This week I want to talk about an intriguing linguistic obstacle that we have noticed at SCL: namely the difficulty of creating proactive words.
This is an unanticipated obstacle because we all imagine that we proactively engage with the world and therefore would have language to describe our actions, but at SCL we have noticed that this proactive language often goes missing and instead America has an abundance of reactive language.
For example, much of the language pertaining to activism focuses on removing something bad. Americans want to “defund,” “abolish,” or be “anti-” in relation to countless things, and while these actions are necessary in certain cases, these words are clearly in reaction to something considered bad. This is reactionary language and there are limitations to the positive, sustainable, nurturing impact that only using reactionary words and ideas can have.
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If your language elevates reacting then you clearly are not in control of your life. Something that precedes your actions is in control, and now the best thing you can do is no longer continue to follow their orders or adhere to their system. Reacting to something negative may seem like you’re breaking free, but the freedom that one seeks will never occur if you do not have the proactive language to guide your thoughts and actions once you are free from the debilitating force that you needed to react against.
The reactive language needs to be the precursor to the proactive language, yet it often seems like the proactive language never gets created because we are far too consumed with constantly reacting to ethnocidal American practices. The cadence of American life has very little time for intentionally cultivating proactive language, yet at SCL, we know that we cannot solve our society’s problems without proactive words.
This is an intriguing problem and I believe that this problem persists because American society lacks a clear idea of the “good” place or society that we aspire to proactively cultivate.
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The Absence of Goodness
When I have philosophical conversations with people, the conversations often evolve into a discussion about whether I think people are or are not “good,” and people are shocked when I say anything other than “Yes. People are good.”
These conversations morph into a discussion about the “goodness” of people because many people like to believe that people’s inherent goodness will solve our problems. If I am talking about ethnocide and the many troubling aspects of American society, people will often conclude that I believe that people are “bad” and they want to know if I believe that people are “good.”
These conversations about the inherent goodness of people display a bizarre understanding of “goodness,” and I think that believing in inherent goodness impedes our capacity to be proactively good.
If people are inherently good then we are encouraged to have a passive relationship with goodness. Our goodness has now become something that precedes our existence, and exists regardless of one’s efforts. After all, why would we need to create the language for actively engaging in good deeds when there is no need for actively doing good because we are supposedly inherently or already good?
This idea of “inherent goodness” is merely an idea, or delusion, that has no relationship to reality. It is a goodness that is unprovable and does not exist, yet this idea still shapes much of our lives. The notion of inherent goodness clearly has religious roots and implications, but it is also philosophical because it also adheres to the ideas of René Descartes’ “I think therefore I am,” that prioritizes essence ahead of existence.
Taking “I think therefore I am” to its natural logical conclusion, if I merely think I’m good then I’m good. If I think all people are born good, then all people are born good. Reality has now become a distant second to one’s thoughts. These delusions will incline people to believe in an omnipresent goodness that will save the day, and now the primary task of humanity is to simply not be bad.
Psychologically, our minds have been focused more towards not doing bad things because goodness has already been allocated to some entity or force that has already predetermined our goodness.
I have always found this idea of inherent goodness to be incredibly troubling and not comforting at all. Believing myself or others to be good regardless of our actions just seems dangerous to me. So when these conversations morph into a discussion about the goodness of people, I always tell people that I do not believe that people are inherently good and that we are all just people capable of both good and bad things.
Many people find this perspective to be unnerving because they want to believe that themselves and others are “good,” but sometimes the conversation evolves into a discussion about what “good” means and now we have finally reached a place where we can talk about proactive goodness.
For many of us, goodness has an inherent passivity and we prefer to believe that we are already good. With this perspective, there would be no need to create the language for a proactive goodness that you see no need in engaging in.
Cultivating Gardens and Breaking Glasses
When talking about good actions and bad actions, one must be aware that it is far easier to do a bad thing than a good thing.
It is easier to break a glass than it is to make a glass. It is easier to burn down a house than to build a house. And even for simple gestures like saying “Hello,” it is known that people are more inclined to remember the hurtful gestures than the helpful ones. A lot of good work can be undone by a bad action.
The ease of doing bad actions also makes the notion of inherent goodness so problematic. The complex actions of goodness have been replaced by delusions of goodness that can be used to justify a multitude of bad actions. An individual can still be “good” despite their bad actions because of their inherent goodness.
Once we are aware of the ease of doing bad actions and the absurdity of inherent goodness, we can now work to cultivate the language for the proactive good we want to do in the world.
In my book, The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, I coined the word “Eǔtopia” meaning “sustainable, nurturing good place.” At first glance, it is easy to believe that there is no need for this word because we already have “utopia,” but what most people don’t know is that “utopia” means “nonexistent good place.”
A utopia is supposed to be a perfect place that already exists that we may reach one day, but it is not a place that people create, yet the word is a perversion because utopias do not exist. It is a wild goose chase towards an alleged goodness that does not exist, yet the western world has chosen to ignore the fact that it does not exist.
If a good place is unobtainable, we will be less inclined to create words for the place we can never reach. Eǔtopia is a word for a good place that we can create, and now a whole new body of language is necessary to fill this linguistic void.
A simple way of understanding Eǔtopia would be to imagine it as a garden, a garden which can enrich your spirit, soul, and mind. At SCL, we call this spiritually nourishing garden a Geistgarten. Our ethnocidal society’s garden is filled with weeds, but we have given these weeds glamorous names because much of the garden has always been weeds. Being anti-weed is not enough to make a beautiful garden. Once all the weeds have been removed, we need the language and philosophy to proactively cultivate a good place that does exist, because without the language and philosophy the weeds will just grow back and our life will continue to revolve around digging up weeds.
Many wonderful things can grow in a Geistgarten and Eǔtopia, and we look forward to naming a lot of them.