A world composed of words

Once upon a time humans learned to talk. From that humble beginning, we've created semantic societies. We've fashioned our cultures, politics, social and religious systems with words, and we've used words to shore them up, remodel them and reaffirm them to each other. We've even pinned nature to our semantic structure. The word and concept "tree" has meaning to us, depending on whether it produces fruit or lumber or provides shade in a park. A rock can name just a rock or a chunk of "granite" which has economic value. We encounter very little in our lives that isn't filtered through our semantic system.

Fortunately for our connection to reality, we've traditionally had a foundation to rest our semantic skyscrapers upon. That foundation is that which we produce, often with little or no semantic input. We grow things to eat. We fashion dwellings and tools. We built the things we use. Sure, a chair is only a chair because we design it as a chair and name it such, but even without that, we would fashion something we could sit on, even if it were just flattening out a fallen log.

The problem now is that it takes fewer and fewer people to actually do things, leaving more people to engage in the strictly semantic pursuits, such as business, politics and information. Add to this the technology that allows almost every one of us to communicate instantly and endlessly with everyone else on the planet, and our semantic world is starting to look like a sub atomic quantum vacuum, filled with energy and wildly erratic. The reality is that, left with nothing physically to do, we fill our spaces and our lives with words, explanations of our world and lives in human terms.

Because of all this, we now live in a world where irresponsible, ignorant people can talk their way into positions of power and authority, and once there, they must maintain these positions by a steady stream of verbiage, whether they have something constructive to say or not. The result is that those with genuine information, knowledge and wisdom to share are often drowned out by the vacuous shouts of people whose only goals are self promotion and financial success. Think of the old radio and TV horror called "dead air

The terrorist of talk are not about to stop, so perhaps we can learn to construct personal filters that screen out the semantic noise. If we can't manage that, maybe we'll need to just put our fingers in our ears and stop listening.

Someone please warn me if I'm becoming one of those vacuous noise makers.