The Cacophony of Cultures

I tend to write a whole week's worth of columns on Sunday afternoon, so if you notice particular themes running through them, then much of it has to do with the mood I am in on Sunday afternoon.  But, since my lovely bride just brought me a bunch of chocolate chip cookies, perhaps my mood will lighten up a bit going forward.

My habit is to scan through the news and look for things that set me off.  I use Drudge for the right-wingnut view, the New York Times for the left-wingnut view, and Rense for the pure-wingnut view. For seasoning, I throw in the Financial Times, the Strait Times, the Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Times of India (aka the Bombay Bombast).  Stir in Russia Today and Xinhua, boil till thick and aromatic. Then I create a mental picture of the state of the world.  And this week, that state is a pretty sad one.

What I came across, though, was an article in the Gray Lady (New York Times) about a Chinese surgeon that wants to perform a full-body transplant on a paralyzed man.  That triggered a memory about an article from Newsweek about an Italian surgeon that wanted to perform a head transplant.

The first thing that struck me is the underlying philosophical differences.  From the descriptions of what is being done, they sound more or less the same thing.  The difference is that the Italians (westerners) are changing the head, and the Chinese (easterners) wanted to swap out the body.

Not sure why, but this difference intrigued me.

Even beyond the Frankenstein movie horror images (the book used an alchemical process to create an homunculus), these articles revealed a very deep division in points of view.

On the one hand, the Westerners were transferring a head to a new host body, while the Easterners were giving a body a new head.  Do you see what I see?  The Westerners place the center of being in the head, while the Easterners view the head in context of the whole body.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?  Probably not much, but it does highlight something that I often go on about here, and that is the fundamental assumptions that we all have and that are culturally induced.

In the West, we have generally come to assume that the head is the center of the body.  This is neither right nor wrong, though I tend to see it as incomplete.  The Eastern culture sees the entire body as a unified whole.  Again, neither right nor wrong, just incomplete.  They are complimentary assumptions and lead to a whole host of viewpoints that are completely in opposition to each other.

A great example is the Indo/Malay word hati.  Now if you ask a schoolchild how this translates into English, they will tell you "heart," and in a sense, they are right...and wrong.  In fact, hati strictly means liver, while jantung means heart - at least when it comes to physical organs.

However, in English we use the word "heart" for a much more intangible and philosophical thing: the seat of the emotions and wisdom.  In the Indo/Malay languages, this concept in located in the liver.  Don't ask me why, I haven't gotten that far in my ponderings, but the fundamental cultural divide is there.

Indonesians will tell you hati-hati (be careful), and perhatian (attention), or memperhatikan (take note of something).  Maybe they will say someone has berhati busuk, or evil intent, or berhati baik, a heart of gold.  In a book, when a character thinks to himself, he is speaking didalam hati, inside his heart.  But, if someone drinks too much alcohol, they will get sirosis hati.  There is no mistake that hati is liver, and it is quite apparent that the language embeds all of the aspects of the Western "heart" in the liver.

In this same vein, the Westerners will transplant a head and the Easterners will transplant a body.  Same basic procedure, completely different philosophies.

To me, and admittedly I'm a bit of a geek, this is one of the most fascinating parts of learning new cultures.  Oh sure, we all have our unique costumes and dances, architecture and food, but the most interesting part is the profound differences in the assumptions we make about the Universe as part of our cultural underpinnings.

Many people go through life without ever having questioned the very foundations of how and why we think that way we do.  They never experience completely different viewpoints or rotate around a problem and attack it from an angle that we are culturally blind to.

It's like religion.  Take Judaism and Islam.  They both abhor pork.  They both practice mutilation of male genitalia.  They both have stylistically similar languages with dozens of cognate words.  Yet, one claims to be descended from the legitimate child of a mythical character (Abraham), and the other claims to be descended from the illegitimate child of the same character.  For this, they have warred for centuries, laying claim to the same lands, when in fact, they are hardly separated philosophically.

Little differences that underlie big things.

That's why - and readers here seem to agree - my scribblings tend to take unusual tacks.  I tend to look at problems and issues from non-standard points of view, and even to create new ones by synthesizing alternative viewpoints.  I like to view the world as both a head transplant and a body transplant, because that one simple change can lead to all sorts of new ideas down the line.

The people I know who can do this all have one thing in common: they speak multiple languages.  The thinkers I tend to gravitate towards all speak at least two or three languages.  The people I most admire are polyglots.  And the things that sets them apart from others is their ability to examine the world as if through multi-faceted eyes, seeing angles that others cannot.

It's a valuable tool not to be locked into a single cultural perspective.

I went to school with the son of the guy who invented the Weed-Eater.  He kept the original in a glass case in his living room.  He got tired of the trouble and expense of sharpening and replacing blades on lawn edgers, so one day he tied a bunch of heavy-duty fishing line to a popcorn snack can and bolted in on to his machine.

My grandfather, trying to figure out a way to clean tanker cars on trains after hauling oil or chemicals, was inspired by the heating coil he used to keep his coffee warm on his desk.

They both became a multi-millionaires because he looked at a problem from a wildly different point of view, and that fact made an impression on me.

Of course, my solution is to wonder why I need to edge, or even have a yard, at all.

Lingua Franka A La Mode

READER NOTE: I'll be collating the results next week, so get your voice in on the Reader Survey below!

I've been taken to task by several readers over my repeated claim to speak 17 languages.  They can't imagine anyone being able to store all that in one head, even though I pointed out that the world record for fluency is 21 languages.

So, how does one learn 17 languages?  Surprisingly, it's kind of easy, after the first two or three.

As a youngster in Texas, we were required to learn both English and Spanish.  I had just as many Spanish classes per week as I did in my "other" mother tongue.  Though I'm quite rusty at this point, having not used Spanish at all for more than a decade, I can still read and write it quite well, and if I'm around a bunch of Spaniards, it comes back rather quickly.

The next step was having a rabidly Roman Catholic father, who not only insisted that I attend an exclusive all-boys Catholic school, but that I study Latin for two years.  While at the time I would have easily compared the experience to being hog-tied by the Inquisition and tortured with glass slivers under the finger nails, I have long since seen the wisdom of it.  You see, the more you learn about the English language, the more your realize that it is shot through with Latin, and it comes in quite handy knowing both.

By the time I reached university, I was tired of the Romance languages and was ready for something new.  I chose German, since I have ancestry from there and because I had already lived in Bavaria for six months working at the national theater, so I had picked up a good bit of "street" German and the Bavarian dialect (called Schwabisch).

Now you're probably thinking, "Yeah, and what does this have to do with 17 languages?"

Well, the southern tier of countries in Europe all use some direct descendant of Latin, which is why they are called the Romance languages (as in Rome).  Having studied Spanish and Latin, I can read French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, as well as understand speakers with some effort.  If I am in those countries, I pick up the language very fast, and can even imitate the sounds quite well.  In fact, I am told that my Spanish has a strong Seville accent and my German sounds Bavarian.  I have also received compliments on my Italian, in that I sound Sicilian.  Not sure if that is a compliment, though.

Anyway, being fluent in English and German gives me the ability to read Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and to a lesser extent, Swedish.  Again, if I am in a room full of Norwegians, it takes me about an hour or so to get up to speed.  For the most part, I need to hear the pronunciation, intonation and syntax so I can start speaking coherently.

On my own, I taught myself the Greek and Russian alphabets, as well as a few basic phrases - call it survival language.  With Greek, I can read some text in a way that is fairly intelligible, but I have no idea (outside of a few words) what I am saying.  Russian is quite a bit more complex, but I have decided one day to give it a go.

Having now become fluent in three languages and being able to get by in a dozen, it becomes much easier to learn more.  Once you are expert at your own language (which most people aren't), then the rest is basically filing.  Think of it as a matrix, with columns being parts of speech and rows being different languages.  Thus, I file nouns in the appropriate column in the row for any given language.  The part that still gets me bunged up is syntax, since there is no easy way to fit that into my nifty mental matrix.  More on syntax in a moment.

At this point, most of learning a new language is memorization.  You learn a new word, figure out what part of speech it is (i.e. - interrogative), then file it away.  The rest is practicing using the word in context.

Over the past eight years, I've been learning (of course) Indonesian.  Like European languages, this gives me access to many others.  Indonesian is a form of Malay, which is descended from Hindi and Sanskrit.  I have little problem understanding or speaking Malay, but I can only pick out a few things in Hindi, Sanskrit or Tagalu (Philippines).  With Tagalu, though, the language is a mixture of the Malay language and Spanish, meaning I can pick out about 60% of the written language, though speaking goes too fast for me to focus on individual words.

Beyond that, many of the 300+ dialects in Indonesia use more or less the same grammar, though the vocabulary can vary widely.  Having already learned the Indonesian grammar, it became rather simple to pick up Javanese and Sundanese.  Just plug in vocabulary.

The hard part was the Indonesian grammar.  Unlike English, the tenses don't use ending on words, but rather modal verbs and time clauses.  There are a whole class of verbs, also, that are not negated but instead have an entirely different word, for instance sedia for "do" and jangan for "don't."  On top of that, the syntax, or sentence construction, is the equivalent of the passive voice in English, where the object and subject are reversed, and you rarely address someone directly, instead speaking directly to them in the third person.  Takes some getting used to.

Once you have mastered this mind-numbing reversal, though, then you realize that Mandarin is very similar, so learning to speak it is just a matter of vocabulary (back to the matrix).  Reading and writing are entirely different problems that some day I intend to tackle.

The most interesting experience in learning new languages is the day you actually start thinking in that language.  This is a very profound experience that can actually change the way you see the world.  Though the initial exhilaration eventually wears off, with some practice, you can actually use this process to examine problems from angles you never thought existed before.

My favorite part of learning new languages are the idioms, those things that are unique to cultures that use the language.  For instance, in German there is an emotion that you cannot have in English.  It is called Gemütlichkeit.  It is often translated as "cozy," but this is a pale word by comparison.  There is no English equivalent.  In Indonesian, there is jayus, which is laughing at how unfunny a joke is.  In Spanish, there is a verb, estrenar, that is just for the first use of a thing.

In addition to untranslatable words, there are expressions in every language that only make sense in that language, within its milieu.  Some great Indonesian examples include polisi tidur, malu-malu kucing and tidur ayam. The first refers to a speed bump, though it literally means "sleeping police."  The second translates roughly as "coy," but literally means "shy-shy cat."  The last is funny because in English, we call it a "cat nap," but in Indonesian, it's a "chicken sleep."

There's even great idioms in English dialects.  For instance, in Texas, the future tense is formed by adding "fixin' ta" before the main verb of a sentence.

I've long been of the opinion that everyone should thoroughly learn at least one other language.  The effort pays off in many unexpected ways, such as being able to express things that cannot be expressed in one's native tongue, as well as the experience of seeing the world from completely different perspectives.

Sadly, many native English speakers never learn other languages.  It is too easy to be lazy when one speaks the most common foreign language in the world.  However, one is missing out on a whole spectrum of human experience that can only be had by seeing the world through different tongues.

This topic, though, reminds me of an old joke:

The person who speaks three or more languages is a polyglot.
The person who speaks two languages is bilingual.
The person who only speaks one language is British.

Nuff said.

By Any Other Name

I have long though that one of the major failings of the English language is its lack of ability to distinguish types of love.  In English, there is only one way to express love and that is, well...love.

In the Greek language, they recognize four different forms of love: eros, agape, philia, and storge.  Some people add mania, but I understand this concept to be a state of being rather than an emotion, so I leave it off.

So the Greeks break love down into "physical or passionate love", "spiritual or transcendent love", "brotherly or mental love", and "parental or familial love".  Note that in Greek, there is no room to love ice cream or Boston cream pies.

I have always found this concept intriguing.  Certainly, in English, we have to qualify our love with a litany of adjectives or negatives, like the classic, "But I don't love you like that."  I always wondered how different our society would be if we could distinguish between kinds of love.

In Indonesian, which is essentially a dialect of sanskrit, there are three kinds of love: cinta, kasih and sayang.  They are defined as "physical love", "transcendent love" and "compassionate love".  Most dictionaries translate sayang as 'pity', but that completely misses the mark.  By the same token, cinta and kasih are defined as 'love', which fails to translate the more subtle aspects.

This has always been one of the more fascinating aspects of languages - the things you can and cannot say in any given language, and even more fun, the idiomatic expressions.  Even in the English language, there are so many dialectical differences that many folks can't understand each other.

For instance, in British English, you call up to someone's house and ring them on the phone, while in American English, you go over to someone's house and call them on the phone.

Back to Indonesian, it's curios how certain things are expressed.  Emotions aren't so much expressed and directed.  That's a bit of a difficult concept.  For example, in English one says, "I love you," but in Indonesian the expression is, "Aku chinta pada mu."  Translated verbatim, that is saying, "I love to you."  In fact, all emotions in Indonesian are expressed in this way, as if they are directed at someone.

In English, you can love a thing, but in Indonesian, that is a foreign idea.  You can't love ice cream in Indonesian, that would sound ridiculous.  The habit of English speakers to love just about anything seems to cheapen the word and make it pale and meaningless.  If only we had a better way to express a strong liking so we could reserve love for less trivial things.

If the English word 'love' were more powerful and meaningful, how much differently might we native speakers view the world?  How many misunderstandings in relationships might be avoided?  How much more sensitive might we be to our fellow humans?  Suppose we could express as many forms of love as Eskimos can forms of snow?

"Look, honey, I feel agape and philia for you, but the eros is missing.  Sorry."

When you learn other languages, I mean really learn them, it changes your perceptions of the world.  Suddenly, you see variety where you didn't see it before.  You acquire new ways of expressing subtleties that don't exist in your mother tongue. 

One of the handiest words I've ever learned is the German "gemütlichkeit".  Another great word is selamat, which comes from the same root as swastika.  Perhaps if more people looked up the actual meaning of swastika, the world might reclaim a great concept.

"William and Kate just had their baby!"  "Swastika!"

At any rate, just some fun things to think about.  Couldn't hurt if we added some new words to English, or at least reclaimed their original meanings.  English has never had much of a problem stealing words from other languages.  Why stop now?

Just another day-dream on the way to the slaughterhouse.

Give Us A Sign!

Our recent article on language and culture appears to have struck a chord with a number of readers, including our good and faithful correspondent Guy, who also inhabits jungles.  He forwarded the article to a friend whose response, in part, was:

Interesting article and very true about how powerful languages are! In some countries in Africa women have developed their own "secret languages" to express special contexts their husbands or man in general would not understand.

Wondering how precise people can talk in sign languages to express the words and contexts? Origin of language and its development is for sure very interesting.

 A very interesting question, and one which I've had occasion to study.  I have worked and socialized with a number of deaf people over the years, all of whom were profoundly deaf from birth.  Thus, they had never directly experienced spoken language.  They were also from different countries and regions of the US.

What I learned from the experience is that sign language is just as rich and subtle as any spoken language.  It has dialects and accents.  A signer from Germany would have as much problem understanding an American signer as any speaker would.  It's really a fascinating topic to research.

For example, a former boss of mine, whose name began with the letter "G", was a rather strange bird.  The deaf woman who worked in our department had a nickname for him: it was the sign for the letter "G" combined with the sign for "weird", which is a bobbing motion with the hand in front of the mouth in American Sign.

In fact, this is a common means for sign language to express subtle or complex ideas.  Different signs are combined in certain ways (there are rules of grammar) to express connotation and subtext.  The signs are combined with facial expressions, which is why signing is done at the chest and face level.  The reader must be able to see the face to get all of the deeper meanings and context.

In effect, this is no different than spoken languages.  Perhaps you've noticed that reading, writing or talking on the phone require additional effort to convey certain subtext, because the facial expressions are not available.

Few people stop to consider how important the face is in communicating.  It is why actors rehearse their roles in front of mirrors to get just the right face and body language into a line.  It is also why stage actors and clowns (no comment) use exaggerated makeup so that expressions can be read at a distance or for comedic effect.

Perhaps you've had occasion to speak with a stroke victim in your experience, especially one with severe paralysis of one half of the face.  You may have noticed, or at least felt, the strange sensation of trying to understand what they are saying because the facial clues were so distorted.  This is true of people with facial tics or other similar phenomena.  A signer who is unable to use their face is similarly handicapped when trying to convey information.

Most of us are so accustomed to taking language for granted that we never think about all the complex functions involved in using it.  The ability to speak or sign is only a small fraction of the tools used to communicate.  This is part of what makes film and TeeVee so powerful, when compared to radio or print.  Our ability to see the speaker vastly expands the information we receive, and how fast we receive it.

I haven't even touched on voice inflection here, which has it's own box of communication tools.  Even signers have inflections.  One can sign peacefully, or angrily, or confusedly.  If you become adept enough at the language, you can tell what part of a country someone is from by their signing "dialect".  If a Spanish signer learns English Sign, they will 'speak' with an accent.  It is a very curious and fascinating phenomenon.

Next time you meet a signer, ask them to show you the signs for "father", "mother" and "thank you".  If you are able to do this with signers from different countries, you'll come to appreciate just how subtle the languages are.  In English, the three signs will offer some interesting insight into subtext and connotation.  The sign for "father" can be combined with the letter "G" to express "God the Father" all in one motion.  I'll leave you to discern all the various emotional baggage that goes with that concept.  Also, giving signs on the left, right or mid-line of the body changes the tone.

Language is a powerful tool, and humans have devised myriad ways to express the subtlety and richness of the human experience.  That the alphabet or medium changes does not in any way affect the ability of the user to convey their thoughts and emotions.

Where the problem lies is in the templates that language imposes (or are imposed) on our thinking.  If we are not aware of the limits and do not consciously try to expand beyond them, then we are trapped in a limited world of experience, unable to perceive or communicate experiences which fall outside the range of our language.  Those experiences are the things that inhabit the realms of fear and religion (but I repeat myself).

Do yourself and the world a favor.  Go out and enroll in a language class today.  Expand your horizons in a month or so with that one simple act.

Pretty soon, those places on the map of consciousness emblazoned with the words, "Here thar be monsters!", will get smaller and smaller until they disappear altogether.

Etemenanki

Ya know, this whole Supreme Corpse thing in the States really has me fired up.  It goes straight to the heart of one of my pet peeves, which I can lay directly at the feet of the Roman Empire (aka Catholic Church), and which has so screwed up Western history and, by extension, the world.

Here's the deal....

Once upon a time, Humans were viewed as the pinnacle of Creation.  We were Masters of our domain (Seinfeld excepted) and the individual was a sacred being capable of achieving god-like characteristics.  Buddhism, which predates both Christianity and Judaism, speaks to the whole idea that humans are perfectable to the point of deification.  Each of us, given enough time and effort, are capable of achieving apotheosis.  As Robert Heinlein put it in 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' "Thou art god."

That whole concept is as foreign to us now as snorting Moon-dust.  We folks today can't imagine such an idea as individual human beings becoming gods in their own right.  That's some quaint idea reserved for Caesars and Japanese Emperors.  Us little people are but worms to be trod upon for the greater glory of someone else.

It shows up in so many subtle ways in our thinking and social discourse.  The concept of our baseness and unworthy-ness is built into our language.  We speak it and don't even think about it.  If we only paused for a moment and pondered what we say on a daily basis, we would (should) be shocked.

The other day, in my Business Conversation class, we took up the topic of 'jargon'.  Jargon is slang that is meant to exclude others from the inner sanctum of any given profession.  Jargon separates us into guilds and professions.  It allows us to exclude the uninitiated, but it also excludes us from other groups.  Slang divides generations, jargon divides disciplines.

Some of the terms we took up were 'core competency', 'corporate values', and 'human resources'.  If you are a corporate drone, then these terms are branded on your soul.  And chances are, you've probably never really thought them through.  So let's do that, because it's part of the Big Picture here on the Far Side.

First of all, 'core competency'.  This is a gem of bullshit.  Here, we've taken a horse turd and shined it up into an object of veneration and desire.  We are using 'core', which means the center, heart or penultimate, as an adjective to describe 'competency', which means average achievement, mediocrity and unenlightened.  So, when your boss talks about your company's 'core competency', he's asking you to buy into the idea that at your organization's heart is nothing more than mediocre ability.  A competent surgeon means he likely won't kill you, but all the effort and money likely won't cure you, either.  There's no art or substance, just following directions, boss.

The next term, 'corporate values', really goads me.  It is the assumption that a collection of humans, working in concert, constitute a 'person' that, in itself, has values, judgement and morals.  In other words, the collective hive becomes an 'individual' with a soul and independent existence.  We are no longer a collection of individuals working in concert, we are cells in a body corporate, where the body is supreme over the cells that make it up.  This should be classified as a psychiatric pathology, but of course psychiatry is part of the problem and definitely NOT part of the solution.

Finally, we come to 'human resources'.  This is particularly egregious.  Earth, wind, fire, and water are resources.  Humans are not.  Paper is a resource.  Ink is a resource.  Electricity is a resource.  Time is a resource.  But humans are humans.  We are not raw materials to be thrown at any given situation, along with whatever lumps of shit we have to hand.  I have skills and talents that are available to my employer for a fee, but I am not cord wood to be thrown on the fire on a cold night.

Now, I think we have sufficiently built a framework to show that the whole core of modern society is sick and dying.  That we humans has surrendered our basic value as individuals who are capable of apotheosis, in order to become cells in artificial golems of mystical construct, in order to receive remuneration and pay taxes is, in a word, sick.

We are a sick society, and perhaps that is why apocolyptism has become so prevalent.  We know we are sick and admit that we have no way to cure this sickness, and so we hope for some deus ex machina to come along and take care of the situation for us.

It doesn't matter what stripe you hail from.  Whether it's neopagan, Christian, Muslim, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even atheism...everyone is looking for some outside force to come in and clean up our dirty thinking.

This is the way mass murderers think.  They know they are 'broken'.  They can't figure out a way to cure themselves.  So they start killing people hoping to be caught so that someone else will take responsibility for their sickness.

This is the origin of the 'war on drugs'.  The elite don't want the individual to figure out how to cure their illness.

We, as a society-culture-civilization, are doing all we can to deny the problem at the core of our existence.  We ARE gods.  We are spiritual beings who are capable of things far beyond what we are achieving on a daily basis right now.  We are in the throes of evil beings trying to harness our power for their personal gain.  We  are the cocoon denying the worm the ability to become a butterfly.

It's time.

It's time to release ourselves.  Only we, as individuals, can open the cocoon and allow ourselves to soar where we belong.  All the legalisms and jingoisms and jargonisms serve only to keep us in the shell, when we should be fighting with all our might to break free of this morass of limits and horizons.

To come full circle, the Supreme Corpse decision on Obamacare serves only the shell, not the 'becoming'.  Those who are doomed to believe that we are nothing without the collective are doomed to spend eternity inside the cocoon.

In Asian thought, an individual is created by hard work.  One must spend a lifetime drawing the elements together to form a unique being.  If you fail, then you must return to the 'soup' from which you came, so that your energy can be recycled into another effort, commonly called reincarnation.  Once you achieve 'self', then you can perfect that thing into an eternal being.

Is the 'self' you are trying to create a part of some 'corporate' being?  Or are you strong enough to create a real 'individual'?  Therein lies our common dilemma in this day and age.

The root of the problem lies in language.  Take control of your language, and you take control of your life...your REAL life.

The lesson of the Tower of Babel was that the gods confused human language to keep them from achieving their true status.  Language is the key.  Learn your own language to the roots.  Then learn as many other languages as you can.  Then, at some point, it will all congeal to show the Big Picture.

Don't let anyone control your language.  If they control your language, they control your thoughts.  That was the whole point of the Great Light called George Carlin.  That is the point that I am trying to make.  Learn all languages.  Use language with great care and control.  It is the most powerful weapon that we, as Individual Human Beings, have at our command.  By controlling our language, we are setting ourselves free to exit the cocoon.

In other words, fuck the Supreme Corpse.

Paul vs. The Powers That Be

Languages are slippery things.  Especially when you are translating one to another, and even more so when you are being paid to do it by someone with an agenda.

Language is never limited to simple 'word = word' kinds of formulas.  There are layers of connotations and subtexts, cultural contexts, and individual experience that flavor every part of a language.  Some examples?

In German, there is the word gemuetlichheit (the ue can also be written with an umlaut).  If you look the word up in most dictionaries, it will tell you that the English equivalent is 'cozy'.  This is such a pale translation.  Gemuetlichheit is an emotion for which there is no English word.  It is a feeling of well-being that one has when the environment includes good food, drink, friends, music, and a warmth and camaraderie that is only found in such a setting.  In English, it would take a whole group of words to convey the same content as that single word in German.

How about another?  In Indonesian, there is the word selamat.  Most dictionaries will tell you it means 'good', as in "good morning".  However, the word means much more than that.  Selamat can mean good, happy, fortunate, well, congratulations, and about a half-dozen other English words.  There is no direct, word-for-word translation for selamat.

This is true of every one of the 15 languages that I am proficient in.  Each of them have concepts expressed with single words that do not have equivalents in other languages.  Furthermore, every word you can think of has a vast context that includes every encounter you have had with the word, all your experiences that you self-describe with the word, the etymological origin and cultural baggage of the word.  On top of all that, words evolve over time, growing slang usages and additional cultural baggage.  After all, how would an American English native translate the slang meanings of 'hip' or 'cool'?  What Russian or Mandarin word would your choose to separate 'joint' and 'low temperature' from 'cutting edge' and 'very nice'?

With that said, what about texts written in other languages that are translated into yours?  Add to that a span of hundreds and even thousands of years.  How much is lost when a Babylonian clay tablet is translated into modern Spanish or Turkish?  Worse yet, how much is lost if the original text is ancient Greek, which was then translated into Latin, and from there into English?  Worse yet, suppose the Latin were first translated into older forms of English, and then updated several times over the centuries.

To this already big pile of confusion the fact that punctuation is a relatively modern convention.  Ancient Greek and Latin did not use punctuation.  Instead, they had a complex body of affixes, which combined with syntax and context, told the reader when one thought ended and another began, or indicated a direct quote, or talk the reader that this word was the subject and this other word was the object or a thought.

You have to imagine that huge piles of meaning have been lost, right?  And to complicate matters, we can assume that the translators, or the people paying them, had agendas that 'flavored' the translations, skewing the results in one way or another.  It doesn't take long before the compounding effect takes us far afield from the original intent and meaning of the primary text.

With all of this in mind, I come (at long last) to my point.  I want to examine a brief passage of ancient text that is often mistranslated, often on purpose, and has profound implications for contemporary thinkers.

The passage comes from something called 'Paul's Letter to the Romans'.  We'll bypass the whole 'was Paul a real person' argument and stipulate for the sake of moving along.  The text can be found in any copy, any version of the New Testament, which is a highly controlled and misused set of documents that have profoundly influenced the modern world.

How profoundly?  Well, I'm willing to bet most folks use the term 'powers that be', but few take the time to investigate the origin of the term.  In fact, it comes from the King James translation of the New Testament.  Specifically, it comes from the aforementioned Letter to the Romans, with the common delineation of Chapter 13.

Credible scholarship tells us that Paul's letters were written in ancient Greek (the Gospels probably in Aramaic).  That means we can search the internet for the original text in the original language.  So we click over to Dogpile, type in "original greek text of romans 13", and select what looks to be a fairly authoritative source that even gives tenses, voices, moods, and cases to help us understand what we are seeing.

Searching Romans 13:1, we get:

Πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω. οὐ γὰρ ἔστιν ἐξουσία εἰ μὴ ὑπὸ θεοῦ, αἱ δὲ οὖσαι ὑπὸ θεοῦ τεταγμέναι εἰσίν:

Now I know what you are thinking: Hey!  This is all Greek to me!  I know, but I want to make sure that you can't come back and say I cheated.  I'm putting all the info right here.

Now, before we go on, let's take a look at how this passage has been translated.  For this, we click over to biblegateway.com (can you say gateway drugs?) and look up Romans 13:1 in the NIV translation:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

Keep in mind that the 'authorities that exist' is the part we all know as 'the powers that be.'  The word ἐξουσία actually means 'to be at liberty' or 'free', as in what you might tell a house guest when you want them to relax and feel at home.  Already, we've completely shot the standard translation out of the water.


In the 4th century, Jerome was commissioned by Constantine to translate the Greek text into the Latin Vulgate.  In every other instance that I've aware of, Jerome properly translates ἐξουσία as liber, or free.  Yet, in this one instance, he changes it to 'authorities', or the more familiar 'powers that be'.  Why?


Because the line actually reads: let everyone be at liberty and only follow those who are of God and righteous.


In other words, we are told NOT to follow blindly, but that only those who rule in righteousness and godliness are worthy of leadership.  The text goes on to tell us that revolt against evil rulers is a virtue.


Obviously, not something kings and emperors want people thinking.


If it is true that this one little line in the Bible has been maliciously manipulated to conform to the agenda of the PTB, then what other lies fester at the core of our culture and society?  What other 'little' changes have been made, not just to this book, but to all others?  How many other falsehoods have been foisted upon us to make us docile slaves, rather than empowered unique creations with moral duties and obligations to fight evil in all its forms?


We human beings have been played for fools for millennia.  It is morally incumbent on us to take back our power and to clean up our mess.  We owe that to our future, both as individuals and as a species.  It's time to flog the money changers in the temple.


The way to begin is to remove the blinders that were installed on our eyes from earliest childhood.  It is time for us to become adults and take responsibility for our lack of understanding, and our lack of action because of it.  Ignorance can be cured, idiocy can not.  We are left with two clear choices: cure our ignorance, or admit we are idiots.  Frankly, I choose the former.


There is a fictional character that has provided inspiration to me since those long-ago days in high school:  Chief Broom in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."  The first step is to see the fog that clouds our minds, the second step is to clear it away and take back our true power.


It is our birthright.