https://beatschindler.substack.com/p/do-animals-have-__-fill-in-the
The unconventional way to simple
People want to know
“Do animals have belly buttons, blood types, cell walls, conscience, culture, empathy, feelings, free will, humor, language, morals, periods, religion, rights, schools, souls, thoughts, or wants?”
These are genuine inquiries on the internet.
Or as Peter Drucker would have it: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
To understand why that is, you must return to when it all began.
In the wordless world
In the wordless world, words don’t exist for self-evident reasons. This, we all know from personal experience.
In the wordy world
In the wordy world, we use words to describe other words.
- In the wordy world, we have gone from animal to the top of the food chain, the most advanced specie ever, ready for breakfast on Mars, in the most recent 0.0003% of Earth-Time only? Why not earlier?
- How in the world did the wordless manage without us for the first 99.9997% of Earth-Time?
- Why are we here? Why are the wordless absent?
What have words got to do with it?
All kinds of things are being said, depending on who is saying them.
Some say the reason we’re here is our upright walk, disposable thumb, naked skin, wisdom, meteorites, aliens, Cambrian explosion, a bang of some size, genes, memes, or any combination thereof. Others insist the universe is written in math and it is our thinking that got us here, but overlooking math and thinking are words, they are barking up the wrong tree.
“Words become works.” – Seneca
Whether a word happened or not doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that it’s true, and you can’t order people what to believe, the word or the word-user, for beliefs are a question of character and personal preference, to each their own. And I think that is a good thing.
Having hit that milestone time and again, I can assure you, when you change the way you look at words, the world changes.
What’s in it for you
Before you knew your first word, you knew how to make yourself from scratch. After you spoke your first, everything was different not because you were different, but because you now had words. It may have taken years, but the moment it happened was still a surprise to you as well as welcome news to those who had been waiting for just that moment to arrive.
“It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak fairly late. They even consulted a doctor. I can’t say how old I was, but surely no less than three.” – Albert Einstein
That is where your freedom is.
You can simplify your world without having to wait for the world to change first. Instead of asking, “Do animals have words?” you can ask, “Does it have words?” Not only is it a simple question but it also comes with the added benefit of an answer even the word-beginners, also known as children, can understand.
- “Yes!” means it is one of us and we have everything we have a word for.
- “No!” means it is wordless.
“To see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.” – Claude Monet