Sharon Ellison’s Taking the War Out of Our Words

Carl H. Flygt

May 2006

Human beings can only interact in a limited number of ways. We can use the five senses. In addition, we can interact telepathically. The energy created by the traditional dynamics of human communication, which devolves essentially from a long and universal history of warfare, causes people to suffer pain, alienation and violence. I am certain it doesn’t have to be this way.

- Sharon Strand Ellison

quoted and interpolated by Carl H. Flygt

How does the socially unimaginable become social reality? Under what conditions? With the advent of Sharon Ellison’s work on communication and conversation (www.pndc.com) we can begin to see how these questions may be answered analytically. We may have, with this and related efforts in the field of Collective Intelligence, the beginnings of a new history in which human consciousness graduates to an essentially new and qualitatively distinct category of function and normativity. With Non-Defensive Communication, we may have the beginnings of a new social science, and of a new form of life on earth.

Ellison’s basic idea is that in reality, and with appearances of civilization aside, we are as language users each engaged in a civil war, a state of nature where the instincts for self-preservation and self-defense inform all of our self-conscious presentations and outlooks. Look around you in society and ask how it could be otherwise! This reality has been thrust upon us by the weight of history, by power relations between nations and kings, between landowners and serfs, between capital and labor, between education and ignorance. It is moreover the only reality imaginable in the world of material nature, where the objects of consciousness occupy space and carry inertia, where nature is fundamentally vast, opaque and indifferent, where objective knowledge is hard won and incremental, and where bodily reproduction is bloody and, throughout the preponderance of history, dangerous and often deadly.

Ellison’s objective is to demonstrate in practical terms how a world without the imperative of self-defense would work. Her strategy is not to imagine a Grand Scenario in which all of the conditions for universal self-disarmament are laid out in a logical argument. That task she leaves to others. She seeks rather to build on her basic insight by rehearsing examples of ordinary language use and showing how these contribute to self-reinforcing patterns of defensiveness that result in personal unhappiness and alienation. By exhibiting this very plain pattern of social pathology, together with its diagnosis and remedy, Ellison holds out the hope that sufficient numbers of individuals will become motivated to approach their communication patterns in an autonomous, powerful and non-defensive manner, and that this manner will then trickle down, eventually permeating all of society and all of human social experience.

Here however the detached observer can actually do more than wish the good woman Godspeed and take the wait-and-see attitude toward how everything turns out. Here one can actually sign up to play a game. That game is possible, as a practical matter, because someone else has made a plausible effort to write out its pre-existing rules. Carl H. Flygt’s Conversation – A New Theory of Language (Lindisfarne Books, 2006) draws on the same basic ideas and principles as Sharon Ellison’s Taking the War Out of Our Words (Bay Tree Press, 2002) and is part of the same basic intuition that is beginning to percolate through advanced Western societies. That intuition is the sense of Collective Intelligence, the pre-rational and psychic capacity that pervades all animal life and is responsible, together with  the DNA of the genes, for the evolution of life and the forms of life that have passed across the Great Stage and Drama of the Earth’s cosmic history. The game of Collective Intelligence is now a reality, and players like Sharon Ellison have an important role to play in it.

To eliminate defensiveness, to liberate honesty, to build integrity and to inspire compassion in the home, at work and among those with whom one enters into reciprocal and material relationships are the great outcomes of Sharon’s work. It is hard to imagine a world extended from this one in which this reversal of social reality will not eventually succeed. Man’s technical mastery of economic and material reality has left most of us with a great spiritual thirst and spiritual longing. That thirst and longing are what will change a world that threatens and alienates us into one that uplifts us wholly. That together with sufficient logic and sufficient intelligence. Let the logic and intelligence of Sharon Ellison be known, and the stance of autonomous, non-defensive power be adopted, in increasing doses, by those who would Find a New Order of men and women.