The world isn’t really like that. In fact, to call it the world is already a mistake. Maybe reality would be a better word to use. Yet even this ushers deception. To speak of reality is to suggest there is something else, something that can’t possibly be. To provide a label is to separate the inseparable, to extract and to abstract. To claim reality as a noun is to claim there can be modes of being that fall outside of being itself.
But language isn’t the real problem here. Language is merely a porous membrane of attachment, a membrane meant to bind us to each other, a membrane designed to provide a deeply-penetrating social texture to experience. The real problem is the way that language has been subverted, turned around, and plied against us. The membrane has become infused and infested with parasitic tendrils of civilization.
We are social primates, each of us meant for a community-embedded life. But modern social spaces no longer provide access to community. There are people, for sure, but community is more than people, and even our closest relationships are woven of superficial threads, absent those qualities of attachment and union that define a true community of equal beings. Civilization has no use for equal beings. Civilization is powered by inequality, by absence and lack and emptiness, whether real or imagined. Equal beings engaged in authentically human intercourse cannot know the absence, lack, and emptiness that are endemic to civilization. What could I lack that is not readily provided? Who would not spare some of theirs if I were in momentary need? And to whom would I not freely offer a portion of my own? And how could I possibly fall into need when abundance and plenty define my every breathing moment?
