Intro

 (Caveat: Please understand that this page and the three that follow it in this section are all very much still works in progress, and thus potentially subject to much change before the final version of the book appears.)

Here's the Deal.

This is it. A life's work. Originally intended to be purely linear. In fact, originally intended to be in the form of fiction. Now it is neither. But there will be opportunity for those of you who wish to pursue this reading in more or less a linear fashion to do so. Nevertheless, from the very beginning--and increasingly as the work proceeds--there should be ample opportunity, along with an equal amount of encouragement, for readers to take detours into related topics, so much so at times that one may come to feel one is navigating a maze of interconnected ideas rather than linear progressions of them.

However, I've written it so that anyone with sufficient intelligence, curiosity, and intellectual ambition should be able to eventually find his or her own preferred way to traverse the full complement of the material presented here.

At times this style will be abbreviated; at other times it will be, for some, onerously elaborate and dense. But again, for anyone sufficiently motivated a reasonably dedicated effort will produce a decent understanding of what I'm trying to say. Of this I have no doubt. Whether that understanding, if and when reached, will resonate within the reader as the sort of call to action that I might desire is of course an entirely different, if somewhat related matter.

All right. Enough introduction. Let's get back to the opening statement.  Here is the deal!

What we are talking about here is a failure to adapt. A failure to adapt to our own successes as a species. What for thousands of years was primarily a set of technological limitations to a much better world for human beings has become in the past few hundred, give or take, depending upon one's point of view, a set of psychological, social, and consequently – and now most desperately – ecological obstacles

In my previous, preliminary book on this subject, Towards a Biology of Culture, I cover in some rambling detail and large generalities key elements, as I see them--from various physiological, psychological, literary and linguistic, historical and social vantage points--that constitute our current failure to adapt. Yet this former book, which you will also eventually be able to access in its entirety (currently only a few sample chapters are available here, and even these may be subject to a few future revisions) on this website, falls far short in analyzing the role of language in this problem of adaptation. The current book, for the time being going under the heading of A Bioenergetic Analysis of Language, attempts to some significant degree to make up for that shortcoming. Nevertheless, there is still much that I don't know, some of which may one day be knowable, and some of which may never be knowable, about the role language plays in our current failure to adapt. Yet if I didn't think that I haven't learned at least a few new and significant facts, ultimately provable on a scientific basis, with regard to these aspects of language and their relationship to other key variables of social change, I would not have embarked upon this writing whatsoever.

What do you know. Several paragraphs and still not one link for you to click. In the early days of computer lingo, such links were referred to as hypertext. Now that the practice is so familiar to most computer users, we can just call it "linkage". Don't worry. With regards to this book, you will get to try it out soon. And pretty soon after that, you might well start encountering links you would rather pass up in order to keep reading the page you're already on. In that case, no worries. If you wish, you can always come back and click on that link later on. And if you do choose to click on that link right away, at convenient points along the route it takes you there will be opportunities to go back to wherever you wish along the  path from which you started clicking, so that you may continue on with your reading  from there.

All this is as it should be, since from my earliest days as a student, I've believed that, whenever possible, form should follow function. Part of the central thesis presented here about the kind of social change required if the human species is going to continue on in an actually improved, and not increasingly impoverished, future is that we humans will need to create an operating system in many ways radically distinct from the one which we have evolved over the past several thousand years. Key if not central to that change will be some very different ways of thinking, which in turn will often include some major modifications to our more traditional linear forms of exposition.

Enough talking about it. Let's try a little linkage. The main components  for the kind of social change I'm talking about here are three. The first is spiritual. The second and third, in no particular order, are self-knowledge and book learning. Now you can click on any of the three links in the previous two sentences for further elaboration of each one of these three subjects. This is a good starting exercise. It will give you an idea of how links will work in the pages that follow.

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