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.

Existenialism's Return : Final Lessons from the Carmelite Hermits.

Glad

 You can see and often feel peer pressure determining what a moral act is. 

 Here's another look at Kant's understanding of Morality. It was a structure in our minds which he argued was a part of the way we experienced the world : Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. In most repects Kant's sentence avoids a list of dos and don'ts chipped into stone tablets by a grateful Moses.

 "What happens when your desires, your career, or your survival are in direct conflict with what you think is right."

 "The brainstem registers this moral tension as physical danger, a cheetah in the grass. And what does the organism do when threatened? It flees. We don't just run with our legs, we run with our minds. We use intellectual concepts to execute a psychogenic flight away from the terrifying responsibility of our own freedom."

 Psychogenic means it has an origin in the mind. Those first Carmelite Hermits used their minds to escape the trauma of battle which revealed a reality the rosy tints of society hadn't been prepared for.

 "When you look past the stained glass and medieval romance, the origin of the Carmelite hermits on Mount Carmel in the late 12th century is perhaps the most explicit, large-scale manifestation of psychogenic flight - a collective, desperate retreat to an interstitial haven - in human history. They were the original 'back row' trying to survive the catastrophic moral wreckage of the Crusades."

 The young men who took the cross in Europe - the sons of small baronies, the blacksmiths, the weavers - to Saracen controlled Palestine were fed a massive, top-down propaganda myth by the front-row bishops. They were promised an adventure of pure, chivalric light. They were told that slaughtering the infidel was a holy, non-negotiable duty that would wash away their sins. They left their green valleys with their eyelids raised high, marching to a corporate jingle about glory.

 When the fighting finally petered out or the armies dissolved, some of these men—specifically the ones who would become the first Carmelites—did not go home to their villages. They couldn't. You cannot take a brainstem that has been seared by that level of slaughterhouse reality and just drop it back into the village tavern or the manor house. The identity of the 'Chivalric Knight' or the 'Pious Soldier' was dead.

 "Are you saying they executed a total psychogenic flight. They deserted the social ledger entirely?"

 "Yes."

 "Not much has changed!"

 "We got shops with lots of stuff in them and we still got a back-row."