Speaking Reality Into Being

rly interesting how in Harry Potter a sign of slavish fear is the inability to name something

— Just Loki (@LokiJulianus) July 15, 2019

“The novella Gulf was quite unusual, for Heinlein or any writer, in its conception and execution. In the November 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction a letter had been published critiquing the…November 1949 issue. As editor John Campbell wrote:

“Generally, a desirable, practically attainable idea, suggested in prophecy, has a chance of forcing itself into reality by its very existence. Like, for example, this particular issue of Astounding Science Fiction.”

“By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all the stars by the breath of His mouth.” Psalms 33:6

“There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities.” Alfred Korzybski, The Manhood of Humanity (1921)

We know, or think we know, that “scientists” have “proven” that every “thing” is made of atoms plus those rather ghostly neutrinos plus electromagnetic radiation as photons and what ever else lives in the “particle zoo” but then they get back to the “Singularity” at the Beginning and 1) flat out concede that they know not what came before, 2) refuse to speculate about “Why?” and 3) by the way, the Universe will “end,” if one can call it an end, in a sort of perfection, the Heat Death of perfect entropy, of all energy spread perfectly evenly, ghostly, throughout all of spacetime.

At the same time, we all experience, every day/hour/minute/second/instant of Planck Time that Will (which doesn’t exist) is involved in every breath we take, the manufacture of the chair I’m sitting in, this amazing ability of mine to pour a cup of coffee–the ability of a pattern and the minutest speck of dust to become a worm, a mouse, a cat, a Man.

Ancient peoples, those ignorant old-timers who didn’t even have cell phones or decent lattes, universally believed in word magic, in words of power, secret words that called forth effects for good or ill.

We’re beyond all that today, of course:

Misgendering can have negative consequences for a transgender person’s self-confidence and overall mental health.

https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/misgendering

It really is “rly interesting how in Harry Potter a sign of slavish fear is the inability to name something”

As the Swiss political theorist Jean-Louis de Lolme put it in his – not uncritical – 1771 book on the English constitution: “Parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman.”

The battle for your mind is fought in words. If they can make you believe in a contradiction and repeat it to others as a sign of belonging, if they can make you believe an absurdity, they can make you do anything.

The “pronoun wars” are not just a sideshow in the present unsettled stew of what to do and how to live. They’re central; if “they” can make you call a woman a man, and a man a woman, they can make you call freedom slavery, and slavery, freedom.