On the “worst inventions of mankind”…

Recently, there has been a flurry of essays and lists naming the worst tools and ideas of humanity. This seems to be a cyclical thing, periodically popping up in bursts from all directions and listing all sorts of things, though notably never the driver behind bad inventing. There are some constants. Farming almost always makes the list. Most listers agree that gasoline-powered transport is bad. Recently, more esoteric things such as writing, money and the scientific method have come under fire. But the actual worst thing invented by mankind rarely shows up on the lists (which lists are mostly written by men).

Few if any of these things are intrinsically bad. They are not even bad in application throughout much of their existence. They are truly only bad in the context of the one thing that actually is inherently bad… What is that thing?

First, it’s not farming. Can we just stop blaming farmers for the messes made of this world? Farmers did not create those messes. They actually can’t do their job — which is to work with the world to produce food and fiber for humans — in the context of biophysical mess. Even when they are able to do their job, they rarely benefit. And farmers have been the one constant source of dissent and rebellion against this systemic mess-making throughout history. It’s not farming…

It’s not writing either, though writing is definitely more entwined with the actual worst thing humans have created. So what is that thing? What is the actual worst invention of mankind? The actual worst invention, that which tints all other inventions in shades of evil, is a hierarchical domination system wherein elite males create artificial scarcity, forcing the rest of us to labor on their behalf, while our own bodily needs go unmet and our lives are wasted. All other inventions, whether “good” or “bad” in application, have become, or were created specifically to be, mere tools of this invented system of domination. It is the worst… the only thing that merits a spot on the list…

Writing is not inherently bad. No tool is. But writing was created solely to dismantle the broadly egalitarian societies that were and are the norm for humanity, so that there could be hierarchy, so that elite men could exist and then claim all the benefits of living. Initially, it was a tool for accounting and propaganda and it largely remains as such. By design, it is and always has been dominated by one voice, the voice of elite men. It forwards their projects and enunciates their values and ideas with surgical precision. It veils the actual world behind a screen of befuddling words. It hides the devastation and harm these men inflict upon us behind fairy stories and outright lies. Writing creates a solid body for these ideas, gives them material existence and weight and durability. Without writing, all false words evanesce as soon as they are spoken. Spoken lies are so much more difficult to maintain in the direct face of reality. Lies are seldom repeated by others. So to lie to the world, men needed a hard record.

And, it must be admitted, writing was very successful. It is a devastating tool in the hands of dominators… To the extant that, all these thousands of years later, writing has successfully molded human consciousness. Those who would not listen to the recorded voice of men were eliminated, culled from the human stock. Those who survived were those who followed the written word, the voice of domination. Through the generations of vicious selection, humanity has become more and more predisposed to believe whatever is in print over the reality before their eyes, before even the words they hear spoken. Print has authority… and we rarely have the ability — or the will — to question the author.

This disposition is all the worse in these days of late modernity, wherein most people can read, and that mostly only the dominant language in print — which is English — regardless of their own native speech. There are more English words in print than all other languages, so nearly all readers must, perforce, read English. This has disastrous effects on the human psyche, on our ability to comprehend and describe the specifics of our lives. English is a domineering language. It occludes, disparages and erases what does not fit within the elite male project. It universalizes and normalizes the minority voice. (For example, what face do you see when you read minority?) English establishes a center from which all knowledge flows — and towards which all benefit streams. It lies… well… Elite men found written English to be even more effective at distributing their message than merely writing and telling the masses what was in print — because, for ages, the masses could not read. Thus, with the advent of English, we were finally taught to read the message. But not to question it.

We are educated in such a manner so that we can all read those printed words, but few of us are able to think critically enough to determine veracity or even real, physical likelihood. This is a perfect tool for suppressing dissent and alienating all those who feel different, who see the world as it is and know it to be at odds with the message. Through this education and the sheer volume of printed words extolling hierarchy and hiding any other way of being, we are made to question our own lived experience. We are made to doubt what we know to be true in the face of all these printed words. And this is what writing was designed to do…

One of the first tasks of writing was to literally dismantle earth-centered living, to rip apart the body and anima, to take life out of the world, to reserve agency, even conscious thought, only to the dominating class of humans. The earliest recorded myths — which are also the earliest recordings of anything save shipping manifests and accounting registers — are brutal narratives of killing the animated world, destroying the soul, disconnecting elite men from embodied existence. These narratives established and sanctified hierarchy and used those rankings to man-splain why most of the world must tolerate abuse and wasted lives, must bear the harm rained down on us in all its manifold forms… Because, the myths clearly relate, in all their bloody screaming, we earth-loving Others are unworthy of life.

No, writing did not have an auspicious start… but it is still not intrinsically bad. You can use it to say anything, not just what elite men will print. And it is possible for some of these other words to slip through the cracks. There are and always have been too few elite males to fully control words… and now there are more tools for recording and… well… they did make a critical error when they taught us all to read their propaganda… Because inevitably, there would arise readers who are also capable of critical analysis of words, people who do not blindly accept the printed word over their own embodied experience, people who will talk back.

Elite males used to fear what might happen if lesser beings like women and other Others were able to read, to manipulate text. For most of writing’s existence, the printed word has been solely within the purview of elite men. By design, this is. Lesser humans were not taught to read because, with equal access to words, elite men might not be able to dictate the message. Indeed, many people were severely punished if they dared to rise above their station to learn the secrets of putting thought into print. However, over time, elite males forgot that this hierarchical system of theirs is precarious and deeply at odds with the vast majority of human experience. They believed their own propaganda, that they were naturally superior, that no reasoning body would dare question their supremacy. They believed themselves impervious and inviolable, enough so that they could risk sharing their tools — to more effectively propagandize the masses, of course. (Advertising and data gathering do not work unless we all can read a little. But not a lot. And certainly not critically…)

They were not completely wrong. There are still very few words in print that go against their project. But not everybody believes those words. Those words are just too jarring and discordant against the perceived and lived world. Manifestly false… So with more ways to distribute writing, more ways to write what goes against the propaganda, there are a few who write against the message of synthesized scarcity, violent competition, and male domination. Elite males can’t police everything. There are eight billion voices on this planet, only a couple hundred thousand of which are voices of elite males, and only a few hundred of which are the voices who control the world. They are simply too few to be effective enforcers. (This is true in many ways… well beyond control of the message… always keep that in mind when considering the durability of this system…)

Women who are adjacent to the dominating class have the most scope for making their voices heard, for righting the message in writing, for putting the anima back into the world. Thus far, most women scribblers have, instead, tried to copy men — because how else would they be published in a male-dominated world? But there are women who care little for publishing. There always have been. They just want to record their own story, to leave a record of their own voice for their daughters and granddaughters. Some of those words have been preserved. More and more are being written. But it is a shadowy project.

It is only through the privilege of my skin that I am able to write as I do — and that only in a small and quiet way. My words might have a global audience, but it is tiny. Yet even within that protective shell, I often feel exposed. I am exposed. I regularly field written abuse and feel compelled to keep my physical identity mostly hidden so that the abuse stays in the realm of the virtual. Other writers who dare to tell a story counter to hierarchy have been silenced. Many have been slain. Even the memory of them has been erased. Unpublished. Out of print. Untold.

But this is changing. Not because elite male ideas are changing, but because they are less and less able to exert their will and impose their ideas. As the world falls apart, the cracks are widening, revealing the machinery under this whole mess. More and more people are aghast at what they see, at the lives that have been wasted to further this project, at the destruction that this bad invention has wrought — for no good whatsoever. No matter how many words are in print, no matter how loudly the propaganda brays, no matter the disparagement and scapegoat spectacle punishments of those who think Other-wise, the masses are finally becoming inured to the message and unwilling to adhere to the project. Because it hurts! It harms us, all of us! And no amount of belief in all these words can ameliorate the pain.

So I keep using this tool against the masters. Yes, I know the common wisdom — can’t tear down the master’s house with the master’s toolkit. But I wonder if this tool truly belongs to the master these days. It never did completely. It was only with the utmost effort that its use was curtailed, kept free of other voices. Utmost effort is no longer enough when we number eight billion, when we can hack the toolkit in so many ways, when we can escape the controlling voice long enough to think for ourselves. Because the controlling voice also has to deal with many other matters these days. He doesn’t have time to police all of us… and so he’s missing out on some of us who are pushing the cracks wider…

But it’s not the tool. Writing isn’t the worst invention, nor even a worst invention. It is not bad. There is very little that is bad… except for this system of hierarchy and domination and wasted lives. So I say use whatever tools there are to break this system.

Just… maybe stop making senseless lists and blaming farmers, ok? Pull back the curtain… show the real bad. And if you happen to have a loud voice amplified by privilege, then use it well, dammit! Until there is no privilege to use and we all have a voice to tell our story…

Teaser photo credit: More details Inscriptions on black-figure pottery using the Early Greek alphabet – National Archaeological Museum, Athens. By Marsyas (2007), CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=471575.