Humanity, shaped for millions of years by survival instincts, became a biological “struggle machine.” Today, this biological hardware experiences a profound evolutionary mismatch with an artificial and hyper-comfortable environment. The metabolism of our ancestors — which stored energy against scarcity and triggered fight-or-flight responses against sudden threats — has become dysfunctional in today’s calorie-abundant and sedentary life, transforming into civilization’s diseases and chronic anxiety. In the absence of a real external enemy, the mind turns inward and manufactures artificial enemies. Humanity without an enemy is its own enemy. What we call “itself” is its capacity for language, its culture, its words.
The survival role of language
Communication, as observed in most animals, emerged as a warning system to neutralize threats. Language is a more advanced warning system. Beyond signaling danger, it also served functions such as coordinating hunts and forming intra-group alliances. It appears to have fulfilled its function up to the present day. If humanity managed to transcend its struggle in nature and build a civilization, it did so not through muscle power but through the communicative possibilities of language. It resembles a weapon that helped us survive. However, it cannot be said to be successful in guiding the individual’s life. The individual sleeps with a weapon pointed at themselves at every moment.
The evolutionary mismatch of the human and language
The individual not knowing how to use the weapon is not the problem. But if one uses a weapon to navigate personal life and build faith in the future, it causes a serious problem. Language that works against an enemy does not work against oneself. Enemy rhetoric is the most fitting use of language. Threat + concrete entity is the reason for language’s existence. This is why politicians can gather millions behind them and lead them forward. Individuals, on the other hand, try to use language for things like “God, nation, love, equality, beauty, religion.” In such uses, the evolutionary mismatch of language merges with the mismatch of humanity’s survival-oriented evolution. Everyone inherits from their ancestors both a killer’s body and a weapon, yet uses them to solve the meaning of life, the structure of the universe, identity crises. This mismatch, by the very nature of language, is managed without ever surfacing and is carried forward to future generations.
Objections
Any reasonable person knows that language makes social institutions, concepts, aesthetics, and ideas possible, and that it cannot be used solely as a concrete threat detector. The origin of language, just like the origin of humanity itself, cannot be declared through a “naturalistic fallacy” — one cannot say it must be so simply because that is how it came to be. Saying that language and humanity are instruments of crime could become a self-fulfilling prophecy and thus turn into a dangerous discourse. These objections are valid, yet to make warnings about the future, it is our duty to also report the path we have traveled and its dangers.
According to Robin Dunbar, the primary evolution of language was not to coordinate hunts but to manage social relationships. Apes form alliances by grooming one another. Humans do this through conversation. Gossip is social grooming. Grooming is costly in time. Two animals can only groom each other simultaneously; as the group grows, this method cannot scale. Language solved this problem: one person can form social bonds with multiple people at the same time. Conversation is the scalable version of grooming. Dunbar ties the evolution of language to social motivations, but since social needs themselves arise from survival concerns, one could argue this is a superficial causality.
Conclusion
Through language we defeated wild animals, but afterward we turned on one another. We warned and were warned about dangers, yet the warning system became the danger. We used language so much that we mistook words for reality. It served us so well that we thought it needed no maintenance. Failing to maintain it, using it without questioning, meant perishing for the sake of words. Those who recognized the magical powers of language drove humanity from place to place with false alarms designed to sweep everyone along. Where we have arrived is simply a different guise of the survival struggle — a struggle to remain within society. The strange thing is, there appears to be no option other than to continue misusing language. Just as we could not choose the bodies we inherited from our ancestors, we cannot change language — a social institution — on our own. But we can prevent it from becoming a plague upon us in our individual uses.
Take, for example, the problem of “the meaning of life.” Beyond survival, there is no purpose. Meaning, however, is a problem of language. A word has meaning. The fact that we name the sequence of events “life” does not mean we can mark it with a definition. What we did in life was survive. Once that became easier, we needed to find other things to do. These things to do are not defined — they do not exist in language — and the use of language in this manner can only be carried out by admitting such helplessness.
