Gefira 79: Those who control the words we say, control the thoughts we think.

The time draws near the Birth of the Word, which is why also Gefira has taken word as its topic. Both the theological Word and the human word have creative powers. Though the former has brought the whole of the universe into existence, the latter does not lag much behind: it creates little parallel worlds ensconced in ideological cocoons that envelop huge numbers of mankind. The comparison to a cocoon tells it all: a man entrapped in it has little contact with reality – the cocoon is the whole world, albeit microscopic in size.

Humanity or rather large groups of it have always lived in such cocoons. In the recent centuries we have had large, medium-size and small cocoons of Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Pol Potism, Three Represents (of China), anarchism, liberalism, conservatism, with their many subclasses or subcategories, and the list is virtually inexhaustible. These cocoons separate their advocates and followers from the evidence of their senses and suppress much of their reasoning. These cocoons act like templates for thoughts. They have been formulated in words, and they act as viruses or bacteria in that they infect the minds of people through the eye (reading) or the ear (listening) and take control over their thinking and consequently – behaviour. If you are taught that the world is all about class struggle, or the struggle between the sexes, or the conflict between man and nature, or equality of all, or supremacy of some, free market or redistribution, competition or equity or exploitation, and so on, and so forth, then you see almost everything through this lens. Some of us are prone to accepting this, others – that ideological virus, very few are resistant to the dominant ideology.

And just like biological viruses can tamper with parts of the genetic code of its vector or themselves, so, too, verbal viruses can have the same effect in that they are transmitted by words whose meaning is purposefully changed.