This is some of the clearest and most challenging writing I've encountered lately, worth reading in its entirety at https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/master and surely worth the 10 minutes to drink in these excerpts:

...Most humans throughout history would barely have understood the purpose of staring immobile at some marks on paper or glowing screen. The notion that they could help anyone to understand the complexity of lived reality would have seemed absurd; as it still does to many. Sometimes writers can forget how pointless, or just baffling, writing for a living seems to many people. We can forget how much we deal in abstraction. We can confuse these words for the reality they are intended to convey. This confusion – of the signifier and the signified, the original reality and its distilled essence – is one of the reasons we end up with language wars. We think, at some level, that if we can control the signifier then that control will bleed out into reality. We think that using our symbols to define reality will change the nature of reality itself.

Words are not real. I think we have forgotten this. In a culture that increasingly deals with abstracts, it is a dangerous form of forgetting.

...

Ian McGilchrist:
While popular mythology might perceive the ‘right brain’ as dealing with ’emotion’ and ‘left brain’ with ‘reason’, McGilchrist suggests the division is more fundamental. The brain’s right hemisphere, he suggests, understands how to look at the whole picture; the left hemisphere understands how to examine its parts. Both are useful – necessary, in fact – to human life; but a sane way of relating to the world outside our heads requires the left hemisphere to be a servant of the right. In other words, the ability to pick life apart is only useful if it is in service to a more holistic understanding.

Modernity, suggests McGilchrist, has been the process of the ‘Emissary’ – the left hemisphere – usurping the ‘Master’ – the right. Now we are paying the price.

This, if true, explains rather a lot. It explains why we believe ‘reason’ to be the supreme human achievement, and the basis for our society, when it is more likely that reason evolved as a tool for serving our intuition. It explains why concepts like ‘intuition’ are dismissed in our reason-obsessed culture, despite having a clear evolutionary basis and day to day utility. It explains why atheists don’t understand religion. It explains why we fail to grasp the symbolism of myth. It explains why we imagine the world to be a ‘resource’ rather than an intertwined network of living things...

It explains, too, why our language has become utilitarian and abstracted and often toxic: why it so often serves the purpose of those who would dismantle the world, or repurpose it for human use. Language no longer serves the part of the brain which, in McGilchrist’s words, ‘believes but does not know.’ It serves the part which ‘knows but does not believe.’ Our words no longer serve wholeness. They serve fragmentation, and we have used them to justify the building of a fragmented world.

If you cannot solve a problem with the mindset, or the tools, which created it, what does this mean for those whose tools are words? It is the question I am coming to now, and cannot avoid. Because I have a suspicion – a suspicion I have long held but have circled around, not wanting to fully face. It is this: that words are the problem. That language itself – or at least the kind of language we use, abstracted, boiled down into these ink marks – is part of the process by which we desacralise the world. That writing is a tool of ecocide.

Step outside the word-bubble – take yourself beyond the literate cultures of the post-Enlightenment world – and you soon find people who would agree. We have killed off most of the world’s oral cultures, but those which remain, which cling on, can sometimes open us out – we, the abstracted ones – to the damage we do with our writing, with our symbolic abstraction, with our constant flow of chatter, with our endless words.

...

If the emissary runs our world, then we all speak his language, because we have all been trained to. It is the language of clarity, dissection, parts and not sums, specialisation, dis-enchantment, reason, theoretical rather than practical expertise, technological ‘solutions’, bureaucracy, abstraction, mechanism. The emissary will, left unchecked, turn our world into a machine, because he thinks it already is one. In the process, he will turn us into machines too.

Linguistically, then, we should all be encouraging the master to regain power. This means working with the ways of seeing and communicating which machine culture downplays or ridicules, but which every traditional society before modernity’s advent understood and worked with. That means myth, religion, practical expertise founded upon physical work, rooted imagery, holistic conceptions of life, communication with non-human beings, poetry, complexity, questions that do not have answers, questions which are not questions at all. It means seeing time as a circle, not a line, life as a process, not a puzzle to be solved, death as a part of that life, not an enemy to be defeated. Sometimes – horror of horrors – it means embracing unknowing. It means learning to stop, and be silent.

It means, in short, upending Machine society’s ways of conceptualising the world we are part of. Impossible? Well, of course, if you are ‘thinking globally’, as we are all instructed to. This is no political solution. But then, this is not a political project. It is not work for a bureaucracy, a state, a ‘movement’: think like that, use those words, and you have fallen right back in to the pit you just crawled up from

No, this is small, intimate, personal work. It is the work of a life, or several lives. Until you know how to speak, you will have nothing useful to say. Until you understand what kind of weapon your language was designed to be, you will never learn what war the Machine has sent you out to fight, and how you might flee the battlefield for the mountains.