> Arguably, the most important function of human > language is to protect the smart from the strong. I understand what he means, though when defined like this

> Arguably, the most important function of human > language is to protect the smart from the strong. I understand what he means, though when defined like this, "the smart" include Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin and a bunch of others, none of whom could have won a fist fight with their strongest soldiers. Yet the soldiers remained loyal to the rulers. I was just reading a book about the fall of Berlin in 1945. One thing I've wondered about in the past is why the German soldiers kept fighting when it was clear that the war was lost. And one thing I just read was that any soldier that tried to desert, and was caught, was tortured and then killed. So the soldiers kept fighting since quitting seemed even more dangerous than fighting. Thus a hopeless cause was prolonged for several months. Anyone who knows anything about World War I knows that a lot of very smart people died in the fighting. And language was used by all sides to rally people and get them excited about the war. So one function of language is to rally smart people into clusters where they can be killed in large numbers. If language really protected the smart from the strong then the Battle Of The Somme would never have happened.