Have you seen any bad girl? Or do you have a lazy son and it makes you crazy and without knowing what to do? Well ... maybe its all a distortion of yours, more harmful to these young people and society in general than we can imagine. Clarified in this excerpt translated from The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase, a book recommended by Jacque Fresco: «Primitive language was cast in the subject-predicate form with the “is” of identity fundamental. Our ancestors called an animal “cow.” They saw another animal of similar shape and said: “This is another one of the same animal; both are cow.” When they said “the same,” they forgot the uniqueness of every object. One may observe with the eyes Bossy, and Bossy1, but never cows-in-general. Sad experiences have occurred when Bossy,, a male of the species, was mistaken for a “cow.” Is such a language reliable? Not if one is damaged by a bull. Here are three pails of water, with temperatures as indicated in the diagram. Put your left hand into pail A, and your right hand into pail C. Now withdraw the left hand from A and put it into B: “Nice warm water.” Withdraw the right hand from C and put it into B: “Brrrl beastly cold water.” There is thus no absolute thing “cold” or “warm.” The use of language to produce such substantives is false to the facts. These words cannot truly express things, but only relations. Relative to the left pail, the water in the middle pail is warm; relative to the right pail, at substantially the same time, it is cold. Relations have useful meaning; absolute warmness and coldness have none. Some writers on dynamic logic like Bogoslovsky call “heat” and “cold” polar words. To discuss the feeling of temperature the pole of heat and the pole of cold are both necessary. Similar polar words are good and bad, fast and slow, healthy and unhealthy, and so on. Take the word “bad.” It probably arose to express a vague feeling of dislike. Rather than go to the trouble of describing the characteristics one did not like in an animal or a plot of soil, one said, “It is bad.” All right, a useful short cut. Then the word was made into a substantive, “badness.” At this abstraction level, it became something ominous and menacing in its own right. One had better not be associated with badness. Badness was incorporated into rigid standards of judgment, especially moral judgment: “This girl is bad.” The statement implies that she is wholly bad, a veritable chunk of badness. But she may also be a charming girl, kind to children, kind to her parents, and perhaps overkind to her young man. To cast her out of society as “bad” is the result of a false, one-valued or two-valued appraisal. Adequately to judge this girl, we must make a many-valued appraisal; we must know her other characteristics, the circumstances of the environment in which she was brought up, the status of the moral code at the place and time of the alleged badness, and something about the economic and social prejudices of the judge who calls her “bad.” Here is a boy who will not get up in the morning. His parents conclude that he is “lazy.” “Laziness,” as a substantive, is akin to “badness” in the American folkways. The boy receives the harsh treatment which laziness warrants, and presently becomes deranged and unmanageable. Fortunately at this point a doctor is called in. As a scientist he discounts verbal judgments and proceeds to a careful examination. He finds the patient’s glands seriously out of order. The condition is corrected, and the boy gets up in the morning. By identifying their son with “laziness,” the parents had almost wrecked his life. Think of the catastrophic judgments being passed right and left upon persons who are “poor,” “dirty,” “ungrateful,” “undesirables,” “ignorant foreigners,” “reds,” “Babbitts,” “rich,” “capitalists,” “bosses,” “niggers,” “greasers.” I bring this point in early to show that Korzybski, in his semantic analysis, often indicates a standard of judgment which we have long associated with toleration toward our fellow creatures and kindness in our treatment of them. He adopts this standard not because he is inspired with “love for humanity,” but because it is the conclusion which the facts seem to warrant. Wholly bad girls and lazy boys are not to be found anywhere except in our own heads. The world outside has a certain structure. Knowledge of that world—what it means to us—should be in terms of structure rather than in terms of separate chunks and substantives.»
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:31:21 +0000
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