Now let's consider the difference between cultures that constitute themselves through oral versus written traditions.
History, as we teach it in schools, begins with the writing of it.
When colonists invaded indigenes' lands, they imagined they entered prehistoric lands inhabited by prehistoric people. This imagining justified, the colonists agreed, their inherent supremacy over, and genocide of, indigenes.
Colonists used writing a) to claim and enforce their deity's supremacy over indigenous deities and b) to implement and enforce legal claim to lands they were appropriating.
We see here the cruel and criminal behavior written language engenders. A god of written words is used to erase gods of oral words. A history of written words erases a history of oral tradition. Written words erase eons of indigenous inhabitation of and claim to ancestral lands: "law" justifies and records ubiquitous land theft, and empowers military violence against those resisting it.
Inherent in the written word, then, is a power of annihilation. The more a mind or culture adheres to the world engendered by written words, the more annihilation occurs.
To think—the colonists conquered with the written word, and now it kills them, because they did and do not know that the world it creates is not bios, is not the primary world. The written word engenders worlds that, through the history of its denizens, can imagine they are permanent, like the god of written words is supposed to be.
Returning to the biblical assumption that "god created man in his image"; let us be more exact: the written word created the colonist in its image. See 1-4 again.
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