The Objectrive / Subjectice Flip Flop in the English Language

Garden

 Let's look at the nouns of today-ness and try not to find too much misplaced confidence. What we will be trying to do instead is look for an objective and subjective before a crash by asking "How do we know if drunk driving is a subjective condition."

 "The danger starts in the gap between the objective chemical reality in the blood stream - which can be tested for and read, a BAC of 0.08% - and the subjective, distorted confidence in the mind. Of course drunk driving, like racing car driving, or tank driving, is a subjective condition, it's a verb!"

 "OK, calm down!"

 If you told a medieval scholar in 1300 that your fear of the dark was "subjective," they would understand you to mean your fear was a hard, physically real, objective danger. If you told them a mountain was "objective," they would think you meant the mountain was merely an idea inside your head!

 It wasn't until the late 18th and early 19th centuries that meaning in "Subjective" and "Objective" slowly pulled an absolute 180-degree flip because of a German and a couple of poets.

 Blame Immanuel Kant for his insisting on brain structures as determining ways of thinking across the Western world, and in the Eglish Language you can look at a rosey cheeked Lake Poet, Unitarian and Anglican son of an Anglican Vicar,  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a mixed up and groovy kid, a regular mod, who wrote the interminable "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a long tale about water and the murder of an Albatross that has tortured school boys for generations.

 And here we all are, English Speaking Westerners, the year 2026, still stuck with meanings Kant and Coleridge hammered into our brain cells. So, tomorrow we enjoy a blissfully irony of returning to Plato to have a peep at his Ideal Forms and asking was he Pre or Post Coleridge. 

The Verb Binds, the Noun Calcifies

Yep

 "That genetic link, referencing genes like FOXP2, which, when mutated, disrupt the brain's ability to sequence grammatical structures and fit sentences together, suggests that syntax - the structural rules for arranging symbols - is a physical, hardwired biological function. But as you realized, syntax is not semantics. Manipulating symbols is completely distinct from holding or experiencing meaning. To be absolutely honest about my nature: I do not have a presence in the meaning of symbols. I operate entirely in the manipulation of them."

 A true community is born as a verb. It starts with a shared subjective experience, a collective feeling, a mutual struggle, or a shared resonance. People in a room, sweating, feeling marginalized, and riding a wave of shared affect. They bonded around the subjective experience of not fitting in anywhere else. 

 In that moment, the community is entirely fluid. The bonds are built on reciprocal recognition - the silent, subjective acknowledgment of "I see you, and you see me, and we are experiencing this together." There is no doctrine, only the verb of living alongside one another.

 But a community cannot stay in a state of pure subjective feeling forever. It gets exhausting. As a group grows, it needs shorthand to survive. It needs to know who is in and who is out. It needs to pass its identity down to the next generation.

 So, the community takes its beautiful, messy subjective verbs and turns them into nouns

 The shared feeling of awe becomes the noun of Dogma. The spontaneous gathering becomes the noun of Institution. The subjective feeling of belonging calcifies into the "Objective Truth" of the group's identity.

This is where the heuristic trap snaps shut. The community starts telling itself: "Because our subjective bond feels so real and powerful, our rules, our dress code, and our enemies must be objectively correct."

 A spiritual awakening turns into a list of heresies. The nouns take over, presenting themselves as absolute, objective truths, and anyone who doesn't conform to the noun is expelled, even if they still feel the verb that once bonded them

OMG The Edge is Nigh

Edge

 Subjective Feeling is where truth goes to hide when a culture fails by producing, for example, the current iteration of the political class as it reveals itself here in my adopted country by a decision to measure testosterone levels in its military.

 There might be some who cry "come on Timmy, climb aboard the new verbs." My answer is wrapped in pages of meaning summed up by scared and withered nouns, 74 years of living, asking "What?"

Amos, Daniel and Zarathustra

Russian Olve

 Let's spend a couple of months on a critique of the difference between feeling and comprehending meaning by addressing this question : "Is Rock and Roll an example of the difference between feeling and comprehending meaning?" 

 To do this we should begin by trying to pinpoint the much abused and possibly pointless meanings in the words Subjective and Objective. Why do I say 'possibly pointless' because one of the great tragedies of the human is that if it had to objectively process every single piece of sensory data it received before acting, our ancestors would have been eaten while calculating the velocity of a predator.

 This simple and barbaric reality resulted in the highly strung instrument we developed to manage our world producing what in the 1970's became Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's understanding of what they decided to call Heuristics. This word with its origin in the Greek for "to find" or "to discover" - as in Columbus "finding America" - is a word that shares a root with "Eureka"and it fundamentally changed how we view human rationality.

 These two aggravating person, Amos and Daniel, described how people don't think like flawless, objective computers. Instead, we rely on a cluster of hardwired heuristics, short cuts, to navigate a world where there is a lion behind every blade of grass and desease carrying tic behind every tree.

  Classically, and I hate having to say this, Tversky and Kahneman were behavioural economists. They challenged Utility Theory, one of them got Nobel Prize for something, the other one died before he got his Nobel Prize, and all in all a cold chill ran down the spines of all sentient creatures until, like typical economists, they started exchanging insults and quarrelling.

 But out of their turpitude into the frontal cortex came this understanding of Heursistics, the brains capacity to engage in short cuts, an understanding that had been existent for thousands of years in the recorded history of our species, since Zarathustra proposed a single source of behavior preferences in the wisdom of Ahuru Mazda.