A manifesto for freedom of language

"Man makes himself on the basis of conditions he did not make." (Karl Marx)

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There are no rules in he sense of somehow autonomously binding laws. There are rules and there are rules. There are rules as the specific dicta of the politico-economic regimes of persons who deploy social power. There are also rules suchas one finds in a carpenter's shop: tools to compare objects with one another in certain geometical ways. And there are people who try to trick you by saying certain things are what they are not nor can be: autonomously binding laws, which are their rules presented as if they were not theirs. Whose? Nobody's, like the invisible hand, or some cooked up category mistake that deploys power without accountbility, e.g., their God du jour.

There can be no rule that says you have to pay your taxes. What there can be are persons with the power to evict you from your home and shove you out to die by starvation or be killed by being run over by vehicle in the street. They call it a "rule" in their unvoiced hope to trick you into doing what they want you to do without them having to look noxious about it. They don't just want you to do what they want you to do: they want you to thank them for it so they can feel some sort of emotion they like ot feel about themselves. The peremptory discourse of petty power: "Only if you want to!" My perp school teaches: here?

I really pissed some shithead off on the Internet with my principle of "ethics"

My principle of "ethics" is based on empirical good sense: enlightened self-interest. When I made the faux pas of saying it aloud on the Internet, some asshole got all self-righteously offended. My principle:

It was the first part, probably, that got this dude's goat. I forget what really "cool" name this asshole called me but it was something like "hater-of-humanity", "misanthrope", "selfish wretch", or something else highly complmdntary like that. He thought he waa saying I was something bad about me. I heard him saying he was bad news. That probably he wanted me to be nice to him without him having to be nice to me in return. Nice work if you deploy coercive power to harm or even kill me and I lack means to defend myself against you, likely because you or your cronies deprived me of them, asshole. But I would still call 911 if I saw him lying on th side of the road dying, provided that doing so would not put my own wellbeing in jeopardy. I'm not selfish, like selfless people often are.

Let's go to English class, ai[←as in "pain"] teach?

The St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for Pubescent Male Virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks adolts tried to sell me a bill of goods or maybe they just did it without intentionality, which last item is an attribute cinderblocks and other inanimate objects seem not to have. I didn't buy all of it, but they subverted me more than I realized t the time and I'm still on my archeological dig. The rot keeps going deeper like an advanced melanoma. So what didn't I buy? For the one aggregious example: Their slime-trail writing style for us students, what they called "script". In 7th grade for some reason I know not and at a time I also do not remember, I remember having changed to writing all upper case block letters with "caps" just bigger. One of their big bullies: Mister Mike Rentko, a lacrossse coach jockman doing duty for 7th grade English teach, his big stolid body standing hunking over little wimpy little me sitting in my little student desk, tried to intimidate me into submission.

He threatened me that I might get away with it in school but I would "never be able to keep up in college". I speculate the only reason he threated me and did not actually do material harm like flunking me in hisgradebook, was that, as an "A" student I was good PR for his employer. That's "smoking gun" proof they did not completely succeed in colonizing and then destroying my soul like Lieutenant Calley, the war criminal convicted by court-martial for the premeditated killings of 200 to 400 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. (Wikipedia) But I have to give them credit for trying. If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. (Jay Unger)

Further reflection: My wilfully changing from writing the way the other children wrote now looks to me like high-functioning Autistic spectrum behavior. The other kids just wrote: they were part of a process or the process was part of their continuity with their social surround. Their form of writing was like water and they and their teaches (not "my" "teachers"!) were swimming like fishes which are not very "bright" creatures (in the water). But my form of writing was a conscious barrier: Keep out! They were on the other side of something I had chosen to put up to protect myself from them messing around in my soul, like toxic worms burrowing into and rotting the core of an apple, to try to make me be one of them. Suppose one of them had started writing Medieval scribal manuscript style (which also is not "script")? Well none of them ever did, although one of the other intelligent students in the class did at some point start writing like me, and I was too lacking in self-esteem to make something of this possible opportunity to make a connection with another student.

Surprise, 2-legged sheep, the dictionary is not a huge book of laws, one for the use of each word. It's a smörgâsbord: take what you want and if you don't want it throw it away. It's not like in the mess hall where if you take more than you eat it goes to waste; words are not corporeal. And grammar books are not law books. they are pattern books. Use the pattern(s) you like unless you want to make something some other way. Or use a pattern by modifying it. Tther i one rule of communicaiton, and like my principle of ethics, it's not based on mind f*cking, but on rational sself-interest:

If the person you are addrssing acountically receives and semantically decodes what you emitted from your oral (or other) orifice and they "get the messsage", including with your intended emotional valence (sexual seduction, intimidation, rational argumentaiton, whatever...), then whatever you emitted form your oral (or other) orifice is correct. else it is wronng because it failed of its purpose which wa to ommunicate. End if discussion.

The net

Language is what I want ot make of it, and what you want ot make of it (or maybe you pretent you are not?). If we do not want to communicate then it's a free fire zone. If we do want ot communicate then there is a rule: if it fails to commnicate it is wrong; if it succeeds in communcating, it is right. In other words, "right" means succes in achieving intended purpose, "wrong" means failing to achieve intended putpose; there are no priggish "morals" involved. So, in talking with my local garbage collectors I should not be tortruring words from Sophocles and grafting ghetto slang onto them. They won't "get it". But if I speak sentences with simple dictionary words in simple grammatical structures, I can communcate much. The penalty for failure is not getting a bad grade on my report card which will through the capitalist wconomy result in a lifetime of low-prying mind-numbing unskilled labor jobs instead of white-collar slightly less mind numbing jobs. It will result in me not getting what i want from the recipient of the communciations. Immediate feedback and grading by real world performace with no recourse. In communcation, the benefit of the doubt goes to the hearer. If he doens't "get it" assume you failed to give it until proven that he was obstinant, mentally retarded or some oher extenuating circumstance – such as being a teach as St. Paul's School for Boys

Nobody made you read this, right? bmcc.edd@gmail.com