Shona

Reaching Out to YOU!

I live out in the country. Sometimes it’s lonely but as Osho says, we can embrace our aloneness, which I am doing more often. The drive to work is long, but on a clear winter night, I always stop to look up at the stars. The spring weather has finally arrived, and the flowering shrubs smell wonderful. This morning, I looked out my kitchen window, and within two minutes, saw a pair of dragonflies, a swallowtail butterfly, a cardinal, and other random (less beautiful or at least less memorable!) bugs flying around.

Part of why I decided to write Knomo Choicius was to meet new people and exchange ideas. I don’t think I had much hope that I would find anyone “LIKE MINDED,” since I often feel so weird, or as my mom says, eccentric. But maybe, I thought, just maybe there would be some people who found my ideas about the possible future of humanity interesting. Over the years, in my engineering society, I’ve met others who like to “shoot the breeze” on philosophical topics. There were several PhD’s (and quite a few with univeristy teaching experience) who were brave enough to entertain some wild ideas. There are a few chapters in Knomo that try to convey the spirit of these exchanges.

Here’s an excerpt from the book…..

The Origin of the Myth of the Son of the Goddess as Her Consort
2026 Earth Current Era
Gorka, Pearl, and Susan walked out of the door of the Glaucus Humanities Building.
“Time for drink!” said Gorka.
“Yep, it’s been a long week!” agreed Susan.
“How about that new bar over on Second and Wise?” suggested Pearl.
“Gimboling in the Wabe?” asked Gorka.
“Yeah, that’s it!” agreed Pearl. “Don’t you love the name?”
“Sure,” grinned Gorka. “Sounds like a good place for professors to shoot the breeze on a Friday afternoon.”
They walked along, joining the crowd of people getting an early start to the weekend.
“I was wondering,” said Pearl, the youngest member of the faculty amongst the three of them, “just who was this Glaucus, for whom our building was named.”
“Why are you suddenly wondering, after being here for two years?” teased Susan.
“I had a dream about some swallowtail butterflies. Turns out that our local genus, the yellow and black striped ones, are called Glaucus.”
“Why would a swallowtail butterfly be named after a Trojan warrior hero?” asked Susan, scratching her head.
“Same question I asked,” answered Pearl.

“Turns out Linnaeus decided to name
swallowtail species for Greek heros.”
“You have to find names somewhere!” said Gorka. “However, one might wonder why he didn’t save the Greek hero names for something more burly than butterflies.”
Susan laughed. “So Gorka, what about our Glaucus?”
“His family made their money in international shipping. They were Greek, following their ancient cultural heritage of the sea trade. He came to the U.S. to go to school, and he met the woman who was to become his wife. She was one of the founding members of our philosophy faculty. She thought the Humanities should be given more prominence at our campus.”
“Right. The state universities were founded for engineering and agriculture. Humanities, sciences and art came later,” added Susan.
“You know how it goes when you look something up on line,” said Pearl.

“Glaucus butterflies are not the only biological Glaucus.”
“Okay. Clue us in!” said Gorka.
“Turns out that there’s an animal called a Glaucus. It’s a nudiform mollusk, to be exact. That means it doesn’t have a shell.”
“Kind of like a slug?” asked Susan.
“Yeah, but it lives in the ocean, at the surface of the water, and spends most of its time clinging, upside down, to the surface layer of the water, and grazing on Portugese Man-O-Wars and the like. And oh, by the way, they’re less than an inch long.”
“So the Man-O-Wars don’t even notice them til it’s too late?” asked Gorka.
“I’m not sure, but apparently, either singly or en masse, they can consume an entire Man-O-War. But they don’t digest the stinging organs of the Man-O-War. They keep them to use as self protection.”
“Wow. Who would have thought of such a thing. Just goes to show that nature is really wild in so many ways,” said Susan.
“Yeah, and these creatures are an incredibly beautiful blue on top, silver on the bottom, and their arms and legs look like pentagonal fractal patterns.”
“So we have Dr. Mrs. Glaucus the American philosopher, Glaucus the

Trojan hero, Glaucus swallowtail butterflies, and Glaucus mollusks!” said Susan.
“Don’t forget Glaucus, the Greek god,” reminded Gorka.
“Here’s the bar,” said Susan, opening the door and holding it for the others. “Go get a table. I need call Michael to let him know where to meet us. Can you just order me whatever beer they have on special?”
“Sure, Susan,” Pearl said. “See you in a few.”

Susan took her place at the table, raised her glass and said “Cheers!” The other two responded. Then Gorka pointed out a detail of the art-work on the wall. “The Mad Hatter,” he said. “That’s why I’m an American.”
“What does that mean?” asked Pearl. “I’ve already gone over that in my mind. If my ancestors hadn’t come to America, ‘I’ wouldn’t exist.”
“Of course,” Gorka said. “Our specific ego forms are a result of a very large number of factors, an important one being whether our parents had a chance to meet.”
“That’s interesting,” Susan said. “The fact that we somehow can do the

thought experiment and imagine that our personal ego would still exist, even if our particular parents had never met… That is very interesting.”
“What do you mean?” asked Pearl.
“Well, doesn’t it point to the fact that some part of us thinks we are more than our genes and our culture? More than nature and nurture?”
Gorka looked at Susan, and smiled and nodded, while Pearl scratched her head. “What more could we be?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Susan, “but I do wonder about it. Could you pass the
popcorn?”
Pearl pushed the basket of popcorn over towards Susan.
“So, Susan,” Gorka said, “you’re getting closer to your dream of going to space. How’s the project going?”
Susan sighed. “It’s going, but some aspects of it are making me feel like a hypocrite. My problem is that I fear the homo saps joining us on the satellite.”
“There are worse things than your type of hypocrisy,” Gorka reminded her.
“I know. My compassionate self wants the homo saps to decide to join us knomos. But I don’t want them in my back yard until they become knomos.”
“Susan, try to look at the bright side,” Pearl said. “We’ve had so many

interesting discussions. Idea after idea. Look how lonely most thinkers have been over the eons. We have a real community here in the history department, and you have another community with your Seeker friends.”
“We’ll never be able to count on the continuity of our real community until our ideas prevail across a wider range of society,” Susan grumbled.
“Well, let’s change the subject, then,” said Gorka. “Pass the peanuts, please!”
Susan did so, and then continued in a little more cheerful voice, “My capra hircus article is coming out in a new book next week.”
“You mean The Origin of the Myth of the Son as Consort of the Goddess in the
Domestication of Capra Hircus is getting a second publication?” Gorka asked, gulping in some air at the conclusion of his sentence.
Susan nodded. “All that research with the archeology department paid off. I think interdisciplinary work is starting to enter a new phase. It’s accepted now. Not just my book, of course. Others in other fields are setting examples of how productive it is.”
“Yes,” agreed Gorka. “There are now quite a few academics who have published bestsellers in fields that are considered ‘interdisciplinary work.’”
“Why do you sound so sarcastic?” Pearl asked.
“Well, as a historian, it seems a bit of a stretch to consider a collaboration of
anthropologists and archeologists as ‘interdisciplinary’ in a really meaningful way. There’s so much overlap in the questions they are trying to answer.”
“That may be the case, but I am still happy that my work has been well received,”
Susan said.
“So what was your exact thesis again?” asked Pearl. “You speculated that early
peoples’ religions experienced a big transformation, as large mammals neared
extinction, making it harder to bring them home for dinner.”
“Yes,” Susan agreed. “That’s the first part.”
“And then you figured out that the myth of the son as consort of the goddess must have originated when an injured pregnant caprine doe was captured and nursed back to health. Then, when her buck kid came to maturity the next year, they mated, thereby creating the foundation for the domestication of animals.”
“Yes, Pearl,” Susan said, nodding. “You have integrated the idea, now.” She smiled at Pearl, and then summarized the key point of her paper. “The doe goat was the first savior that our ancestors recognized in the changing world of the Neolithic.”
“And of course you’ll never be able to prove that this exact scenario created the idea of the offspring of the goddess becoming her consort,” Pearl said, her voice a little stronger now.
But Gorka had agreed. “It makes a lot more sense than interpreting the symbol of a human form mother taking her son as consort. That’s simply an incestuous
relationship.”
Michael pulled over a chair, and they redistributed themselves at the round table, to let him join in, Susan giving him a quick kiss. “Maybe that was part of the idea,” he said. “That the goddess was so powerful, she could flaunt the laws that applied to humans. It showed her power. Her son looked like her, and that was attractive to her.”
Gorka had sipped his beer, then offered “Maybe. But somehow the Eastern Orthodox Christians transformed the symbol into a depiction of Mother Mary with a miniature adult Jesus. If it had originally been showing an incestuous relationship, wouldn’t the symbol have been too toxic to transform?”
Susan took another sip of beer, and watched Pearl grab another handful of popcorn, while they mulled the transaction between the two men.
Gorka then added “I think that if the original symbol had been of an incestuous
relationship, it would have been completely suppressed in the Christian tradition. Where were Eve’s daughters in Genesis?”
Pearl agreed. “You have a good point. In ancient times, among humans, pretty
much only the Egyptians thought incest was good.”
Gorka laughed. “Good point! And then, even the Egyptians only allowed sibling spouses for the royalty. And the royal stock eventually declined because of it!”
Susan took yet another sip of beer and started shelling a few peanuts. “Yeah, I bet the humanization of the savior goat was later. And you’re probably right Pearl. By then, civilizations had multilevel hierarchies, and a powerful goddess image flaunting human laws would reinforce the power of the king, her servant, on Earth.”
It was Michael’s turn to agree. “Rules are for the weak. History shows that the powerful have always done what they wanted.”
Pearl glared at Michael. “But in prehistory, humans changed that! The powerful were constrained for thousands of years. Then, Sargon showed up.”
“Pearl, one person can’t change everything,” reminded Gorka.
“Yes, Gorka. I know. There were precursor events leading to Sargon’s conquest. But that doesn’t change the fact that for thousands of years, the weak managed to work together to constrain the powerful.”
Gorka smiled in his mature relaxed way, and side stepped back to the original
discussion. “Getting back to Susan’s point now. Freud and many others had
speculated for years on the origins of the incest taboo, and as far as archeologists and anthropologists could figure out, it far predated agriculture of any kind.”
“That’s right!” said Michael.
“What’s right?” asked Gorka.
“Freud thought that the incest taboo originally came from an uprising of the young against the alpha male and his couple of beta honchos. He speculated that the young got tired of watching the alpha have sex with all the cute females, and carried out a violent overthrow.”
“Really? Are you making this up?” asked Pearl.
“Of course not. I’m a psychologist. Why would I make something up about Freud? Read Totem and Taboo. It’s all spelled out.”
“I’ll put it on my list!”
“The bottom line, according to Freud, was that after the murder of the alpha, his
replacement was forced to abandon his hereditary and muscle enforced nearly solitary and special right to the females.”
“What does that have to do with the incest taboo?”
“I’ll spell it out!” smiled Michael. “The new alpha had to agree to avoid having sex with his daughters. Since pretty much only the alpha and beta males got to have sex, pretty much all the younger generation were daughters of the alpha and the betas.”
“Oh. So the new alpha was one of the old betas….”
“You’re catching on Pearl! There had to be some compromise at first. But Freud
speculated that this became the first law where the weak imposed their will on the strong.”
“That!” announced Pearl, “is very interesting. So really, the incest taboo was against fathers having sex with their daughters. It originally wasn’t against sisters and brothers. So the Egyptians weren’t going against the original taboo. Interesting.”
“Dudley Young, and other anthropologists, later wrote about the sister brother thing. How marrying from outside of the group built complex social structures that increased the chances of survival in tough times.”
“Well you apparently do have wide ranging interests, Michael. I guess that’s why Susan is in love with you.” Pearl grinned at Michael.
Michael rolled his eyes at the ceiling, then grinned back at Pearl.
“No,” Susan said.
“No what? You’re not in love with me?”
“No, it has nothing to do with that!” She blew him an air kiss. “No has to do with the earlier conversation. The original version of the myth of the mother taking her own son as consort must not relate to a human relationship.”
“Well, I do hope you still believe what you published in the article, Susan,” said Pearl.
“I think it’s ok to continue to question my conclusions, even after I’ve published!” Susan announced, and raised her glass to her own intellectual integrity.
“Good point, Susan. Good point. Better be open minded than certain,” Gorka said.
Susan continued her explanation. “To be holy way back then, it had to be realistic, and to be realistic, it had to be some non-human animal. First of all, because humans felt weak, so a human would not have been the first choice to be deified. Secondly, as you just noted, in human society, only the males took their daughters as sexual partners. Unless he was an alpha or beta, a woman taking her son to father her offspring was revolutionary. The wild ancestor of the modern domesticated goat is the most likely candidate for the origin of the feminine godhead.”
Gorka laughed. “That is pretty much the same way you explained it the last time!”
“Well, there’s some shade of different understanding now. I have greater confidence in what I am saying.”
“You do think out of the box, Susan,” Gorka acknowledged. “I’m sure you’ll be able to find new collaborators in the anthropology department.”
Michael nodded. “Her next article will be ‘The Origin of Feminism in the Myth of the Horned Mother Goddess.’”
Susan grinned. “At least the title of that one will be a little shorter.

E-CON-IGNOMINOMICS, or The Curmudgeon’s Fantasy

The end of the current economy is coming. Who knows when? I don’t claim to. But when my writing group was given the prompt to write about a secret shopper, my first thought was the demise of the secret shopper. How could anyone afford to pay a secret shopper to check on service at a store, when nobody shops at stores? How could the concept of a secret shopper exist on line? There are no secrets. The merchants don’t even care if we buy their products. They simply hope we’ll window shop so they can sell the record of our window shopping for profit. But sometime, I don’t know when, the prices paid for the record of the trail of clicks of the public shopper will fail to support the lifestyles of the useless leeches of today’s e-con-ignominomics. The phantasm of smoke and mirrors supporting the lifestyles of these leeches will blow away and sublime. The smoke will blow away and the mirrors will sublime. Sublime. That’s a technical term that refers to the process by which the atoms of a solid substance leave their neighbors, one by one. Yes, the smoke will diffuse and so will the mirrors. The leeches of the internet will be revealed in their nakedness for who they are. Some of them might recall some previously learned skills that are actually useful to their fellow humans, like gardening. Maybe they’ll grow a tomato or plant a row of asparagus, to reduce our dependence on factory food that’s full of listeria, hepatitis, and salmonella.

Ode to Rollo May

A long time ago, at least in some frame of reference, I walked out of the front door of my parents’ home. Bereft of hope, I had not yet read Rollo May’s “Man’s Search for Himself.” Could I have known then what I now know, it might have been slightly easier. Doubt though, and the anxiety that accompanies it, are the shadows of the man or woman on the conscious path to becoming truly alive. Every day, I now know, that I miss the opportunity to make my own choices, that day is a chance lost to become my true self.

Fortunately, many friends and guides have supported even my most meager efforts. Good fortune is easier to see in hindsight. Having had to live through the doubt and anxiety was not fun at the time. I am now, however, very grateful to Rollo May for refusing to sing a lullaby. Justice for the courageous is not assured in the mundane world. Kindness to self is a difficult path to learn to tread. Looking at the fact that the hardest thing a human ever does is using rebellion creatively against parents, the stand-in for God, (or is God the stand-in for parents?) can only bring both hope and fear.

May I, writing as though I’ve risen to May’s challenge, actually gain the strength and courage to do so. Never, never will I totally give up, not even from the grave. Oh, I know the temptation to rest is compelling. Perhaps a few centuries of riding with the wave-forms of consciousness will suffice. Queen of Swords in this life, perhaps I’ll manage to become an Empress in the next. Really though, the specific mask of my temporary personality is irrelevant. Security is an illusion to anyone inhabiting a body. Time equalizes all, though. Universal consciousness is the only reality, the only frame of reference that can dispense with boundary conditions.

Verily, I am grateful to Dr. May for helping me see truth, helping me to see my own strength, as much as it has been developed to date. Why it took so long for me to comprehend that I really am, as Joseph Campbell teaches, the hero of my own story, is now clearer. X-rays, though penetrating to matter, would not have helped me to recognize the stages on the spiritual path sooner.

You might not be able to grasp the import of this acrostic, especially if you have never studied mythology, ancient history, philosophy and psychology. Zeno reminds that there is always another step on the path to half way to heaven.

The Cost of Defending Wealth

Defending wealth is expensive. Very expensive.

Think about it.

It’s self evident truth.

But remember, self evident truth is not available to the casual observer!

Only those who learn to see past what the conventional wisdom says are able to glean self evident truth. The whole idea of self evident truth is that you see it for yourself. It’s a shock when you see it. Things that don’t shock are not worthy of the category of self-evident truth.

One of the problems of understanding the ideas of self evident truth is that there are many different kinds of truth. To me, the original self evident truth to which I was introduced, that all men are created equal, is really not self-evident when I look at the world. Or if we were created equal, the equality rapidly evaporates.

But back to the original topic. It is currently self evident to me that protection of concentrated wealth is what our tax money goes to. Those who own little property of value to others are not the ones who need the police and courts to keep their property safe. Rich people don’t go to jail very often. Much more money is spent on sending poor people to jail. Poor people are sent to jail to protect the rich from the behaviors of the poor. Specifically, the behaviors of the poor that the rich see as undesirable, or a threat to their wealth.

Even if there is no direct threat to the property of the wealthy, keeping a lot of poor people under threat of incarceration helps to keep them distracted from ideas of working for social justice. I know from personal experience how I felt when I was threatened with jail time for a trumped up charge. I was eventually able to plea bargain down to my actual deed. And I have more resources and property than most.

Even if people of little property tend to be less educated, and may make personal mistakes, their mistakes are unlikely to cause the expensive problems our society faces, such as war, and the costly need to defend our borders. Rich people don’t go to war very often either. They send those of less means to defend their way of life. The cost of war is such a high number, I can’t fathom it without study. Check out the link.

Those who own lots of property are the ones who need protection from the jealousy of those who have less, whether internal to our national borders, or external.

The concept of personal property, and the desire to pass personal property on, at death, to heirs, has many consequences. Most of us never think about those consequences.

Even though we Americans think of our country as a democracy, we’re a republic. The whole idea of the (wealthy) founding fathers in creating a republic was to protect their wealth and privilege from the royalty. They gave more rights to the propertied men who had the means to run for office. The idea of the republic was not to give full rights to those the founders considered beneath them in the social hierarchy. Those who had not yet proven themselves worthy of consideration, because they had not amassed adequate wealth to join the powerful.

The results of the intentions of the founding fathers are with us still, even as we have given non-felonious citizens a full vote, regardless of skin color. (Note that it is the individual states that decide whether felons can or can’t vote, not the Constitution!)

What is the cost of the prison system? Our epidemic of incarceration costs us taxpayers $63.4 billion a year. Much of this is keeping drug offenders locked away, because as a society we have decided that is a more acceptable answer than rehabilitating the offenders, who have often had restricted opportunities at making a reasonable life for themselves according to the conventional recipe for the American Dream.

Poor people are also not the ones who wish to keep the minimum wages depressed by forcing the poor to compete against themselves. John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” is an eloquent explanation of how property owners work to keep wages down.

Picture Strabismus

Life is funny sometimes. The day after I wrote the following flash fiction, I found this photo of Walt Whitman. He seems to be looking in two directions at once. Wikipedia says he had a stroke toward the end of his life.

**********************

The painting had been in storage for decades. That had saved it from the destruction of the works considered to have attained a higher level of mastery. Now Nancy stood in front of the glowing acrylic colors. The face floated in front of the black background.

“The eyes,” she thought. “A portrait can’t be great if the eyes aren’t right.” The right eye wasn’t quite right though. “Haha,” Nancy thought. “The right eye isn’t quite right! Haha.”

The right eye stared at a different location from the left’s focus, which was the viewer. “That’s funny,” Nancy thought, as she moved back and forth in front of the canvas. “The left eye follows me, while the right looks elsewhere.

“Maybe it was intentional. Maybe this is an accurate portrait.”

Nancy walked over to the UPC sticker printer and touched her gadget screen. The sticker protruded from the slot of the printer, and she pulled it out and returned to the canvas applying the ID tag to the back of the frame.

“Cross eyed people always carry some extra pain. Who was this man” How did he overcome this disadvantage?”

Nancy stepped back. She used her third eye to visualize the neural circuits of the subject of the painting. “Who are you?” she whispered. “Who are you?”

A Flash Fiction Triptych: The Consequences of Sadness

I brought the cards from my Dixit game to my writing group. This is a fun storytelling game for ages 8 to infinity. The cards are beautiful. We used them as prompts. See the three cards I selected from the ten or so I was randomly assigned. If the image doesn’t show up, click on the blue text below.

Three cards from original Dixit Game. Artist M.Cardouat

Part The First

The true artist will buy paint over food. As Rumi purportedly said (via John Moyne and Coleman Barks) “If you can’t get fed, be bread.”

Puss in Boots, in her 92nd incarnation, this time as an artist, has made good use of her soul’s accumulated wisdom. Her current painting is of a fish, so realistically depicted, it swims off the canvas, naively thinking itself liberated, but now free to fall prey to the waiting fisherman.

Part The Second

Sadly, my head drooped. Forced back in to the ring too soon after my daughter’s death, this time was the only time in my life that I was sorry I had chosen this profession. It was the first time I felt inadequate to the challenge. I needed a clown to cheer myself up. The tears of the clown flowed down my face. I at least wished I had paid more attention to the prof in that 400 level class, “The Sad Clown.” Back then, I thought it would be unnecessary. I’d always been the fountain of cheer.

Part The Third

Will there be anyone left alive to witness the heat death of the universe? Only the consciousness of the eternal serpent. No longer able to survive on its own waste products, the perpetual motion machine is winding down. The serpent bleeds its last drops of vitality as infinity chills toward absolute zero.

Perhaps, perhaps on its way to a new bang in the network we call the mulitiverse.

Note about the Eternal Serpent: This reference is to the Orobouros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros), or the snake eating its own tail. The issue isn’t eating its tail though, it’s what is implied in the action of eating its tail. The snake exists self sufficiently, on its own waste product. We humans can’t do that and survive in human form. Only “The All” is capable of this feat.

See this link for an image of the Orobourus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros#/media/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg

What is a Knomo Choicius?

When I look at how humans treat each other, I don’t wanna be one. So, I’m opting out. I’ve decided that I’m no long going to consider myself a Homo Sap. I’m a Homo Knomo Choicius now. It’s a new day. Why wait for the plague? Why not just go ahead and create the foundations of a new spiritual path, along with the new species of Homo? Of course, new spiritual foundations would be foundations laid over older foundations. Why re-invent the wheel? We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water, as they say. What religion might appeal to the Homo Knomo Choicius? What would replace the scriptures of all the ancient faith traditions?

Join me in the Convolution of Knomo Choicius!

The “Rapture”

At one point, I started to fantasize that we’d actually have the “Rapture,” where the rigid fundamentalists, of any type, preferentially got killed off by a plague. They think we’re left in the worse place, but maybe we’d be better off with fewer people who are stuck in old traditions around. They think those left behind are in hell, but I think maybe we’d be better off. But by their own beliefs, the ones who were taken would be happy too!

To be clear, I’m not out to pick on any specific religion. I once had an argument with a fundy Bahai. Now up until that day, I would have thought that was an oxy-moron, if there ever was one. But sad to say, even Buddhists have started resorting to violence in our sad, sad world. Anyway, I’m a progressive. Focusing hatred on a single ethnic or religious group is repugnant to me! It’s only because Christian fundies are the type I have to deal with in my day to day life, co-opting their own Rapture fantasy was what crystallized for me. What if poetic justice prevailed? What would the world look like, in the aftermath of the Peace Fare Virus?

There was a historical precedent for this, I reflected. First of all, when forty percent of humanity died due to the Black Plague in the Middle Ages in Europe, there was a rapid change in outlook by those who were “left behind.” Clearly, belonging to the Church hadn’t saved anyone. On top of that, the dramatic decrease in population meant that the equivalent of the minimum wage rapidly rose. The poorest of the abused under-classes experienced considerable improvement in standard of living, and the backbone of the self-reinforcing power structure of the church and royalty was broken. In the West, we ended up with the Renaissance, and eventually, a new, more Democratic vision of government.

What would such a Renaissance look like today? How would the daily lives of ordinary people change? Mother Earth would surely breathe a sigh of relief with a significantly lower population burden. I fantasize that there would be more resources for the poor, who would still outnumber the rich. Life might just be a little bit easier for those who currently have it so rough.

But, I asked myself, would we even still be homo sapiens sapiens?

Recent scientific work has shown that we are not the single human race that the Adam and Eve story made us out to be. Maybe this is part of the reason that there are large fractions of the population who can’t communicate with each other. At least they can’t communicate anything more subtle than “Please pass the salt.”

And isn’t part of the definition of a biological species that it can freely interbreed? Why do so many couples need fertility clinics?

Cultivate Clarity! Learn to Discern!