Language is competence

There is no common factor between all the rich people in the world. There is no objective scale from which it is even remotely possible to deduce the reasons for riches. Money only flows, and there are people who catch it, temporarily, and those who don’t. You will find those who don’t care about money with money, and those who care about money with money. There are people who come from wealthy families who have money, and there are wealthy people with humble origins. Money is with those who worked hard, worked smart, or didn’t work at all. However, between every rich person who lived, the closest thing we have to a relatively passable intersection point, is language.

In something as unpredictable and unevenly distributed as wealth, language plays the most crucial part. You will find in all rich people the ability to communicate, and to adapt to the grammar of the people they are selling their ideas, products, services, or innovations to. To make them believe. The ability to speak to someone the way they want to be spoken to. Even crooks with money know how to use language to their advantage. To ‘put their mouth where their money is’. Tesla used physics to light the bulb. Edison used language to make it his.

Language commands every other field of life. Everyone thinks. A philosopher thinks parallelly with language. Everyone speaks. The president speaks himself to power. All the apostles of God were the foremost in their command of language and grammar. The ones who claimed to be apostles but weren’t, are best refuted not by the critique of their morality or inconsistency in their logic, but by detecting their incompetence in their use of language, and their inability to ignite conviction where it mattered.

This is not to say that the one who knows more languages is better than the one who doesn’t (although there is a tremendous difference in their capacities once such a fact is established), but to say that the one who knows more about how language works, how to manipulate it, what reactions it would get out of people, how much of it is true and how much a facade, is the one who will hold the power to navigate the tides of life with the most indomitable mast, and will sail the ship of his intellect to lands unfathomed to other men.

The practitioners of the art of the written word, of literature, are imbedded into the sub-conscious of all human history. Orators have launched armies into the gaping mouth of death. A mere misinterpretation of Nietzsche became the soul of the devil in Hitler. Homer and Goethe conquered as much of Napoleon’s mind as Napoleon conquered Europe. Men can act only for themselves, but can speak for a million other men. All grandeur is puppet to the dripping strings of spit from the tongues of great men.

Language is divine

A weapon such as language has complex structures and nuances. It also takes different forms altogether depending on where it is spoken. A sentence in English is the same sentence in Japanese but reversed. The meanings of the words in a language depend as much upon the way the tongue moves as it does on the reaction of the people using those words in a given setting. Something as rigid, objective, and direct as a book of law or a constitution is often twisted by lawyers and politicians in courtrooms and parliaments all around the world. The workarounds for these loopholes exist, too, in the ability to compress or decompress words within a subject-specific context.

Take culture to be a sword. the sharp edge of culture is language. The sharper the edge, the more competent the sword of culture, the better its cuts, the more versatile and wide-spanning the skill of the people practicing that culture.

With all that said, it is a mistake to attribute the miracle of language to man. Language is a tool for man, but as much as this tool is a gift, it is also a curse. A gossip could lead to slaughter, a rumor to suicide, a complaint to punishment, a misplaced word to separation. A gift and curse that surpasses our scope and understanding of reality itself. Its applications, complex. Its effects, immeasurable. But all of it gets best installed when man is an infant.

The child expands the horizons of their mind, quite unconsciously and by design, to attach feelings to words like “sad”, to understand space with prepositions like “in”, to place the world in time with words like “now” or “after”, and to lay it all in perfect grammatical sequence with each other in the form of sentences.

The absorption of the fundamentals of math, of structure and form, of phonetics and musicality, of emotional weight, of dimensions, of space, all through the lens of language as a tool to translate what’s inside ourselves to a physical, deducible, and socially accepted medium, all by our fourth year, better than any adult on the planet, better than the infant’s own upcoming adulthood, could never be the work of the child or the parent. It is like saying that a mother consciously makes the baby inside of her womb. She doesn’t. The baby is simply born and the process, for 9 months, ‘happens’ to her. Language coming organically to the infant is a miracle, too, because it unfolds as many times as birth and death itself.

Language is what tells us that we were meant not to just survive, like plants or animals, but to mean something, to ourselves, to each other. As automatic as it may seem, it arrived in us, by design. We were built for it and it for us, for language, above all, is a metaphysical imitation of the human itself. To create endless sentences sourcing from a finite set of rules, sounds and strokes of the pen. That is precisely what man is, too. More, from a lot less.