Peaceful, the crickets on the vines singing even in midday. Didn't wait for nightfall today. Not for the sun to boil the sky red and yellow, nor for dusk and those blues stealing away into blacks. But for the most part they'll wait til everything gets tired and the light starts to turn in. Now breathe. A gentle wave comes to shore, tidings of another mundanity.

The tide is quite low.

Now let's look at something else the wave has carried to shore.

My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.

–Claude Levi-Strauss

Looking at the birthplaces of written language (Mesoamerica, Egypt, China and Mesopotamia) we may note, as Levi-Strauss points out, all these locations developed class systems and built the first cities around the same time. Is writing then a tool primarily used to better exploit a concentrated people, to segment them into classes and use them for labor, and not as a way to enlighten people? The hypothesis has been concluded neither way, but in inconclusiveness we do see that the application of writing was fairly exclusive in those early years (~1000-2000 BC)–it indicated power and prestige. Things like the Olmec stone carvings, Egyptian obelisks, or on a lesser scale, Mesopotamian merchants using writing for inventory tracking, buying and selling. One can imagine, then, that perhaps writing was a means for the powerful to stay powerful and consolidate more. And now that we've climbed into a literate society, web novels no doubt have assumed the role of enslaving force.

Truly examining claims goes beyond the scope this small chapter–read Tristes Tropiques, where the quote came from, instead–but it does make one wonder: if written language did indeed begin as a way to serve the hierarchization, the enslavement of people, then where did spoken language come from? If spoken language, which shapes and guides how we think, is also fundamentally a tool of domination and control, then we stand on a quite sobering foundation. But even if the worst is true, people have been torturing and killing and oppressing each other for millenia, and we've still manage to live with our heavy burden of history and inherited problems.

Here's some sunnier armchair speculation: we think predominantly in language and considering 'cogito ergo sum,' how nice would it be to learn a foreign language and exist in that fundamentally, linguistically different way?