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The first half of this page is Chapter 18, A Small Part in the Journey of Humanity, of the book Thumoslang for Character Renovation.
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[1] This book plays a small part in the journey of humanity that began over a hundred millenniums ago when early humans discovered a way to have widespread control of fire. Fire is a tool. We use fire, a hammer, and other tools to extend our ability to do work. Physics students know best; work involves energy and plays out when some force affects an object through a distance.
[2] The second stage of our technological advance began; the machine age. A machine is a mechanical structure that uses power to perform an intended action by applying force and controlling movement. The more skill bestowed upon the machine by the creator, the less skill the user must acquire for the work involved. Humans use machines to extend their energy further than tools can offer.
[3] The third stage is automation, which carries out complex or repetitive processes with minimal human assistance. In the final stage of technological advancement, humans take advantage of automation to scale up the application of energy to project much more power for much less effort. One click, for example, is all you need to sort through countless documents around the world.
[4] Tools, machines, and automation are all about conserving personal energy to keep it from being wasted. Trump, Putin, and the likes use nations as their tools but only for personal purposes. They conserve personal energy but not the energy of our humanity as a whole.
[5] The use of the tool, including widespread control of fire, the machine, and then the automation, gives us humans a more excellent projection of energy and power. However, a nation with more energy or power does not have citizens who know how to treat one another better than those in lesser countries. It is, therefore, safe to conclude that technology cannot bring our humanity beyond this point.
[6] Bestselling author Jamie Wheal has an idea. Uploaded to the YouTube channel Big Think, Wheal speaks about the speed at which modern civilization progresses. According to Wheal, earthly philosophies and religions introduced us to Meaning 1.0. It was an attempt to answer fundamental questions many people ask about life. Heartless data, systematic sciences, and technologies at scale brought about Meaning 2.0. It answered the fundamental questions humanity had about our biological bodies and other physical entities in them and across the universe.
[7] The speed at which modern civilization progresses has become overwhelming for humans and, according to the video, has caused a collapse of meaning. For many, Meaning 1.0 (organized religion) and Meaning 2.0 (modern liberalism) no longer provide the structure and guidance that they used to. “It does feel like the handrails, the things we used to look to for stability and security, have evaporated,” said Jamie Wheal. “If we’ve experienced a collapse of meaning, how do we go about restoring it?”
[8] “How do we create liberating structures so that a lot of people all around the world can experiment, innovate and adapt their approaches to finding and restoring meaning, without it coming tops-down?” Asked Jamie Wheal.
[9] “From Meaning 1.0, we need healing, inspiration, and connection. From the modern liberal side,” that is, Meaning 2.0, “we want this [Meaning 3.0] to be open-source. We want anybody anywhere to have access to this, needs to be scalable, really cheap or outright free,” said Jamie. “And then the third is that it has to be antifragile. So the idea of an anti-fragile solution digs in and gets stronger, more rooted, more effective as things deteriorate around it…
[10] If we want to create Meaning 3.0, which is a blend of traditional religion, and modern liberalism, how do we have the salvation that religion promises and the inclusion that modern liberalism is committed to?” To go beyond Meaning 2.0, we must have a systematic approach to preventing the upbringing of Trump, Putin, and the likes.
What would it take for us to go beyond and reach Meaning 3.0? The short answer might be Thumoslang. If that is the case, the long answer is this book.
[11] The suffix -lang flags Thumoslang as a language; it is the formal vocabulary created by the original Thumos textbook, written by Mark Canny, a University of Rhode Island graduate of 2017, and Nickantony Quach (pictured above, left,) who was an expert in quality assurance. However, neither Mark nor Nick understood the immense power of Thumoslang. That’s why they did not identify it by name in their book. The discovery of Thumoslang, the nomenclature for social life, took place years later.
[12] Alec Mustafayev (right), a Classical High School graduate of 2020, is the first person who grew up with Thumoslang since high school. In 2020, he joined Nick to write Trekvella, a collection of more than 60 episodes spread over nine Thumoslang series, hosted by Amazon’s reading platform Kindle Vella. In March 2022, Alec strung 15 of the 60 into a sequence of content designed for teaching the first year of Thumoslang in high school or college. A teacher or professor may want to teach Thumoslang using this book.
[13] To that end, this book makes the first formal attempt to take us beyond the tool, the machine, and the automation. It takes only one Putin to destroy millions of lives in Ukraine within a few weeks in early 2022. It might take a new type of widespread ‘technology’ to prevent the upbringing of another Putin. Thumoslang exists to minimize unwanted drama. Drama; that means, exaggeration of benign events. The war in Ukraine is the most prominent example of unwanted drama globally. The nomenclature thereby plays a small part in humanity’s journey, hopefully going from the widespread control of fire to the widespread use of Thumoslang.
Editorial Note: How did this book come into being? Why does the book exist; what are its subject matter and goals? What are the compelling insights into a book’s content?
Thumoslang 