The Word Is Mightier Than The Spear

The Pen is mightier than the Sword; or in ancient terms, the Word is mightier than the Spear. Just imagine the irreversible and massive social revolution that must have taken place with the advent of spoken words and ultimately language in our proto-human ancestors.

With the ability to chant, speak a couple of key words, and then to form concepts, phrases and whole sentences, suddenly the alpha male was no longer the strongest physically or the best hunter, but it was the best speaker. I hate to say it, but the best manipulator. Now you could get food, shelter and sex with the best partners with your ingenuity and your words. This marked the end of the domination of brute strength and physicality, and it was the advent or the precursor to the politician, the general, the businessman, the shaman, and the priest.

The TV never lies - "Breaking News --- Bush: One of the worst disasters to hit the U.S."
There it is right on the old boob tube; has to be true.

When fascism comes to the US, it will be called Patriotism (or simply, the Patriot Act).

Obviously, the power of the word still reigns supreme in our modern society; one only needs to look to a Pope or President or a Donald Trump for perfect examples. The Pope probably couldn’t feed himself if he was starving to death, but he wields control over tens of millions of peoples’ lives and has direct control over a vast wealth that some estimate is the largest fortune in the world. Past examples would include everyone from Khufu, who built the Great Pyramids at Giza, to Hitler to Gandhi. Being physically strong or tough could only take you so far. But being a good speaker, a good bullshitter, as it were, being able to lead others and convince them of the necessity or charity of your cause lead Alexander to conquer the entire known world over two thousand years ago. It is said that Hitler never personally killed anyone. Do you think Khufu ever chiseled or lifted and 80-ton granite stone? Do you think Donald Trump feeds and waters the cows that now produce his Trump-brand steaks?

The birth of language was the event that created the possibility for modern civilization as we know it today, not the birth of agriculture as Jared Diamond posits in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Certainly the birth of agriculture in the Nile River Valley and in Mesopotamia over 15 thousand years ago allowed civilization to explode into the societal structures and religions we all still live with today, but it was language that created the shaman and the pharaoh – two sides of the same coin, who cannot exist one without the other. It all started before the first groups coalesced into the first villages on the Nile and the Tigris/Euphrates. It started with some hunter/gatherers expressing their belief that the good food and shelter was where they thought it was and getting the rest of the tribe to follow them. This would be easy for a Bill Clinton or a Gandhi born twenty-thousand years ago. Once they proved successful a couple of times, they could then utilize the strength and ingenuity of the best hunters and feed the whole tribe. Of course, the priests, shamans, and witch doctors would get on board (so that they could get fed and laid by this new powerful ally), and then the shaman (to serve his own needs) would most certainly endorse this leader as, you guessed it, “having come from the gods.” And thus, you have the birth of the pharaoh, the king, the prophet, religion, government, etc., all in one fell swoop.

At the same time, imagine the power that this suddenly gave to women, who had been relegated to the gathering part of the equation because their child-rearing, submissive bodies could never compete with the strongest alpha males in the hunt for food and shelter or in providing protection to the tribe/family. All of a sudden, women, who certainly have developed the powers of speech beyond any doubt, had just as much power as any man, i.e., Cleopatra. Here, supposedly is a depiction of Cleopatra trying out poison on her former lovers. How many Western women would love to have that power?

It may have taken 20 thousand more years for that power to fully come to fruition, but it’s quite apparent in today’s society, glass ceilings notwithstanding. Think of the power that a modern-day Cleopatra - a femme fatale has over a powerful uber-alpha-male. Anna Nicole Smith comes to mind, i.e., how a 2nd rate stripper from the panhandle of Texas earns $89 Million Dollars - marriage. She did that with her looks, but also with words and the seductive images they convey; not to mention the seductive, perfectly lighted and airbrushed magazine and TV images she appeared in.

Here are the top 10 searches of the New York Times web site in mid-2007:

1. sex

2. immigration

3. Anna Nicole Smith

4. China

5. Global Warming

6. Iraq

7. health

8. India

9. Obama

10. Iran

Not to pick on Anna Nicole Smith, as she is an easy target and admittedly beautiful (or was, sometimes), but the point is that language gave her power on a par with an oil billionaire who probably was in the office at 7:00 am for the better part of 60 years. Of course, to further illustrate my point, on the other side of the equation, this 89-year-old Texas oil billionaire wouldn't have been married to ANS if he wasn't loaded. He got that money by being a capitalist - nothing wrong with that. He has language to thank for it. 20 thousand years ago, the alpha male of his tribe would have used this old guy's ass for a hat while he took ANS out to the woods for a little mating ritual. Now, ironically, the only person who could knock this billionaire, and his heirs, on their asses, is, well, his all-powerful (thanks to him) wife. Can't blame him or her. It's DNA and evolution at work here. And just look at that DNA. Amazing what some peptides can accomplish...


Some scientists say that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon’s co-existed on earth way back when. That is, two different species of proto-humans were on Earth at the same time. It is generally believed that the Neanderthals were an evolutionary cul-de-sac that died out, while Cro-Magnon’s went on to greatness. It is also believed that Neanderthals had not developed the physical apparatus for speech that the Cro-Magnon had, so it is easy to see how their larger size and physical superiority was no match for Cro-Magnon’s ingenuity and deal-making. Nice bush!

Dr. Zaius quote: "Zero humans have the ability to speak."

The memes, or ideas, that were born with early language are still alive and kicking today. Hundreds of millions of people alive today still believe that their religious leaders (alive or dead), their kings, and their Pope still have some sort of god-given superiority – that they were born from gods or at least have some sort of Bat-phone connection to god. This is an idea, a meme, that has been kicking around since the first grunts about who has the right to lead us to food over 20 thousand years ago. Ideas like that aren’t going away any time soon. It’s so basic to our existence that it seems almost genetic, but it’s not. It’s memetic – or driven by the natural selection of ideas over the years. These ideas have existed and flourished throughout mankind not because of their veracity or accuracy but because of their power to survive. Just a like a cancer cell or a super-disease like HIV, a gene or an idea doesn’t have to beneficial to its carrier to survive, it just has to be good at replicating itself, and religion certainly is that. Religion, manifest destiny, god’s chosen people, etc., etc., all grow out of these ideas. They are not true, they are just good at replicating themselves. They do this through meme-complexes. For example, it’s not enough to just claim yourself a Christian (or any other religion). It comes with it an extensive laundry list of memes to which you have to subscribe. People joke about Catholics being cafeteria-style Christians because each person is only able to pick and choose of few of the rules they can handle from the ridiculously long list of rules (memes) handed down from “God’s infallible spokesman on Earth,” the Pope. Included in this list of rules (not just for Catholics, but for any religion) is the ubiquitous rule that all of your children must be raised in the same religion and indoctrinated with the same dogma, generation after generation. It’s not too difficult to see how this meme multiplies throughout the brains of a society generation after generation – 2 practitioner/believers become 4, becomes 8, becomes 16, etc., and that would be if people were only having 4 babies to every couple of parents. Obviously that is not the case since many major religions control the rules of sex and propagation, e.g., no birth control allowed. So 2 meme carriers (parents) are actually creating 6, 8, a dozen new meme carriers – each. It is said that membership of the Mormon religion doubles every 30 years or so, this is not due to converts. This is due to each couple creating 10 new practitioner/believer children meme carriers.

It all started with language. With one great, i.e., effective to his listeners, speech, Hitler sickeningly sent 6 million Jews to die. This is power well beyond even the imagination of any hunter/gatherer, not to mention any primate ancestor of ours.

With one banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” and a speech from an aircraft carrier right off the coast of “oh-so-dangerous” San Diego, our child-President, GW Bush, can send thousands of Americans to die in a foreign country making him and the investors and CEO’s of the corporations that put him into office into rich men.

Ommission Accomplished:

This is the power of words magnified by the so-called Presidential Press-Corps, a bunch of spoon-fed stenographers, lead by The New York Times. This is memes incorporated. This is a Public Relations and Advertising Agency that puts the Hollywood publicity whores and super-agencies to shame.

Do you think that as the American economy goes into a tail-spin Osama and co. (not to mention the other investors in the Carlyle group like the Bushes and Cheneys) are laughing in their mansion in Saudi Arabia and saying, "We knew the Americans would borrow a trillion dollars from the Chinese to come after us. We knew they'd self-destruct if we just put a flame to the powder-keg with 9/11. Do you think the war profiteers in America are saying, "Good job, Osama, thanks for the kick-start."

This is no different than the pharaoh proclaiming he is a god and needs a god-like tomb like a Pyramid that took twenty years and hundreds of thousands of peoples’ deaths to build. And another pyramid for his wife, and another one for his animals, while you're at it. No kidding.

- The pyramids are falling down - figuratively, if not literally.

Every time I turn on a documentary about the Great Pyramids at Giza, I see they roll out some Egyptian expert, some Egyptologist, who tells us that beyond any shadow of a doubt, the Great Pyramids were built by paid workers, not slaves. This is another PR coup and it misses the entire point. The existence of Pharaohs, not to mention all-powerful Kings, Presidents, and a Pope, is the definition of slavery at its most basic essence. It is the deification of one man over thousands or millions of others because he can bullshit his way into it (along wtih his partner, the shaman)

Does it really matter if you call a Pyramid builder a “worker” or a “slave” when he is born, lives his whole life, dies, and is buried in the shadow of the pyramid, when his entire existence is owned and financed by the state, when due to his “social class” he is not allowed any other existence by the powers that be, when he is fed, bathed, housed, and clothed by the state to whom he owes his existence. Is he a slave or a worker paid in coins or food and shelter. He has no choice. The god-king says build, so build it he must. The President says, “Evil-doers,” so war we must.

Language gave us Plato, Gandhi, Mozart, Jefferson, Jack Kerouac, and the Beatles - the ability to conceive and express music, poetry, greatness, freedom, the pursuit of happiness.

- If you want to stop having Hitlers in the world, then stop creating a world that makes Hitlers out of people.
- John Lennon

Amazing, isn't it, that the gods we believe in seem just like the egotistical and all-too-human leaders we have right here on earth. Okay, let's say some big God in the sky did make everything, then why does his tender little ego need me to go to church every Sunday and worship him and constantly scrape and grovel and thank him for doing what he wanted to do anyway. What kind of an asshole is god, anyway? Sounds kind of like Nixon; or, you know, Hitler - some egomaniacal asshole that can't get enough praise to overcome his shitty childhood. That's the god you want to worship? No thanks. More likely, God created man in his own image, and then we returned the favor. And created a god completely like us. And then created leaders that mirrored the god we had created - crazy, egomaniacal, power-hungry, murderous assholes. Funny how that all works. It's the memes again - all connecting the same ideas.

Language and memes gave us Hitler, Alexander, Stalin, the Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, constant non-stop warring in the name of peace, slavery, and religion. Was it worth it? Can we control it? For every E=MC2, there is a Hiroshima. Do we continue to deify these talkers and let them have their way – build more beautiful and pointless monuments to slavery like The “Great” Pyramids, The “Great” Wall of China, World War II, The “Cold” War, etc., or do we gather together and reject bullshit when it is bullshit?

Let's end this tale with a couple of nice quotes to illustrate the power (and misuse) of words. So much for the separation of church and state...

"I believe that God wants me to be President." - GW Bush

"I would like to thank Providence and the Allmighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany." - Adolph Hitler

Heil Bush!