REFLECTIVE INSIGHT #025 - PROPERLY FORKED - WHY OUR ECONOMY AND PLANET ARE CRASHING WITHOUT OUR CONSENT
Have you ever looked at the state of the world—the climate crisis, the social inequality, the fact that a lettuce recently outlasted a British Prime Minister—and thought, "Man, this is properly forked"?
Well, over my Christmas holiday (when I should have been eating ham and ignoring my emails), I went down a research rabbit hole so deep I nearly bumped into Alice. And I found out something terrifying: we actually are forked. But not in the way you think. It’s not just our politics or our economics that are broken. It’s our words.
We are trying to run a complex, living, breathing planet using a linguistic operating system designed for a steam engine.
The 17th-Century "Software Update" That Forked Us
To find the bug in the system, I had to go back to the scene of the crime: London, between 1620 and 1700.
Before this period, people generally saw the world as "entangled." The universe was alive, and words were these rich, juicy things that connected you to the world. But then came the Scientific Revolution. A group of very serious men in very large wigs—including Sir Francis Bacon and the founders of the Royal Society—decided that all this "poetic" and "connected" language was inefficient.
They wanted a language that could "command nature." So, they performed what I’ve coined "The Great Semantic Enclosure."
Just as rich landowners were fencing off the common land to kick out the peasants, these intellectuals fenced off meaning. They stripped words of their magic, their spirit, and their connection. They demanded a "plain style" where one word equalled one dead object. They basically tried to turn the English language into a spreadsheet—great for counting sheep, terrible for describing the shepherd’s soul.
The Newtonian Error: Why We Treat Nature Like a Vending Machine
This creates what I call the "Newtonian Error."
In this context, Newtonian refers to a worldview that treats the universe like a giant clockwork machine—predictable, mechanical, and made of separate parts that only interact when they crash into each other.
This error is baked into English grammar. We use a Subject-Verb-Object structure ("The company mines the land"). This forces you to think that the "company" and the "land" are totally separate things. It tricks your brain into thinking you can hurt the "object" (the earth) without hurting the "subject" (yourself).
It is a linguistic optical illusion. And here is the kicker: this update happened without our consent. We didn't vote for a language that treats the living earth like a dead quarry. We didn't sign up for a syntax of separation.
But this unauthorised forking of our language has subsequently forked our economy, our health, our mental well-being, and the planet itself. We are running "extraction software" on a "regeneration hardware" planet, and the motherboard is starting to smoke.
The Solution: A Linguistic 'Hard Fork'
So, how do we fix a broken operating system? In the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain, when a piece of software is fundamentally flawed or needs a radical upgrade, developers execute a "Hard Fork."
A hard fork is a permanent divergence from the previous version of the blockchain. The new path separates from the old one, leaving the bugs behind to build a new, better reality.
I believe we need a Linguistic Hard Fork. We need to stop trying to patch the "Old Code" of extractive, Newtonian English and migrate to a "New Code" that actually matches the laws of physics. We need to get the fork out of Babylon.
The Triangulation of Truth
The good news is, we don't need to invent a new language from scratch (my Christmas holiday wasn't that long). My research found a "Triangulation of Truth"—three different languages that all agree with each other, leaving modern English looking like the odd one out.
Quantum Physics (The Hard Data): Science has finally caught up. It tells us the universe isn't made of separate billiard balls; it's made of Entanglement. Separation is a myth.
Biblical Theology (The Deep Spirit): If you dig into the original Hebrew (not just the English translations), you find concepts like Ruach, which means wind, breath, and spirit all at once. It refuses to separate the physical from the spiritual.
Te Reo Māori (The Universal Explainer): This is the key. Te Reo never underwent the "Great Semantic Enclosure." It’s a language of connection. When we say Whanaungatanga, we aren't just talking about a family reunion; we are describing a literal web of quantum entanglement where "I" and "You" are inextricably linked.
I’ve concluded that Te Reo Māori acts as a "Universal Explainer." Because it focuses on processes and flows rather than static objects, it is the perfect code for navigating a quantum universe.
Conclusion: Unforking Our Future
We have been trying to solve 21st-century problems with 17th-century words. We are trying to build a regenerative world using a language designed to exploit a dead one.
It’s time to unfork ourselves from the Newtonian delusion. We need to start speaking a language that remembers the earth is alive. Whether we are in Northland or New York, the task is the same: we have to change our syntax to save our systems.
We don't just need new policies. We need a new grammar. Otherwise, we’re truly forked.
