literate men have been since the invention of the phonetic 
alphabet. Mere writing, however, has not the peculiar power of 
the phonetic technology to detribalize man. Given the phonetic 
alphabet with its abstraction of meaning from sound and the 
translation of sound into a visual code, and men were at grips 
with an experience that transformed them. No pictographic or 
ideogrammic or hieroglyphic mode of writing has the 
detribalizing power of the phonetic alphabet. No other kind of 
writing save the phonetic has ever translated man out of the 
possessive world of total interdependence and interrelation 
that is the auditory network. From that magical resonating 
world of simultaneous relations that is the oral and acoustic 
space there is only one route to the freedom and independence 
of detribalized man. That route is via the phonetic alphabet, 
which lands men at once in varying degrees of dualistic 
schizophrenia. Here is how Bertrand Russell describes (in his