OMNICREOLISTICS

Praveen S. Venkataramana

Omnicreolistics and the Unconscious

What is a Language?

The unconscious is structured like a language. I regard unconscious habit and norm systems the same way as languages, and thus use the word “language” to denote both. I also use “habit system” for it. I do not use “language” to mean expressive/generative systems the way combinatorialists or naive non-linguists use it, instead I call these things “generative systems”.

There is no one true theory on how language works. All psychological sciences suffer from the observer effect much more than physical sciences, since the object of psychological sciences is the human mind, which can subconsciously confirm or rebel against theories made about it. Each language ideology has an impact on how people think and process things with their unconscious mind.

Wittgenstein famously stated that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. This is inaccurate and should instead be “the limits of my linguistic theory mean the limits of my world”.

I can argue for the reverse, the way people normally conduct themselves and behave unconsciously reflects an implied language ideology in their mind. I say that if a person’s behavior reflects a language ideology, they “live” that ideology. There are two main language ideologies that are reflected today and these are also the two main ideologies talked about in linguistics class.

Prescriptivism: the unconscious operates on rules (the “prescriptivist impulse”). Focused on virtue and righteousness. Descriptivism: the unconscious operates on habits (the “descriptivist impulse”). Focused on performativity, judgment, identity, image, group belonging, and categorical perception.

Children however aren’t born with either paradigm in place. Both these paradigms are enforced by outsiders -- prescriptivism by teachers, elders, bosses and religious authorities; and descriptivism by crowds of peers and colleagues. The natural paradigm all children follow is a third paradigm:

Omnicreolistics: the unconscious operates on freedom, choices, and motivations (the “omnicreolist impulse”). Focused on love, creativity, aesthetics, and ethics.

Everyone has proclivities towards all three impulses, both children and adults, and should recognize which one has become dominant in their lives. The omnicreolist impulse does not do away with rules and habits completely -- doing so would be logically impossible -- it instead recognizes both rules and habits and sees those in context, and cultivating omnicreolist impulse will automatically result in a healthy amount of rule-dependence and habit-dependence (not too much and not too little either). These are not the same as prescriptivist or descriptivist impulses. The omnicreolist impulse also recognizes the importance of hacking internal rules and habits into something more conducive to ethical behavior. An omnicreolist mindset recognizes rules and habits as personally decided (self- prescribed and self-cultivated). Thus in omnicreolistics, rules do not turn into virtue or righteousness and habits do not turn into performativity or identity.

These are reflected in linguistics in obvious ways. Prescriptivist languages (or standardized languages) include languages like textbook English and Classical Chinese, as well as religious languages like Classical Nahuatl, Sanskrit and Classical Arabic. Descriptivist languages (or vernacular languages) are sociolects, ethnolects and dialects picked up from crowds with a certain group identity or performative image. Most languages studied by linguists are vernacular languages. Prototypical omnicreolist languages, formed spontaneously by children, are creoles (hence the name). Children are known to develop their own grammar rules unprescribed by outsiders and be playful with language, and analogize based on patterns, before they pick up irregularities of vernacular language from peers.

Omnicreolist ideology goes a step further and says all idiolects are creoles picked up from influences of other people’s idiolects and processed through the omnicreolist impulse. Questions immediately arise about coherence of the various inputs that lead to an idiolect, and whether these lead to functional or dysfunctional idiolects. These are real problems that descriptivism and prescriptivism both ignore.

Linguists often talk about diglossia, when people code-switch between a vernacular language and a standardized language depending on context. Since omnicreolistics isn’t widely accepted as a theory as of the moment of writing this article, linguists have not recognized triglossia as much, featuring a three-way contrast between an idiolect, a sociolect, and a formal language. Triglossia is real and I believe the idiolect must be emancipated.

Moving beyond linguistics, each language ideology is also a way of being. Most institutions spread the prescriptivist way of life, and most social communities spread the descriptivist way of life. Both ways of life are ethically unstable and can lead to harmful “us” vs “them” sentiments. These are not inevitable; social communities and institutions can be formed that reinforce omnicreolist values. Omnicreolistics is the only ideology out of the three that is naturally stabilizing. Because omnicreolistics operates on freedom as a defining principle, the evolution of value systems, habits, and norms in an omnicreolist way of life is much faster than in a descriptivist or prescriptivist way of life. The evolution of unconscious thinking thus keeps up with the evolution of conscious thinking and worldview in an omnicreolist way of life. Contrast this to a descriptivist way of life (guided by the descriptivist impulse) where unconscious norms evolve at a snail’s pace, that too randomly and independent of ethics, and there are relics that are totally forgotten by the conscious mind if not actively criticized or dismissed by the conscious mind as primitive, obsolete, or unjust.

Prescriptivist and descriptivist language ideologies tend to fight each other; prescriptivists regard vernacular language as “wrong” and “substandard”, and descriptivists regard standardized language as “artificial” and “bookish”. Both ideologies look at idiolects as secondary to the kinds of languages they consider ideal or authentic. Omnicreolist ideology recognizes both kinds of language as influences and tones both ideologies down, putting them in place. Omnicreolistics looks at the idiolect, a dynamic and rapidly evolving personalized form of language, as the ideal.

Omnicreolistics does not totally shun vernacular and standardized languages though; it gives them a totally different context -- as communication and behavioral codes created for expediency to aid social cooperation. In omnicreolistics these are considered useful but very different in nature from individual languages; both must be respected in omnicreolistic thinking. When guided by the omnicreolist impulse, these codes are created deliberately with attention to personal ethics and freedom at all costs.

What is shunned in omnicreolistics is when overreliance on vernacular and prescriptive languages (including systems of habits) gets in the way of personal freedom. Thus rather than non-ideal languages, omnicreolistics has a notion of non-ideal mindsets, which in this case means anti-freedom and anti-exploratory mindsets.

Scholar-models

Prescriptivist and descriptivist ideologies are named after a type of person whose perspective is regarded as authoritative, when analyzing a culture or language or habit system. Prescriptivism is centered around the views of prescribers of rules (teachers, elders, religious authorities). I can say the prescribers of rules are the scholar-model of prescriptivism. Descriptivism’s scholar-model is the “dispassionate” outsider whose goal is to assimilate completely and unthinkingly into a habit system and be regarded as native. In the process of documenting a habit system, a descriptivist scholar engages in a dispassionate description of traits of the habit system (hence the name).

In prescriptivism, the central distinction people operate on is “correct” vs “wrong”. In descriptivism, it’s “native” vs “foreign”, or “unmarked” vs “marked”. This is what leads to the descriptivist claim that “native speakers are always right”, which really is a tautology (since “right” means native) and is not true in prescriptivism, and not true in omnicreolistics either as we’ll see.

Anyone living a language ideology strives to be a scholar-model. People who live prescriptivism strive to be in positions of power so they can prescribe rules, even if they aren’t powerful at the moment. Likewise, people who live descriptivism don’t have to be outsiders. Insiders to a habit system can live descriptivism and many do, which means that they value fitting in and being regarded as “prototypically native”. Linguistically this can surface as e.g. a child of immigrants picking up a local dialect and slang which may not be prescribed in school.

What then is the scholar-model of omnicreolistics? It’s the self-aware insider who lives in a habit system and yet is aware enough to realize the consequences of it (both positive and negative) and is willing to improve it according to their own personal conscience. Central distinctions in omnicreolistics are thus “healthy” vs “unhealthy”, and also “embodied” vs “disembodied”. A person living omnicreolistics doesn’t have to be an insider though -- an outsider lives omnicreolistics by picturing themself as an insider living under the assumptions of the habit system and is self-aware enough to critique and improve it. An outsider with an omnicreolist attitude wants to improve cultures for the well-being of their inhabitants, just like an insider with an omnicreolist attitude. Thus the distinction between outsider and insider is much weaker in omnicreolistics than in descriptivism.

Omnicreolist critiques and scholarship, unlike prescriptivism and descriptivism, are first person. Omnicreolist ethics is centered around visualization, “putting oneself in the shoes of” someone living in a habit system -- specifically an intelligent nonconformist living in a habit system -- rather than either dispassionate or moralizing second person viewpoints. An omnicreolist masters this as much as a scientist masters observation. This perspective has parallels in mathematics, where researchers visualize themselves working with new axiomatic structures they develop and examine consequences of it. Like science, omnicreolistics is self-correcting.

Most interestingly, this omnicreolist attitude spreads to a person’s own internal habit system when they live omnicreolistics. An omnicreolist will instinctively examine their own internalized habits and want to fix them in accordance with personal ideas of health. This means omnicreolists generally have to be much more active when engaging with themselves and the world than descriptivists and prescriptivists. A person living omnicreolistics will find that they can change the internal assumptions their brain follows with much more skill than a person who doesn’t live omnicreolistics. This is entirely a matter of practice and can be accomplished by anyone who’s willing. A consequence of this is that omnicreolists do not have fixed mindsets. Descriptivists have double standards, their model of culture is that it very slowly evolves with changing social trends but yet has its own identity that’s fixed at any moment in time; prescriptivists have fixed mindsets and are explicit about it. Because of this, omnicreolistics aligns a lot with spiritual concepts from religious traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism.

Neither descriptivist conformity nor prescriptivist virtue are accessible equally to everyone, and both often come with social ironies. Omnicreolistics, however, is accessible equally to everyone.

The Positive, the Comparative and the Superlative

As we saw in [a previous article], the three linguistic ideologies (prescriptivism, descriptivism, and the new omnicreolistics) come each with their own ideal, scholar- model, and impulse to focus on. In this article I’ll dig a bit deeper into the idea of a new linguistics and social theory centered around omnicreolistics, and the ramifications of it.

The 19th century comparative linguistics movement, led by the Brothers Grimm and Ferdinand de Saussure among others was triggered by the arrival of Romantic philosophy, which valued the spirit of folklore (Volksgeist) as the most authentic form of human culture. Filtered through this ideological stance was the observation that Sanskrit, which Europeans were just beginning to get familiar with from a linguistic point of view, bore enough similarities to their classical languages Latin and Greek. A new field originated when comparativists posited based on these two memes that perhaps there was a common ancestor of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek. Today, comparativism, along with its goal of seeing through common threads between stories and paradigms from disparate cultures to find the true, authentic paradigm “at the heart of it all” -- in addition to the language ideology that it came with, descriptivism -- is a default mode of thinking all over the humanities, ever since structuralist theory, started by Ferdinand de Saussure, emerged which considered the study of linguistics the model for the study of all human cultural activities. With postmodernism, comparativism has reached a dead end, the dissolution of all wisdom that could realistically be attained in favor of a world where everything is arbitrary and inherited.

Comparativism has still other flaws, in addition to leading to this dead-end world. The study of pidgins and creoles was a direct challenge to the comparative model of historical linguistics where a common ancestor was to be found for languages assuming a process of social evolution. The evolution of a creole has a very different mechanism from the evolution of the most common world languages. On the surface, this leads to controversies about how to classify them. Is Haitian Creole, for example, a descendant of French, or something else entirely? When seeing a theory leading to a controversy like this, it could be that the theory hasn’t been fleshed out fully enough -- or it could also be that the theory rests on a flawed foundation, and the controversy is a sign that we’ve stumbled upon a notion that is ill-defined or imposed. I believe the latter is the case, and this controversy hides a deep misunderstanding that comparativists have about creoles and evolution of language. The very fact that creolization is a real phenomenon that’s different from the way languages typically evolve, and the mechanisms behind them are clear, shows that the idea of an “ancestor language” is a philosophical imposition.

In [this article] I proposed a new linguistic ideology: omnicreolistics, which puts the creole as the idealized model of language. In other articles I pointed out the socially beneficial consequences of omnicreolistics. With this in mind, it is worthwhile to consider how comparativism would fare in a world dominated by omnicreolistic thinking. With the creole in such a central position, comparativism is doomed to fail. But how, and what is the alternative?

The premise that gave rise to the word “comparativism” itself, on the surface, does not break down. Comparative analysis, i.e. looking at different stories or paradigms side by side, is still useful in an omnicreolist world. Comparison is a very natural behavior for humans, after all, when they are exploring different things. The problem with comparativism though is in its underlying unstated assumptions. Comparativism is based on three central assumptions, both of which turn out to be flawed in the context of omnicreolistics: 1) the mechanism of inherited evolution of language, 2) the assumption of just one “main” ancestor of a language, and 3) the goal of comparison, to seek an “original” or “authentic” paradigm from which all languages being considered diverged. Furthermore, inherited evolution, in a typical linguistics context, is thought of as either random (in the case of semantics) or guided by its own rules independent of the humans living the social paradigm (as in phonology).

Creoles naturally break all three of these assumptions. The first assumption is well known not to hold, since creoles are created spontaneously in a child’s brain not directly reinforced en masse by the society the child is in. The social language that gets creolized, after all, is not even a fully functional language to begin with, but an expedient trade pidgin. The evolution of a creole, in that sense, is ex nihilo and has a very clear-cut boundary, in contrast to the gradual evolution from, say, Old English to Middle English to Modern English, where there are no such boundaries. The second assumption is also broken by the fact that creolization generally involves many different inputs -- namely, the languages that influenced the pidgin that the creole developed out of. In creolistics, the study of creoles, languages that play different roles get different labels. Instead of speaking of ancestors, creolists speak of lexifiers, languages that gave lexicons to creoles, with the assumption that languages don’t have to be shaped by one lexifier but can be shaped by many, regarded equally. This results in the popular and partly true myth of creoles being mixtures of languages.

The third assumption is more enlightening to deconstruct. If creoles emerged anew from diverse inputs, with no clear-cut notion of what their ancestors are, what then is the “origin” to understand? This is where a bit of thinking outside the box is helpful. The most obvious “origin” of a creole is a pidgin, but this is very misleading, because it completely disregards the mechanism of creolization. A bit of creativity and we’re led to consider the idea that creoles originate not in any particular speech code but in the human brain itself, specifically a child’s brain as it synthesizes various inputs. A creole, therefore, is a linguistic representation and metaphor for the way children learn as they absorb inputs from the world and turn them into a coherent mental paradigm. This means that if we want to revise comparativism in an omnicreolistic context, we should incorporate this idea of embodied evolution, as a replacement for the inherited disembodied evolution that’s idealized by mainstream comparativism.

Considering the scholar-model of omnicreolistics mentioned in [this article], it is tempting to consider an even bolder hypothesis: what if one of comparativism’s main flaws is the way that scholars show a distanced, dispassionate attitude towards the cultures they are comparing? The image of the dispassionate scientist bears enough resemblance to the unconscious evolution of most world languages themselves, that one could flesh out a parallel method of science to the embodied evolution of creoles -- a passionate science, where the observer’s feelings about data are not suppressed with the intention of seeing the “unadulterated truth”, but are included along with the data. This is in line with the scholar-model of omnicreolistics as the active participant and thoughtful insider who improves the social paradigm they are in. This passionate science is advantageous in that it recognizes social science ultimately as the study of human behavior by humans, rather than putting scientists in an external “godlike” role that has been idolized since the Enlightenment. At the heart of this passionate science is a Marxist desire to not just understand social systems but to be able to think and make them better. Another surprising consequence of an omnicreolistic way of life is a radically new approach to psychology, centered around first-person narratives where scholars understand the workings of their own minds rather than trying to conduct artificially “repeatable” experiments on other people to get insights about the psyche. This is a much more ethical alternative.

How then would comparative analysis work in a passionate science? One reasonable idea is that rather than seeking “authenticity” and common threads through comparison, an eclectic approach should be pursued where beneficial things (for creativity, health, social function etc.) are noticed in all the paradigms being compared, and these are synthesized, creating a new and more helpful picture. To indulge in a bit of wordplay, this approach can be called superlativism, or the superlative method, since it involves absorbing the best from everywhere. This is in direct parallel to the way children form creoles in their brains, by not only synthesizing inputs but filtering them through children’s natural sense of linguistic coherence. Superlativism is thus a forward-looking, active method of scholarship, in contrast to the backward-looking approach of comparativism. In superlativism, “what to do with a claim” is as important a question as “what is the right claim”, and thus superlativism is ultimately more utilitarian and practical than scholarly.

Superlativism is more than just a revision of comparativism, though. The superlativist idea of embodiment also gives it a perspective on scientific rigor and logic. In the act of synthesizing various inputs, a superlativist scholar must necessarily turn to the basic laws of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology (the “hard sciences”), as well as embodied feelings, rather than any abstracted social-phylogenetic trees, to see the consequences of different social paradigms. Superlativist scholars must be aware of the fact that the hard sciences do not give prescriptive injunctions or reveal any “truths”. Mathematics does not say what the right or wrong way to do things is. Rather, mathematics only shows what the logical consequences of axiomatic systems are. Any “statement” in mathematics is actually a logical implication rather than an absolute truth. Similarly, physics, chemistry and biology are only the study of implications, revealing physical consequences of lifestyle and design choices rather than dictating the choices themselves. This is in stark contrast to the common and wrong image of the sciences in the general populace as prescriptive, a view reinforced by the ideology of positivism, coincidentally a linguistic correlate of “comparativism” and “superlativism”. Superlativism makes it very clear that the choice of paradigm itself is left to the personal thoughtful mind, aware of consequences that are understood by science, rather than being dictated by science. In addition, unlike positivism, superlativism is open to holistic methods and thoughts that aren’t directly of a “reasoning” nature but pave the way for it. Conjectures, heuristics, beliefs, and memes which provide purely creative inspiration are explicitly stated as such and accepted rather than rejected.

This way, superlativism bridges the worlds of the humanities, sciences, and politics, a totally unexpected bonus which only reinforces that creoles are the right languages of investigation for a linguistic theory of the future.

Ideality and Naturality in the Humanities and Science

All theories try to explain the world. Likewise, all theories do so by invoking an ideal state of the world. In the sciences, there are references to ideal states -- the ideal gas law in chemistry, for example, or Newton’s law of viscosity. Early models of physics also presented things relative to ideals. Ideals are rooted in patterns people notice from perceiving the states of systems. The boundary between prescriptive and descriptive ideals (referred to by various terms, like “ideal” vs “natural” states, or what “ought to be” vs what “is”) is thus vague and best regarded as nonexistent.

The normative view of the ancient Greeks was that there were two kinds of objects, celestial and earthly, each with their own ideals -- earthly objects tend to fall and stop moving, and heavenly objects tend to go around the earth. Retrograde motion challenged this view and two approaches were developed to address this: refining the starting model by adding the notion of epicycles, and revising the model to propose a new ideal of gravitation that included both heavenly and earthly objects. Newton’s first law presented a radically different ideal -- objects tend to stay moving at constant speed. This was inconsistent with what was observed in real life where stones pushed along a road eventually stop rather than moving forever. Investigation of this discrepancy led to friction and drag as concepts. This is an epicycle in the Newtonian model of motion, albeit one that’s scientifically explainable with a mechanistic view and leads to more accurate predictions. Relativity and quantum mechanics are examples of revisions of the Newtonian paradigm invoking new ideals instead of epicycles.

A completely mechanistic view of the world, with no invoked ideals, is something to strive for, though in real life it is impossible because all mechanistic views of the world have to be derived from some assumptions about the “atoms” that take part in the mechanism -- in short, ideals. But I can look at this last claim a bit differently. A completely mechanistic view of the world is itself an ideal vision, with the presence of ideals being deviations from it. This is an example of an ideal in a meta-scientific theory. Ideals can never be escaped completely, in any field, and thus claiming to have a view that lacks ideals is arrogant. This is true in both scholarship (the sciences and humanities) and practical fields like technology and politics. Rather than trying to lack ideals whatsoever, people should strive to develop healthy ideals that help them be creative, ethical, and sustainable.

Revisiting the is-ought dichotomy, I can reasonably say that there’s no difference between a theory that postulates something as a “natural state of a system”, and a prescription as to how the system should behave, with exceptions being “deviations”. Attitudes towards deviations vary. Science often uses terms referring to descriptive and prescriptive ideals interchangeably. A fluid that follows Newton’s law of viscosity, originally a descriptive ideal, is called Newtonian (i.e. conforming to Newton’s law), and one that doesn’t is called non-Newtonian. Both these terms recognize the ideal that they were based on. However, outside of the hard sciences, people tend to use terms without recognizing that they are based on an ideal. A different ideal makes these terms irrelevant.

In linguistics, there are two main ideologies, prescriptivism and descriptivism. In addition I am proposing a third one, omnicreolistics (see other articles for explanation). All these ideologies, just as with theories in science, are implicitly statements of an ideal. Academic linguistics assumes descriptivism as an ideal but does not acknowledge it, and thus uses terms and judgments based on deviations from the ideal (“marked” or stylistically “unusual” registers, and also forms of linguistic creativity and play that don’t align with habitually accepted grammar). Changing the ideal can drastically change people’s concepts of things. Some things that are stigmatized in descriptivism are ideal in omnicreolistics, and vice versa. I propose that omnicreolistics is a healthier ideal overall that will beneficially affect the way people behave and think about many real-world issues, even outside of linguistics.

Observation and Imagination in Ideals

Now that we’ve seen that the is-ought distinction is ill-defined, I present a better contrast: ideals based on observation versus imagination. Premodern theories of science are exclusively based on observation. A theory based on observation alone suffers in that it mistakes things that just happen to be common (due to emergent properties) with natural states of systems. Aristotelian physics is a case in point: earthly objects “naturally tend to” stop because friction is an emergent property of materials. The Newtonian breakthrough was special because it added imagination, of how physical systems could behave in different contexts that we just happen not to have seen, to observation. It asked the key question of whether something that was observed (in this case, objects stopping due to friction) was just an emergent property or something that would naturally show up in a totally different context. It’s imagination that made physicists after Newton realize that ultimately, the dynamics of heavenly and earthly bodies are the same, but a complex mix of circumstances make it look different. The “natural form of movement” posited by Newtonian physics was unlike both the motion of heavenly and earthly objects, and thus, didn’t really show up in nature. This is the idealized frictionless surface mentioned in introductory physics textbooks. Quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics took it a step further by imagining that a lot more phenomena we think are absolute are actually emergent.

In physics, modern theories, based on imagination in addition to observation, turned out to be predictively more effective than premodern theories. Imagination, of things that could be but just happen not to have taken place, reveals natural phenomena and principles down to their essence. Observation clouds those in historical coincidences which could be misleading. It’s not just in science that imagination makes for better ideals, it’s also relevant for politics and social action. The climate crisis, mental health epidemics, and other crises today are testing the imagination. Drawing inspiration from systems that haven’t evolved in our world so far but are logically coherent is much more important than ever before, and theories of the world based on observation alone are not going to help us see those.

In linguistics, creoles beg us to ask the obvious question: Are evolved languages, the kind historical linguists regard as natural, really the most natural form of language? It wouldn’t hurt to picture a theory where the creole is the natural way a language emerges, and the evolved language is just a “classical limit” of creoles that shows up in complex, albeit common, social contexts. There is more evidence for this than for the historical linguists’ naive empirical ideal. Children picking up community dialects generalize patterns faster than they pick up new ones, as illustrated in their tendency to make strong verbs weak in English (“eated” instead of “ate” etc.). This sort of extrapolation is very typical of how creoles form and it would result in a perfectly functional language even without “correction” and reinforcement of socially accepted forms. While most children go through this in some form, they eventually learn the evolved language paradigm as adults which creates the illusory sense that the evolved language is more natural, when it’s really just more common. The main initial way people pick up language when they are born is creolization, not habituation. Creolization is how language gets embodied, whereas habituation is more superficial. This is a foundation of omnicreolistics.

How to Avoid Bad Omnicreolistics

When a new language ideology enters the scene, there are inevitably going to be bad practitioners of it, people who claim to be following the new ideology and superficially accept some premises but really just follow the old ideology with different parameters. This happened during the transition from prescriptivism to descriptivism and the most salient example is linguistic purism. Linguistic purism is the idea that foreign loanwords in a language should be avoided at all costs to preserve the language’s “essence”. This idea is not really descriptivism, even though descriptivism is about “nativeness”. It is really just an incarnation of prescriptivism in a context that looks like it aligns more with the goal of descriptivism, still maintaining the idea of “correctness” in language but disguising it as nativeness. In a linguistic purist ideology, it is still true that an authority dictates how language should be used rather than the crowd. A widely accepted loanword would still be wrong in linguistic purism but not in descriptivism.

Likewise, people should really watch out for bad omnicreolistics, things that look like they’re in line with omnicreolistics but are really just prescriptivism or descriptivism in new clothes. It is easy to confuse omnicreolistics for both of these ideologies when uninitiated. On the surface, omnicreolistics’s emphasis on the “embodied” superficially resembles descriptivism’s emphasis on the “native”. Omnicreolistics is not a belief that “each one of us is a totally separate culture” where each culture is viewed just like how large social cultures are viewed in descriptivism. It is thus easy to take this nonconformist idea of omnicreolistics out of context, and thus develop a concept of a “native embodied” language or paradigm that is fixed and regarded as specific to the individual. This is bad omnicreolistics, because it totally disregards two very important things that separate the omnicreolist impulse from the descriptivist impulse -- thoughtfulness and agency. The descriptivist impulse is one of fitting in, and the omnicreolist impulse is one of freedom and motivation. A good omnicreolist recognizes this latter impulse. Good omnicreolistics recognizes the importance of habits, but doesn’t make conformity the be-all and end-all. Rather, it accepts these habits as personally decided (self-prescribed and self-cultivated) and subject to change within the life of the individual, in line with worldview, ethics and experience.

Likewise, omnicreolistics’s emphasis on the “healthy” superficially resembles prescriptivism’s emphasis on the “correct”. Bad omnicreolistics as practiced by someone with the habit of prescriptivism would thus think that they have to create a fixed external standard that originates within them and then picture it as outside their control, letting it control their mental paradigm without question. In other words, “creating a religion and following it unquestioningly”. This is bad omnicreolistics because it misses the omnicreolist impulse of freedom. An externalized standard of this sort is not in line with the omnicreolist impulse, because it stops being embodied. Good omnicreolistics recognizes the importance of rules, and recognizes rule-making as an aspect of human creativity and freedom, but doesn’t make correctness the be-all and end-all. Rather, good omnicreolistics recognizes the importance of personally questioning and changing rules according to internal perception of good health. When a personal thoughtful revision of rules becomes wrong because of overfixation on old rules, this becomes disguised prescriptivism, not omnicreolistics.

There is also a very bad trap when introducing a new linguistic ideology, which is schismogenetic rebellion. Descriptivism itself is an example, avoiding anything that looks like “rules” so as to maintain a separate identity from prescriptivism. Someone claiming to be omnicreolist trying to rebel against prescriptivism and descriptivism can end up with an especially problematic kind of bad omnicreolistics, which would say that neither rules nor habits should be made or followed. This kind of bad omnicreolistics is easy to sugar- coat in spiritual or mystical language and disguise as a good thing. Words like “freedom”, “natural”, “Zen” and “Tao” are easy to misappropriate this way. This sort of narrative long preceded omnicreolistics and led to, most notably, the “noble savage” myth of the totally thoughtless blissful indigenous tribe “living in harmony with nature”. This is a very gross misunderstanding of omnicreolistics (not to mention bad spirituality, and equally bad cultural ethnography) and is scientifically impossible, and leads to paradoxical thinking and dangerous mental loops. Staying blissfully unaware and unthinking, and making that a directive, is the opposite of good omnicreolistics. Good omnicreolistics recognizes the importance of both rules and habits, and also recognizes that rule-making and habit- cultivation are essential human functions. Most importantly, it regards rules and habits as changeable. I can even say that a good omnicreolist should pay more attention to rule- making and habit-forming than a good prescriptivist or descriptivist, because they must be constantly questioning and revising rules and habits into something better and more embodied. Good omnicreolistics is about flexible rules and habits guided by individual thinking, not the lack of rules or habits.

Pidgins and Creoles, Revisited

Misunderstandings and controversies on the terms “pidgin” and “creole” are very common, both in the general populace and in linguistics. In typical narratives on historical linguistics not developed by people who specialize in pidgins and creoles, these languages are sidelined and viewed as aberrant phenomena compared to the more common evolved language. The norm, for them, is a language that evolved from an ancestor through systematic sound changes and an unbroken tradition of transmission. Almost all global languages are of this form, and thus languages are assumed by default to belong to a phylogenetic tree. English is Indo-European, Tamil is Dravidian, Finnish is Uralic, and so on. Creoles like Tok Pisin and Haitian Creole break this mold, since they have an origin that’s different from the typical evolved language with unbroken transmission and gradual evolution. Thus there is controversy on what language family a creole belongs to, with some people believing they should be classified as descendants of the languages that gave vocabulary to them (English in the case of Tok Pisin and French in the case of Haitian Creole), and other people believing they should be thought of as entirely separate.

The only reason why pidgins and creoles are grouped together in popular discourse is because they deviate from the ideal of the evolved language, promoted by historical linguistics. Otherwise, mechanistically and cognitively they are worlds apart. Pidgins are expedient trade languages developed on the spot by communities of people speaking different languages for mutual communication. As such, pidgins are not functional languages. But when children grow up in communities speaking a pidgin language, they instinctively reshape pidgins into functional languages that cognitively work just like evolved languages. These are creoles. Sadly in popular narrative, people often get the words “pidgin” and “creole” mixed up, using the label “pidgin” for languages that are well established as creoles. Hawaiian Pidgin is a well-known example.

As with any ideal, it’s important to question the validity of the ideal promoted by historical linguistics. Are pidgins and creoles really aberrant phenomena? A deeper look at the picture, and a parallel look at spiritual traditions like Buddhism and Taoism, reveal a very different story. These spiritual traditions often think of language as insufficient to express the true nature of reality. But if we look closer, social languages, even those that appear to be well-established evolved languages, are really expedients devised for communication. Every person who has functional language capacity naturally develops an idiolect, as a synthesis of all the linguistic inputs in their life and subject to various kinds of input, both consciously thought through and unconsciously manipulated by crowds and teachers. But idiolects differ between individuals -- different people have subtle differences in syntax and semantics. So mechanistically, there is no difference between the way an idiolect forms and the way a creole forms. Likewise, there is no difference between a social language and a pidgin. The Buddhist and Taoist idea of ineffability may simply be a statement that social languages, like pidgins, are not fully functional. A closer examination of the way creoles and idiolects form shows that the main difference between a creole/idiolect and a pidgin/social language is that the former is embodied, inside a person’s brain shaping its structure. Social languages and pidgins are not fully functional precisely because they are not fully embodied. They exist purely in the ether. So in this revised view, creoles and pidgins are far from aberrant -- they are the only kinds of languages in existence!

This view is central to the new ideology of omnicreolistics, which is more than a linguistic ideology, it’s also a philosophy of life, and the mechanism of creolization is thought of as a metaphor for how mental paradigms form in the life of an individual. Omnicreolistics can be understood almost perfectly through this metaphor.

Morality: Rule or Habit?

We commonly think of morality in terms of rules, injunctions, do’s and don’ts. We also think of moral foundations as taught to us through religions and authority figures like cultural elders -- guided by the prescriptivist impulse. But how accurate is this perception really?

For one thing, cultures all over the world come with a lot of social inertia. There are many famous instances in world cultures where prescribers of moral foundations do so because they see flaws in the status quo and want to change it. This is especially common among religious reformers. It’s also just as common that societies blithely ignore the words of nonconformist prescribers of rules who nonetheless attained prestigious status. These nonconformists are often merely worshipped, hyperbolically as geniuses or enlightened souls, while at the same time, their words either are ignored, or coopted by the status quo and made to mean something different. There is a reason for this.

The stickiest kinds of morality are the kinds that are reinforced by habit, and often by collective social habit. These kinds of morality are ways in which psychological instincts like fear, disgust, and desire for coherence and predictability are coopted to reinforce conformity. Cultures tend to have moral foundations that are sometimes hardly stated at all by elders but instead emerge as comfort zones, picked up unconsciously. These comfort zones come with very complex systems of expectations which can often contradict a person’s intentions and thinking. Moral judgments are most often relative to these habitual expectations; actions that are in line with those expectations are what we casually call “moral” or “correct” and those out of line are what we call “immoral” or “wrong”. These habitual moral paradigms are also based on categorical perception, as well as judgment of cultural identity, a major cause of a lot of “us” vs “them” sentiments which are often critiqued, and rightly so, by religious reformers, scientists, and peace activists as the cause of dangerous social tensions. However, these activists and intellectuals are not effective at implementing better forms of morality when the main moral impulse is conformist, i.e. the descriptivist impulse. It is quite rare to see a completely intentional rule-based morality in actual practice.

We associate morality with prescriptivism because we’ve historically seen many instances where elders reinforced socially expected moral paradigms. But the transmission of these paradigms is much more effective -- and pernicious -- through habit rather than rule. Contrary to our popular conception, the prescriptivist impulse turns out to be the impulse that guides majority moral thinking the least.

Is there a way out? Yes, and it starts with awareness of the three different impulses that guide a person’s behavior. The descriptivist impulse is the stickiest of the three and regarding it with suspicion is a very reasonable and effective first step to tone down its effects as much as possible. The descriptivist impulse, and the habits that come out of it, can feed off of themselves. Comfort zones gradually narrow until they become very constraining. Many religions, both organized and unorganized (the descriptivist impulse does not require organization), and also internalized social hierarchies and norms in many cultures, suffer from this problem. Questioning the descriptivist impulse means questioning habitual patterns of thought and seeing how much they really make sense, according to first-person experience and the laws of math and the hard sciences. It is the omnicreolist impulse that ultimately makes this possible, since it operates on creativity, imagination, and awareness of consequences, and it, not the prescriptivist impulse, is what guides spiritual thinkers. A truly healthy and flexible morality would be dominated by the omnicreolist impulse.

An omnicreolist moral foundation would be based off of principles, rather than habits, that the individual mind is free to interpret according to natural senses of ethics. Notions of “right” and “wrong” would be based on embodiedness, in line with the omnicreolist impulse, and compatibility with these principles. It would be constantly open to new patterns of behavior that are still in accordance with those principles. In an omnicreolist moral foundation, being stuck in a pattern of behavior would be regarded as an aberration, at least meriting imagination of alternatives. But omnicreolist morality would be just as open to sticking to a pattern of behavior when personal exploration reveals it to be the best choice at the moment -- the choice to stay put or to change is embodied. “This is how we’ve always done it” is an invalid justification in an omnicreolist moral foundation, whereas in a descriptivist moral foundation, it is very common and disguises itself as many other things.

These principles of omnicreolist morality apply to both personal morality and social morality.

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