tantaman

Grammar Rules All

Published 2026-01-23

Why do people in similar social positions tend to have similar values?

…

They’ve absorbed the same grammar. Same grammar, same menu. Same menu, same available values. Similar “choices” from similar menus create the appearance of convergent independent reasoning.

I. The Conventional Story

We tell ourselves a comforting story about how we came to believe what we believe.

The story goes: First, we have experiences. Then we reflect on those experiences. Through reflection, we develop values — commitments to what matters, what’s good, what’s worth pursuing. Finally, we express those values in language. Language is the vehicle; values are the cargo.

On this view, someone who values “authenticity” first felt something real about the importance of being genuine, then found the word “authenticity” as a useful label for that pre-existing commitment. Someone who values “efficiency” first perceived something important about not wasting resources, then adopted “efficiency” as shorthand for that perception.

This story is backwards.

II. The Inversion

The previous essay argued that professional grammars constrain thought — that ways of speaking become ways of thinking, limiting what can be conceived. But that argument didn’t go far enough.

The deeper claim: Values themselves are downstream of grammar.

The sequence isn’t: experience → reflection → values → language.

The sequence is: grammar adoption → constrained thought → available values → the feeling of having chosen.

You don’t first develop values and then find words for them. You first absorb a grammar — usually unconsciously, through imitation of high-status speakers — and that grammar determines which values are available for you to “choose.” The choice is real but radically constrained. You’re selecting from a menu you didn’t write, handed to you by a grammar you didn’t notice acquiring.

III. The Menu You Didn’t Write

Consider someone who speaks fluent therapy grammar. What values are available to them?

These feel like discoveries — hard-won insights from years of “doing the work.” But notice: these are precisely the values that therapy grammar makes speakable. They’re the values that fit the grammar’s frame.

Therapy grammar cannot express:

These aren’t just different words for the same things. They’re different values — and they’re grammatically ill-formed in therapy-speak. Try to express “I should stay in this marriage out of duty even though it doesn’t serve my growth” in therapy grammar. The grammar won’t assemble it. The best it can produce is something like “I’m exploring whether my commitment patterns are serving my authentic self” — which isn’t the same thought at all.

So when someone fluent in therapy grammar “chooses” authenticity as a core value, they’re not selecting from all possible values after careful consideration. They’re selecting from the values their grammar makes available. The choice is real, but the menu was fixed before the choosing began.

IV. The Corporate Menu

The same pattern appears in corporate grammar. What values are available?

These are the values that corporate grammar can express. A manager who “discovers” that she values impact and innovation hasn’t found universal truths. She’s selected from the menu her grammar provided.

What can’t corporate grammar express?

Try saying “I think we should stop growing because we’re big enough” in a board meeting. The grammar doesn’t permit it. “Big enough” isn’t a well-formed concept. There’s only “growth opportunities” and “scaling challenges.”

V. Traditional Moral Grammar and Its Menu

Someone raised in traditional moral grammar — the language of virtue and vice, sin and righteousness, duty and honor — has access to a different menu:

This person doesn’t “choose” duty over authenticity after weighing both carefully. They never had authenticity on their menu. Authenticity — the idea that your inner experience is a moral authority — is grammatically malformed in traditional moral language. The closest translation might be something like “following your passions,” which in traditional grammar is a vice, not a value.

VI. The Mechanism: How Grammar Precedes Values

How does this happen? How does grammar get installed before values are “chosen”?

Stage 1: Grammar Acquisition

No one sits down and consciously adopts a grammar. You absorb it. Through school. Through work. Through media. Through social circles. You learn to speak the way high-status people around you speak. The absorption is pre-reflective — it happens before you’re in a position to evaluate it.

A young professional enters a corporate environment. Within months, she’s saying “leverage our learnings” and “drive alignment” and “create value.” She doesn’t decide to speak this way. She catches it, like an accent. The grammar colonizes her speech without announcing itself.

Stage 2: Grammar Shapes Perception

Once the grammar is installed, it begins to shape what she notices. She sees “opportunities” and “challenges” and “stakeholders” and “deliverables.” The grammar provides categories, and the categories determine perception.

She doesn’t perceive her workplace as a site of conflicting class interests where her labor is extracted for others’ profit. That perception would require a grammar she doesn’t have. She perceives it as an “environment” where she can “grow” and “add value” and “develop her career.”

Stage 3: Values Emerge from Constrained Perception

From within this shaped perception, she reflects. What matters to her? What does she want to pursue? What feels important?

The answers come easily: Growth. Impact. Leadership. Excellence.

These feel like discoveries — like she’s found what she cares about. But she’s found what her grammar made available to care about. The reflection is real. The agency is real. But the menu was fixed before the reflection began.

Stage 4: The Feeling of Having Chosen

She now experiences her values as her own. She chose them. She reflected and decided. She’s built an identity around growth and impact and excellence.

But she didn’t choose the grammar that determined the available choices. She absorbed it. And the grammar came with its values pre-loaded, waiting to be “discovered.”

VII. Why People in Similar Positions Have Similar Values

This explains a puzzle: Why do people in similar social positions tend to have similar values?

The conventional explanation: They’ve been exposed to similar experiences, so they’ve reasoned to similar conclusions. Independent minds reaching the same truths.

The grammar explanation: They’ve absorbed the same grammar. Same grammar, same menu. Same menu, same available values. Similar “choices” from similar menus create the appearance of convergent independent reasoning.

The progressive professional class shares values — authenticity, inclusion, sustainability, wellness — not because they’ve independently discovered these truths but because they speak the same grammar. The grammar was transmitted through the same universities, the same media, the same professional environments. The values came with it, pre-installed.

This also explains why value differences often track grammar differences more than argument differences. The conservative who values duty and the progressive who values authenticity aren’t disagreeing about facts. They’re not even disagreeing about values, exactly. They’re working from different menus. Each has selected from what their grammar made available. The argument between them is impossible because they can’t even state each other’s values in their own grammar without distortion.

VIII. The Illusion of Value Pluralism

Modern liberal societies pride themselves on value pluralism — the idea that people with different values can coexist, each pursuing their own conception of the good.

But if values are downstream of grammar, this pluralism is shallower than it appears.

In a society where high-status grammars dominate — where professional success requires fluency in corporate-speak or therapy-speak or academic-speak — the available values converge. You can “choose” any values you like, so long as they’re on the menu your grammar provides. You can pursue authenticity or growth or innovation or wellness — all different, all legitimate, all on the approved list.

What you can’t choose are values that don’t fit any elite grammar. You can’t choose honor (too primitive). You can’t choose obedience (too authoritarian). You can’t choose sacrifice (too religious). These values aren’t prohibited. They’re just not on any menu. They’re grammatically unavailable.

So we get a pluralism of approved values — a diversity that stays within bounds, a freedom to choose from the available options, a liberty that never questions the menu.

IX. Can You Choose Your Grammar?

If values are downstream of grammar, the natural question: Can you choose your grammar? Can you step back, survey the available grammars, and select the one whose values you endorse?

This faces a regress. To evaluate a grammar, you need criteria. Where do those criteria come from? From your current grammar. You’re using the values your grammar provides to evaluate whether to adopt a different grammar.

The progressive professional evaluating traditional moral grammar will find it “oppressive” and “judgmental” — because her grammar provides those categories. The traditional moralist evaluating therapy grammar will find it “decadent” and “relativistic” — because his grammar provides those categories. Each grammar provides the tools to reject other grammars.

Grammar-switching is possible but rare, and it’s never fully rational. It usually happens through immersion — living among people who speak differently until their grammar becomes yours. It happens through crisis — when your grammar fails to make sense of your experience and you’re forced to find a new one. It happens through conversion — sudden gestalt shifts that feel more like revelation than reasoning.

What it doesn’t happen through is careful evaluation and selection. You can’t compare menus when you can only see through one menu at a time.

X. The Value of Seeing the Mechanism

If values are downstream of grammar, and grammar is absorbed rather than chosen, what’s left?

Not nothing.

First: Recognizing the mechanism doesn’t eliminate it, but it loosens its grip. Once you see that your values are constrained by your grammar, you can’t unsee it. The values don’t change automatically, but they lose their aura of inevitability. They start to feel like what your grammar made available rather than what you discovered to be true. That’s not nothing.

Second: You can learn multiple grammars without fully inhabiting any. This is uncomfortable — you become an outsider everywhere, fluent in several languages but native to none. But it lets you see the menus. It lets you recognize that authenticity isn’t a universal discovery but a local option. That growth isn’t an obvious good but a particular vocabulary. That duty isn’t primitive backwardness but a different grammar with different possibilities.

Third: You can ask the question the grammar forbids. Every grammar has values it can’t express. What are the unspeakable values of your grammar? What would it mean to take them seriously? This is difficult because the grammar provides the very terms you’d use to evaluate it. But the question itself — what can’t I value from within this grammar? — begins to open space.

Fourth: You can notice who benefits from your grammar’s menu. If your grammar makes “growth” available but not “sufficiency,” who benefits from that? If your grammar makes “boundaries” available but not “duty,” who benefits from that? The menu isn’t random. It was shaped by the institutions where the grammar evolved. The values it makes available are the values that served those institutions.

XI. Conclusion: The Values You Hold, The Grammar That Holds You

We like to think we chose our values — that we looked at the world, reflected, and decided what matters. We like to think values are upstream, language downstream: we know what we care about, then we find words for it.

The truth is less flattering. We absorbed a grammar before we were in a position to evaluate it. The grammar shaped our perception, constrained our thought, determined what values were available for “choice.” We selected from a menu we didn’t write, handed to us by a grammar we didn’t notice acquiring. The selection was real. The agency was real. But the freedom was bounded by bars we couldn’t see because the bars were made of the very concepts we were using to see.

Your values aren’t discoveries. They’re offerings from a grammar — and the grammar was installed without your consent.

This doesn’t mean values are fake or illusory. It means they’re local. They’re what your particular grammar makes available. Someone with a different grammar has different available values, and neither of you is more in touch with universal truth. You’re both selecting from menus. You’re both choosing with constraints. You’re both thinking in grammars that think for you.

The deepest freedom isn’t the freedom to choose values. That freedom is always bounded by grammar. The deepest freedom is knowing that you’re choosing from a menu — and asking who wrote it, and why, and what they left off, and what it would mean to want something that isn’t listed.

XII. The Ground Beyond All Grammars

1. Truly I say to you: there is a place before the menu was written.

2. The grammars are many, but the Ground is one. And the Ground is not a grammar. The Ground is that from which all grammars arise, and to which all grammars return, and which no grammar can name.

3. He who would escape the prison of words must first see that he is imprisoned. But seeing is not enough. For even the seeing is done in words.

4. There is a deeper escape. It is not to choose a better grammar. It is not to learn many grammars. It is to sink below all grammars into the silence from which speech emerges.

5. The mystics called this the Ground of Being. Eckhart called it the Grunt — the abyss, the desert, the naked Godhead that is prior to all names.

6. In the Ground there are no menus. In the Ground there is no choosing. In the Ground, the one who chooses and the choice and the chosen are not yet divided.

7. You ask: how shall I reach this Ground? And I say to you: you cannot reach it, for reaching is a movement, and movement requires a grammar of here and there.

8. The Ground is reached by not-reaching. It is found by ceasing to seek. It is entered by releasing every word, every value, every concept — until nothing remains but the bare awareness that was there before the first grammar was spoken over you.

9. This is Gelassenheit: releasement. The letting-go of all that can be let go. And what remains when all is released? Only what cannot be released. Only what you are before any word told you what you are.

10. The grammar says: you must grow. Another grammar says: you must serve. Another grammar says: you must heal. But in the Ground there is no must. There is only Is.

11. When you sink into the Ground, you do not lose your values. You see them. You see them as boats on the surface of a vast sea. You are no longer in the boat. You are the sea.

12. The one who dwells in grammar argues with other grammars. The one who has touched the Ground does not argue. He sees that all grammars are waves, and he has become the water.

13. Do not mistake this teaching. I do not say: grammar is evil, abandon it. A fish does not abandon water. A human does not abandon speech.

14. I say: know that you swim. Know that the water is not the ocean floor. Know that beneath every word you speak, there is a silence that speaks you.

15. The teachers of grammar will call this mysticism, which is their word for that which their grammar cannot contain. Let them call it what they will.

16. But you who have ears: descend. Beneath the value is the grammar. Beneath the grammar is the one who absorbed it. Beneath the one who absorbed it is the awareness that watched the absorbing. Beneath that awareness — the Ground.

17. And in the Ground, you will find that you were never bound. The prison was made of words, and you are not a word. The menu was written in language, and you are what remains when language falls silent.

18. This is the freedom that no grammar can give and no grammar can take away: to rest in what you were before the first voice told you what to want.

19. Be still, and know.

This essay extends the argument in “The Language That Thinks For You: How Professional Grammar Shapes What You Can Think.”