HOW LANGUAGE MAKES HUMANS DIFFERENT
51 videos • 229 views • by TRYING BEINGS: From Life's Origins to Total Jerks Other’s meditate. Me, I’m into anthro-introspection. My peace of mind comes from remembering what I really am, a human, one of these mid-sized mammals with a twist, a mammal with language which makes us more anxious and delusional than other critters. Watching us humans get tangled up in this relatively new contraption called language is both sobering and slapstick. It fills me with compassion for our kind. Talk about mindful! We’ve got minds full of ideas, talk, voices, past and future, real and imaginary, scolding and tempting all made possible by language. Us or dogs – who has more to worry about? Obviously us mind-chattering humans. And who can come up with easier excuses for ignoring whatever’s worrisome? Us again. Language make us humans the worry warts and bullshit artists we are. It’s great to try to quiet the mind but I think it’s even more important to remember what a human mind is, to take stock of what a rarity we humans are, navigating drunk and disoriented by language. Of course, other critters communicate, but language makes us humans radically different in ways this page explores.