So easy and yet so dangerous is to separate our feelings from our thoughts. We must do this, of course, because thoughts, to move forward and to connect to other ideas, must have their own lives. Each concept must be a separate entity with its own identity to fit within the community of other concepts. Concepts are attracted to others like themselves. They find comfortable niches and become parts of cliques. They socialize with like-minded concepts and connect in ways that emulate friendships, neighborhoods, and even political parties. 

If a community of concepts is well-accepted, they are likely to get public recognition. They support higher-level concepts or principles like ‘love’, ‘faith’, or ‘industry’. They are communicated with others, shared with friends on social media, and/or referenced in articles. They create narrative threads that secure the warp and woof of our social fabric. If they are socially unacceptable, they hang out in shady corners and back alleys of our consciousness to prevent cognitive dissonance with their more socially accepted cousin concepts.

The acceptance of a set of concepts can change, as we know. Think about how some concepts such as racism, elitism, and self-service might proudly step out from the underground of ideas to have loud parties and raucous behavior on the main streets of media, if given a chance.  

What I worry about – a lot – is that once a thought becomes a concept, affirming its own identity through established pathways in our neural systems, it loses the sensory and emotional experiences from which it arose. This process is a well-known one called ‘reification’ – the act of considering an abstract idea as an entity in itself removed from the sources that generated it. We know the advantages of this: when thoughts become concepts, they can move into the imagination and join up with other concepts to create new ‘realities, and even generate impossible worlds – reconceiving our current views and improving them. How could we live without our fertile imaginations?  But removing a concept from its source has problems. 

A word that captures problematic aspects of a reified concept is ‘euphemism’ which hides negative sensory origins of a concept to make it more socially palatable: “Passing on’ is a euphemism for death; ‘Cleansing’ is a euphemism for genocide. A horrific experience sounds acceptable. Soldiers are taught to dehumanize the enemy so they can justify killing them.  

So is the power of words. Words capture sensory experiences that we share to be human with each other, even as I in this blog reach my humanness out to your humanness. But words – as abstractions of felt realities – slip the carpet of acceptability under our feet to hide the poisons beneath. Words are both precious and fragile when close to their sensory sources, and powerful and damaging when separated from their lived experience. Watch out, word user!