Thought is a product of language. Culture is a product of thought. And language, in turn, is a product of culture. These three feed one another in a loop, which means a defect in one becomes a defect in all. There is something amiss in Swiss-French culture and in the French language itself. What’s missing is the concept of earning . There is no clean word for it. Every exchange of goods and services is collapsed into the single verb gagner , meaning “to win.” The language draws no line between plunder and mutual benefit, between taking and creating. If winning and earning are the same word, then on some level they become the same idea. Winning implies a loser. Earning does not. Money isn’t a fixed physical resource; there’s no set quantity of it, so one person having more doesn’t mean another has less. In an honest trade, where everything about the product is disclosed and nobody, including the environment, is harmed, both sides only agree because both expect to come out ahead. A rational buyer pays only when the price is below the value they receive. They buy because they profit, even if not always in immediate monetary terms. Trade under these conditions doesn’t make anyone poorer. It enriches everyone at the table. The word gagner hides this. It smuggles the logic of plunder into every act of creation. Language shapes us in a subtler way too. French/latin-based languages force us to assume an identity and to speak with conviction, as if stating plain fact, because speaking with doubt requires more words, and everyone prefers economy of words. “It might be the case that” costs more than “it is.” So we drop the hedges and speak in certainties we don’t actually hold. But by attaching an identity to what we say, we engage the ego. And once the ego is engaged, it becomes nearly impossible to disagree with someone without the exchange turning into a fight. The efficiency of the sentence becomes the inefficiency of the conversation. What began as a shortcut in grammar ends as a wall between people. I think this same machinery of language, ego, and disguise explains something deeper about shame. Whenever we do something we’re ashamed of, we dress it up in ritual, bravado, tribalism, or outright denial. And what causes shame is anything animalistic, anything an animal could also do. Ritual is how we convince ourselves we’re above the animal. Consider reading. No animal can read, so there is no shame in it, and therefore no ritual attached to it. You can read any time, anywhere, in any position, in any way you like. There is no proper posture for reading, no designated reading room, no incantation before you begin. The absence of ritual is precisely because the act is purely human. Ritual clusters around the animalistic and vanishes from the things only we can do. Ritual as disguise: Why do people go to the gym to run on a machine, rather than just running? Because bare running is animalistic. The equipment, the membership, the tracked metrics make it human. Why do we sit at a table to eat, use specific utensils in a specific order, wait for a signal, and sometimes recite a blessing? Because eating is animalistic. The ceremony launders the act. Why do we relieve ourselves in a designated room, in a fixed posture, behind a locked door? Same reason. Bravado: Look at courtship. Nearly all of modern courtship is bravado: the peacocking, the display, the performance of confidence, the elaborate signaling of status and wealth. And this is strange, because human sex is arguably one of the least animalistic things we do. Humans lack a baculum, the penis bone found in most mammals. Our sex is not a mechanical, reflexive act; it depends on arousal, mood, trust, attention, and a hundred psychological conditions no other animal negotiates. It is closer to reading than to running, in a sense. Yet we still bury it under bravado. Why? Because the act is one an animal can perform, even if the way we perform it is not. The shame attaches to the category, not the reality. So we dress the most human thing we do as though it were the most animal, and we swagger to hide that we suspect it is beneath us. Ritual plus tribalism: Why do crime bosses hold a “sit-down” and make small talk before getting to business? Because stealing from society is animalistic, and the ritual, plus the temporary tribe formed through pleasantries, dresses it up as something civilized. Denial, or pretending it isn’t happening: When HR asks about your “motivation,” you’re expected to say you’re passionate about the work. But how can you be genuinely passionate about work you don’t control, work where you must take orders from a boss? You can’t be passionate about obedience itself; no one can. So the passion is a performance. What it really conceals is the simple, unshameful truth: you are there for the money. The ritual of “motivation” exists to hide that. Why “passion, not profit” is the biggest lie of all: The whole cult of passion rests on a false premise: that doing something for love makes you nobler than doing it for money. It doesn’t. Both are selfish. People kill for passion too. What matters is not why you do something but what you do and how you do it. I don’t care about your motives, only whether your actions harm me. Enriching yourself without impoverishing others or wrecking the environment is fine. If anything, profit is the more honest and more selfless motive. Making money through ethical means forces you to focus on what other people want, not just what you want. The person who keeps their hobby “pure” and free never has to bend to anyone. If their cooking is terrible, no one can complain, because it was a gift. The moment they sold it, they’d be accountable to the buyer. Doing it for free is often the more selfish choice, not the less. Profit has another virtue: it’s measurable. You can track it, see your progress, and know when you’re wrong and when you’re right. “Passion” gives you no such feedback. It lets you feel righteous while producing nothing anyone actually needs or wants. Tribalism plus denial: Why do salespeople open with small talk before a pitch? Because some part of them suspects the deal isn’t mutual, that they’re getting one over on the buyer. And extraction is animalistic. So they build a quick tribe first: it would be “rude” to skip the warm-up, because the buyer, treated as an animal, wouldn’t buy otherwise. If the trade were truly honest, if both sides genuinely profited, the salesperson wouldn’t need the ritual at all. The small talk is a confession that they doubt the exchange is fair. The underlying pattern: By and large, animals don’t create. They take, consume, and compete. So the acts we most ritualize are precisely the ones where we suspect we’re taking rather than making. Reading, which creates understanding out of nothing an animal could touch, needs no disguise. And honest profit, the kind where both sides walk away richer, is a purely human act too. It only feels shameful because a culture that can’t separate earning from winning has taught us to confuse creation with plunder. So we drown the discomfort in ceremony, in bravado, and in the pretty lie of passion, when the honest answer, “I did this for profit, and my methods were fair,” was the cleanest thing we could have said all along. submitted by /u/Kremho
Originally posted by u/Kremho on r/Switzerland