Oppenheimer,

 

I’ve seen the bombastic movie – pun intended –  Oppenheimer, which is based on the autobiography of this immensely complex physicist, who was considered the father of the atomic bomb. Funny, that he is called the father of this terrible child. He was the director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory in the 1940s. I want to contrast the work of this troubled man with my work. I am very happy with what I have done. I didn’t want to be a father, as I felt I had something more important to do. You could say – I hope you will – my discovery of Embodied Language (EL) is the exact opposite of this destructive force, which is still with us today and which may very well mean the end of mankind.

 

I am not exaggerating, by stating, our future is going to depend on whether we will finally be able to acknowledge the difference between Disembodied Language (DL) and EL. DL has given us the arms race and EL is our only way out. According to the critics, the movie was historically mostly accurate and only contained a few elements of fiction. However, in my opinion, the whole movie was based on fiction, as the intense conversation going on, from beginning till the end, was an example of DL. Actually, the movie was merely another failed attempt at EL.

 

Although, the relentless, forceful, predetermined, loaded, deceitful, so-called dialogue, which went on against the back-drop – another pun intended – of the big nuclear bang, that is, the big bang created by men, it wasn’t clear, that people, who engage in DL, will do horrible things and it makes absolutely no sense, to try to speak with DL about DL. Neither Oppenheimer nor Einstein remotely resembled EL.

 

While this noisy movie didn’t say so explicitly, its message was, of course, that regardless of our romantic relationships, science and politics, we have remained ignorant about our EL. Presumably, it is not our own way of dealing with language, which is    complicated and needing all our attention, but the scientist Oppenheimer, the American Prometheus.

 

What got Oppenheimer this title? In ancient Greek mythology Prometheus was referred to as the God of Fire. Interestingly, the name is also believed to refer to forethought. Prometheus is best know for defying the Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge and more generally, civilization. So, the fire, is just language and the so-called stealing of the fire, is reasoning with our own language (EL), but we are too hung up on and carried away by what we can do with language – physics, atomic bombs and movies – to pay attention to how we want to use it.

 

The question: are we going to use our language for good or for evil, depends on how we define good or  evil. Historically, good was defined in terms of what was beneficial to the group we belonged to, as our tribe helped us to survive. However, such a survival mechanism has brought about the nuclear doom. Moreover, our DL has created and maintained all divisiveness, as it deals with how we decide for each other how we deal with our language. First, parents decide for their children, then teachers decide for their students, preachers decide for their flock and, supposedly, politicians tell people what they want to hear. We have never decided, for ourselves, as individuals, how we want to use our language, as that would reveal the choice between DL and EL.

 

Actually, there is no choice to be made between DL or EL. Once it is clear what is DL and what is EL, we want EL. Yes, EL will be a tremendous explosion of intelligence, wellbeing and collaboration, as we will finally be able to deliberately, properly, skillfully use our own language. In other words, individualism, as expressed by our EL, benefits us as human beings and is not at odds with our history of conditioning, which, so to speak, gave birth to our individuality.

 

In Western civilization, in which individualism was eventually born, Prometheus became a figure, who represented human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences. Only with our DL, in which speakers always dominate listeners, do we create an arms race. Surely, there is nothing wrong with nuclear science and its potential to benefit societies. It is not about the science, but about how we use the science, and, in the same way, EL is not about the language, but how we use our language.

 

The fact that Oppenheimer was concerned about the long-term implications of nuclear weapons runs parallel to my concern about the general ignorance of the destructiveness of DL, which is our common way of dealing with language. Oppenheimer was a lone wolf in the company of people, who couldn’t fathom, as he could, the consequences of what he had discovered. I know that to talk about EL is like dropping a bomb. It is surprising and alarming, that, without any warning, we suddenly become aware that our DL, which is – and, I can’t emphasize this often enough – our own habitual, unconscious way of dealing with language, is utterly devastating.

 

There was – in my opinion – reason for an F-bomb, because the movie contained a scene, in which a woman reads in Sanskrit from the Bhagavat Gita, the famous Hindu scripture, while she was wiggling on top of Oppenheimer and having casual sex with him. She made him read the sentence: I am become death, destroyer of worlds. Hollywood, of course, would never make such an offensive movie scene  about the Koran and Islam or about China, because they know very well, that then, all hell would really break loose. This is an example of how Western culture is okay with denigrating Hindu culture and that insidious DL is always about group dominance.