: Mokokoma Mokhonoana
: Divided and Conquered An Analysis of Man-made Weapons of Mass Separation
: Sekoala Publishing Company (Pty) Ltd
: 9780620600484
: 1
: CHF 4.80
:
: Philosophie, Religion
: English
: 317
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

What makes you, you? Is it your mother tongue? Is it your country of birth? Is it your ethnicity? Is it your bank balance? Or, could it be who or what you call God?


Mokokoma takes the reader through a mental tour. An exploration of social constructs that have divided the human race, i.e., language, culture, nationality, the monetary system, religion, ethnicity, race, et cetera. A journey through familiar territories. But, for a change, with an unfamiliar set of eyes.


If this book does not un-divide the human race, nothing will.


Mokokoma argues that the civilized man is technologically ahead of--but intellectually behind--his time. This one of a kind life-changing book is our opportunity to catch up.

LANGUAGE

What Is Language?


Take a group of men, ask each to definelanguage, and you are likely to get as many different definitions as the number of men who have responded.

When people communicate, language functions as an attempt to move, or rather duplicate, a thought, a question, or an order, from the speaker’s mind to that of the listener, or from the writer’s mind to that of the reader. The same can, of course, be said about the deaf, who rely on visual gestures and signs to achieve the very same thing.

I moved frommove toduplicate. But as fitting asduplicate might be, it is misleading, in every single instance of a misunderstanding, to refer to the process of human communication as the duplication of a thought or thoughts. More on that later. Anyway, I opted forduplicate simply because, in instances where communication is without a misunderstanding, after a speaker speaks, though the listener will then be thinking about whatever it is that the speaker said, whatever the speaker said will by no means be lost (by the speaker’s mind); it will merely be duplicated (by the listener’s mind).

For a simple analogy, think of the process of combustion. When a burning candle, candle1, is used to light another, candle2, it is not at the expense of candle1’s flame. Even though candle2 will, at some point, have the “same” flame as candle1.

Perhaps the wordattempt is the most important part of what I said as to what the function of language is. I regard the process of communication as an attempt simply because communication isn’t always a successful exchange of information: it is merely an attempt to do so (in other words, a misunderstanding is nothing but such an attempt’s lack of success). And, equally important, by seeing something as an attempt, we become less defensive whenever someone directs our attention to the thing’s defects. For once we have agreed on what the function of a thing is, it then becomes possible for us to objectively examine the thing in question (i.e., look at the thing through eyes that are not contaminated by our worldview, our beliefs, our affection for the thing, etc.) and, more important than the thing itself, the thing’s effectiveness. For you cannot sensibly call a man lost, unless you know where he is and, more importantly, where he intended to be.

Having said that, this book isn’t merely an attempt to tell the reader what a particular social construct is, and then comment as to whether or not the social construct achieves its purpose. Every single social construct that I will explore in this book achieves, as I am about to attempt to illustrate, what I believe it was made to achieve. My interest is in why and how these social constructs divide the human race, not in whether or not they fail to achieve what they were supposedly invented to achieve.

Lastly, let us return to the question that this writing’s title is made up of.

Perhaps the most insightful answer to that question is that tha