion, and gossip. 

The danger is of a Risk Taker reacting to gossip instinctively without knowing where it leads to. Thus, making themselves responsible for something larger than they were ever aware of.

Also, a Social Calculator should never try to understand all the choices and actions of Risk Takers. If a Social Calculator does not like the actions and choices of a Risk Taker, they should work to get them incarcerated, if necessary, or simply leave them be and stay away. Social Calculators should try to only interact with Risk Takers whose behavior they find acceptable.

The danger is of a Social Calculator driving themselves nuts trying to figure out something that even the Risk Taker doesn’t understand, but giving the nature of the environment and evolution, works perfectly.

An example of an overall worst case scenario is of a typical man who instinctively acts on the gossip of a woman, like his mother, and then his wife makes herself crazy trying to read and understand his actions in her calculations.

Social Media

There are three modes of communication in Social Media:

1. Marketing. Either public or private, most social media is marketing. A person posting a picture of their dinner to family and friends is little different from a car company placing an ad in an international magazine. They are both looking for feedback. What is different is the kind of feedback they are looking for.

2. Correspondence. Most of the interaction on social media is actually correspondence; people who are not within the context of the same moment and are trying to communicate across time and space. 

3. Conversation. Conversation requires that all participants are within the context of the same moment in time. Thus, conversation can only exist online in chat-rooms and messaging apps.

Because all of the participants of a Conversation are within the context of the moment they can be very quick and easy with grammar and structure. But, when people try to be that quick and unstructured in replies on social media posts, the meaning almost always gets lost. Correspondence requires that the writer makes the extra effort to ensure the readers understand the context and intention of their reply, because the participants are spread out across time and space.

Social Sprawl

Social Sprawl is just like Urban Sprawl, but with social interactions and behaviors.

The desire to spread out socially and continuously make new friends causes sustainable social structures, with their established mores and norms, to be neglected and deteriorate.

The behaviors needed to make new friends are different from the behaviors needed to maintain old friends.