Cultural Relativity
Europeans are internalized, Americans external. Multi-lingualism leads to useless complexity and introversion. Uni-lingualism allows mental space to be devoted to other things, like science and technology, without devoting so much effort to translation and bad grammar. There are two broad fields of knowledge in the world from which all others derive: mathematics and linguistics, on the surface at polar extremes from each other, mathematics revealing knowledge of the other, linguistics revealing knowledge of each other. In reality the two are not so different from each other, linguistics with a strong logico-mathematical basis, math also capable of a distinct relativity of perspective. They both thrive on the little stick-men of culture that live in the pages of books, on the pages of experiment. Numbers and letters are not so different, really. Everything else is derivative knowledge, recipes for fulfillment and short histories of nearly everything. The thing is in the name, a convenient substitute for the thing itself, virtual reality in graphic symbols. It’s like my movie scripts. Nobody wants them; they just want the titles: “Good Day to Die”, “Virus”, “Reality Check”, and “Lost in Time”, my names just hung on any old shit piece of work.
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