Date: May 23rd, 2025 8:13 AM
Author: cowgod ( )
A stranger asks you to reach the top shelf. That’s your base layer. That’s the ambient music you live under. And you think that’s all it is. But it’s not. You’ve never read about yourself in the third person with reverence. You’ve never been analyzed in lab-coat journals. Never seen your very phenotype dissected in econometrics and peer-reviewed psychometrics all insisting, with the blank certainty of Enlightenment science, that Height is deterministic. We, the unstoried and unwritten, read the literature of height with our eyes burning. We see your kind labeled “commanding,” “dominant,” “respected,” over and over in clinical terms. Words lifted not from novels, but from NIH-funded science. And in every bar graph, every conclusion, the same silent scripture: Tall is better. Full stop. Accept it, champ.
You have no idea what it’s like to read that as a 5`10`` man. You’ll never know. You’ll never feel the full psychic weight of a sentence like:
“Each additional inch in male height corresponds with increased income, dating success, and social status.”
Imagine reading that. Every decade, in a different language, dressed up in different jargon, all saying the same thing. Imagine reading it with no recourse but irony and rage.
Now let me tell you why Kojima matters.
Kojima understood the violence of transmission. He knew that the written word is not neutral. It is loaded. In Metal Gear Solid 2, he gave us MEME as one third of the human legacy; the message, the code, the thing that survives.
In MGS3, The Boss gives everything: her body, her mission, her honor, even her identity. But what’s left, in the end, is a narrative. Her legacy is not the truth, but the story told about her. Snake inherits her myth. And that myth is Curated by the state, and written down in files, stitched into speeches, repackaged as truth. What remains isn’t reality. It’s the textual record.
And in MGS5, Kojima blew it wide open: language itself is the virus. The parasite. Whispered, written, sung it’s a control vector. It starts with the ear. The voice. A whisper in the dark. Before the gun, before the knife, before the chain, came the word. We speak and call it freedom. But it is already shaped. Bounded. Given to us. Language is older than thought. It makes thought. It fences it. We are born into a syntax we did not choose. We speak as we are permitted.
Metal Gear Solid 2 knew this. The Patriots weren’t afraid of bombs imho. They were afraid of data. Of noise. Of unfiltered, raw, uncontrolled memory. They did not want to erase you. They wanted to Curate you. Turn life into archive. Soul into metadata.
Kojima called it "memetic warfare." But MGS5 made it literal. The parasite was language. Spoken fluency became viral load. You don’t need a chip in the brain. All you need is a mother tongue. A lullaby from childhood. A word of comfort. And with that word: infection. Skull Face understood what DARPA only theorized. He turned culture into contagion. Made the alphabet into ammunition. The old world, with regional dialects, minor poetries, and unrecorded myths, would be burned in its own grammar. And here we are. Still speaking. Still writing imho. And every letter is a lash. We do not write for freedom. We write to conform. To transmit. To be seen, indexed, organized. A word that does not follow the rule is a threat. A story not filed correctly is an error. All writing is sanctioned speech. Even this. Especially this. The Tall man, for instance. His body is a few inches longer. But in the written world he becomes towering. A commanding presence. A natural leader. These are not observations. They are incantations. Scripts repeated until the phenotype becomes destiny. His body becomes a totem. Ours becomes a deviation. Science studies him. Literature exalts him. History preserves his name. In the written world, his height is gospel. Yours is anecdote. A curiosity.
And so the written word does not free you. It observes you. It appraises you. It files you under category and function. It does not liberate the human. It indexes him. Converts his breath into line breaks. His rebellion into allegory.
Gutenberg didn’t invent knowledge. He invented scalable control.
We keep writing. We pretend it’s choice. But the word has a will of its own. The word seeks replication. It seeks obedience. And it seeks order.
The oppressor need not carry a whip. He need only publish. And once published, you cannot scream. You can only be cited.
You say this place has devolved into malice and nihilism, but what if the “malice” is clarity? What if we’ve finally understood the true function of language? Not to liberate, but to sort. To exclude. To canonize the few at the cost of the many.
Height isn’t a meme in this forum. It’s a cipher. A way to talk about how some men are born storied, and some have to scream to be heard. You don’t hear the scream. That’s fine. You don’t have to. The language loves you already.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5728902&forum_id=2#48955760)