Part of my research work explores how ontology (our language structures that define our relationship to the world) builds our societies, and how these invisible architectures often maintain the collective entrapped in predictable social structures that self perpetuate via language. Same seed, same tree… same invisible architectures, same society. Language creates reality, reality creates language, as an endless mirror that keeps us trapped, unless we open up to the evolutionary spark that shifts the whole thing to a whole new set of self-reflecting mirrors.

Many of the ontological structures that we use today carry archaic forms of consciousness (which include violence and domination), and for the most part they carry and duplicate the memes (units of culture) that perpetuate pyramidal collective intelligence, the form of collective intelligence that still prevails in our societies.

We can see some of these many old ontological structures at play in our habit to use substantive words that express a function, a social status or state, rather than essence. Examples:

• the homeless rather than people without a home
• a user in the software world, rather than a person (shall we say some day a person interface rather than a user interface?)
  
• a prisoner rather than an imprisoned person
• an Italian rather than an Italian person
  
• etc

We use generic terms such as the French, the Africans, the geeks, the red necks, the blacks, the WASP, the gays, the Republicans, etc, as social, functional or ethnic classes that we reduce to one of their social attributes.

In every single example above, we put asside the essence to the point it completely escapes our consciousness. We don’t talk about a person, a being, or a human being anymore, which express and acknowledge the subject as its own essence. Our attention gets directed to and diverted by the function, rank or status given to the person by society, by means of social attributes. Seeing the other as a utility, a function, an attribute dehumanizes us. It obliterates our innate capacity to acknowledge and celebrate life as sacred and unalienable.

Today I recommend we don’t much use the word user in the flowplace and in any other piece of software we create, but that we replace it with essence-based words, as a way of acknowledging the sacredness in every corner of our languaging of the world. Person represents definitely one of these words.

For a long time I have trained myself to use words and expressions that acknowledge the sacredness of living beings. A long journey, a long inner education that has no social backup to support it. A journey of creating new social DNA from inward out.

Business as usual 🙂