The language of dominator conformity represents an essential meaning perspective. How we conceive of language, holds real power over how we think.[101] The use of the right language, conformist language, can save us from our perceived danger in expressing our being, expressing our becoming self in the face of dominating conformity. It will not, however, aid our awareness or the search and aspiration for our becoming self.
We feel tempted to escape from the becoming self into conformity because of our continuing vulnerability, or fear of rejection and isolation. Our identity wishes to appear always correct in its choices, and our ego needs to defend the rightness of those choices. When we say "Yes" to conformity, we feel we say "No" to error. When we do what the dominator/conformist structures around us prescribe, we know immediately that what we do is right. We make the right choice because that's the choice every decent person would make within the conformist community. That is we make the same choice as everybody else no matter how fool hearted or confused that choice really shows itself. Conformity thereby ameliorates the fear of error. True, that fear never entirely disappears, but conformity lessens such feelings of exposure to censure, to vulnerability. It also gains us some form of regard—conditional to be sure, but at least we feel it's due us so long as we conform. We can signify our acceptance of and our relationship to the conformist norm by unconsciously using the normative language of that community.
The language of being forms almost no part of our typical, conformist way of speaking and thus thinking.[102] In order to fully say "Yes" to being, it will help enormously when we recognize how much having language of possession we use as a daily part of our speech and thought. When we use such language, we say an implicit "Yes" to the conformist attitude of having. Removing the words of possession comes so hard in English that it will remain nearly impossible. Until some new sets of words arise that denote relationship without possession, we will find ourselves stuck with some very awkward locutions. We would not say, "My car," so we would say, "The car (or the type of car) I drive." That remains ambiguous in that we could rent the car. Clarification might sound like this: "The car I drive for which I can show legal ownership papers." That seems to designate a legal if temporary relationship which rather suits saying "Yes," to being rather than having. This example may seems trivial, but if we want to choose a new relationship to objects, to what we have, what we think we own, we can do so in part through an awareness of the burden of possession and the confusion it creates in our whole being.
When we speak the word "have," we signify that we own that thing. It belongs to us. In such an ownership relationship, we invest ourselves in the object to a greater or lesser degree. It becomes part of our language of personal reference: "I have an arm," "I have a mind," "I have a car," "I have a house." We make that possession a part of our being, as a part of our identity. We even do that to others, independent beings who should not serve as possessions, objects we can have: "This is my wife/husband/son/daughter." Such introductions happen all the time. The speaker may follow such an introduction by a name but often not. The other person's separate being has become consumed into the possession identity of the speaker. If we are what we have, as Fromm says, we will show it in how we speak about ourselves and our immediate and extended worlds.[103]