So, I'm working my way through my Watch Later list on YouTube while fleshing out more content for Giant's Bay, I listened in on this video, They Control Humans With Words, from Stefan Molyneux.
It has a message about how governments and philosophers have been using words in a real way to effect things that we usually relegate to magic spells and fantasy worlds. In a way, George Bush used his words to destroy the genetic integrity of generations of Iraqi's. Truman used his words to disintegrate entire cities. Other's use theirs to move gold, food, and guns around, to justify theft and expropriate things for themselves. They cast spells called "Obama-care" or "War on Drugs" and rituals with components based on the elusive "Social Contract" or "Silent Majority". We hope to sometimes ward them away or attempt, impossibly, to reign in these wizards by gathering together in long, straight lines to offer up the names of The Powerful Ones upon scraps of paper to great, hollow cubes of decision. Yet every attempt to do so only grants these wizards more power, because we believe in their magic.
This is kind of a weird cross-over between Fantasy and Philosophy that I never thought of before and it struck a chord with me. Words have power among us social animals, even if they technically work through other mediums. Philosophy only gets more important the grander and more advanced our societies become. Be wary of wordsmiths and slick-tongued wizards, magic isn't real but words carry a great deal of power. A good place to start is by ignoring those who expound philosophies and curiously exclude themselves from its costs while keeping the benefits.
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