If language has indeed been the biggest help to human progress how can it now be the biggest barrier? Language has enabled the human species to move ahead of primates even though there is only a tiny difference in genetic DNA. Language has allowed communication and therefore cooperation. Language has allowed the storing of knowledge so that future generations can benefit from the learning and wisdom of past generations.
 
Language allows the formulation and expression of thoughts. Language allows competent and subtle descriptions. So how can language now be the biggest barrier to human progress? Any self-organizing system like human thought and human language reaches a stable equilibrium state (sometimes called a local equilibrium). It is very difficult to budge from this state because any change seems inferior. So we are sucked back to the equilibrium state. That is why changes in language are so slow and so difficult. Purely on this system basis it is inevitable that language will reach a complacent 'stable' state and will become more and more inadequate at describing an increasingly complex world. So language may indeed have been the biggest help towards human progress up to this point in time. It may also be the biggest barrier to further progress. A child's clothes are important and suitable but the child eventually grows out of them. The clothes remain wonderful but their value is changed. Trainer wheels on a bicycle are essential until you learn to ride the bicycle - but a hindrance thereafter. The apparent contradiction can also be resolved in another way.
 
Language as a general concept remains as valuable as it has always been. At the same time, our current language is a barrier to progress. That is why this website needed to be created. Language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Words and concepts enter language at a state of relative ignorance (relative to our current knowledge). These perceptions are frozen into permanence with a language word. So we are forced to perceive the world in a very old-fashioned way. It is for precisely this reason that language has become a barrier to human progress. For example, the perception of 'profit' has severely limited the social development of business and value creation in society. Why, then, have we not been able to develop the new concepts and perceptions that are needed? The answer to this question is the key element behind the de Bono code.