The Namers
THE NAMERS
Once upon a time, there were no names for anything. There was no Adam or Eve, monarch butterfly, sunflower, cherry tree, woodchuck, cooper's hawk, slime mold, or carpenter ant. Instead, everything identified by its relationship to the others around it. There were no words to separate individuals, except through a storied description that shifted through the seasons. The language of the birds and the bees, chipmunks and nut-bearing trees, and even the allelopathic plants and grumpy wolverines, was rich with adaptive connections that they shared like wisps of vowely breath on a cold morning. Then the Namers came with hard consonants stuck in their throats.
Now, the Namers were afraid of nearly everything; being caught under a bright, hot sky with nowhere to hide, long shadows, starry skies, when water fell through the air on cold, dark nights, the soft sounds of wind in hollow plants, the loud bang of thunderclaps, big and small animals, and the secret conversations of evil trees. The Namers tried living in the ground, high in voiceless trees, on long, flat plains, and between the echoes of mountain caves. Everywhere they went, they found dangers. But their fear made them clever and they learned to build walls to keep out the world. And there, separated from everything else, they named each other. For the first time ever, they were alone, even when they were together.
The next thing they named was their walls and called it a "home." Then, some genius threw some straw on the floor and called it a "bed." It spread quickly from there and each thing they named made the world less scary and more comfortable. It wasn't so complicated when each thing was chained to a name, shrinking the mysteries into a few syllables. They wrote it all down and broke it into even smaller bits, spelling them out until they were controlled.
After they controlled everything in names, there was nothing left to do except control each other with long, boring stories called the "Social Hierarchies."
So just remember, no matter what you're told, you're not special. You're everything.