Word: korzybski
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When Callenbach began researching the book, he recalled a work he had read while a student at the University of Chicago, Science and Sanity, in which author Alfred Korzybski talked about man's capacity for "non survival" behavior. "He used the term largely in a social sense, but it seemed applicable to a wide range of things that we started doing in this century and that seemed like a good idea at the time, but now persist even when circumstances have changed and the habits have become self-defeating." Callenbach mentions things like nuclear plants and chemical fertilizers that...
...appreciate the damage that this sort of sloppiness can do, it is useful to invoke the late Count Alfred Korzybski, inventor of general semantics. Korzybski was a Polish-born mathematician and physicist, part crank and part genius, who regarded his theory as a whole new science of life. Our language, argued Korzybski, does not reflect reality, and its structure does not correspond to the seen or unseen world. Its grammar, based on Aristotelian logic, implies primitive philosophical concepts tied to the prescientific past. All this leads to emotional disturbances and frustrations, known as semantic shock. Korzybski prescribed some mental tricks...
...Fallings" is necessary because there are many different kinds of falling in love. Love, like most other terms, has many different meanings; hence Korzybski taught that mentally at least, one ought to "index" words, so that love1 might stand for love of God, love2 for love of country, love3 for love between men and women, etc. The bracketed "to me" indicates that love is not equally wonderful to everybody, and the "great many ways" recognizes that virtually nothing in the world happens "in every way." All this may seem obvious. Nevertheless it contains a significant relativist philosophy and much wisdom...
...Korzybski, where are you now that we need...
...semantic harm done by "to be" is that it tempts man into erroneous value judgments. Korzybski noted dryly that a rose is not at all "red" to those afflicted by color blindness, and that redness itself is not a reality but a quality of reflected light to which the description "red" is arbitrarily assigned. Better to say, Korzybski suggested, "I classify the rose as red," or "I see the rose...