Azur
The Living Force
[Edit: emphasis added]
I came across this link today: _http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07a.shtml
There are some things in here that I find interesting and others that I'm not sure I agree with.
It's quite long, a bit repetitive, suffers from a bit of a slant, but there are some nuggets in here, with respect to "taking back the language" and the problem of automatic thought entrainment via word programming (such as "Church"). ;D
I tired to post it here, but something gets screwed up in the formatting somewhere (I couldn't find where) and makes it hard to read.
Here are some excerpts:
The following sounds like classic "Snakes in suits" but does apply to non-genetic psychopaths/sociopaths too. I wondered where I had heard of Neo-tech before, it was in Buddy's post here: http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=14224.msg110539#msg110539
These are mostly the passages I found interesting. There is a lot I left out. Also the author seems to think E-prime is a major tool in fighting this problem (I don't concur, although it is useful to a point).
I came across this link today: _http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/tl07a.shtml
There are some things in here that I find interesting and others that I'm not sure I agree with.
It's quite long, a bit repetitive, suffers from a bit of a slant, but there are some nuggets in here, with respect to "taking back the language" and the problem of automatic thought entrainment via word programming (such as "Church"). ;D
I tired to post it here, but something gets screwed up in the formatting somewhere (I couldn't find where) and makes it hard to read.
Here are some excerpts:
ON CONTROL AND LYING
THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN CONTROL PEOPLE IS TO LIE TO THEM. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them. When you find an individual is lying to you, you know that the individual is trying to control you. One way or another this individual is trying to control you. That is the mechanism of control. This individual is lying to you because he is trying to control you -- because if they give you enough misinformation they will pull you down the tone scale so that they can control you. Conversely, if you see an impulse on the part of a human being to control you, you know very well that that human being is lying to you. Not "is going to," but "is" lying to you.
Check these facts, you will find they are always true. That person who is trying to control you is lying to you. He's got to tell you lies in order to continue control, because the second you start telling anybody close to the truth, you start releasing him and he gets tougher and tougher to control. So, you can't control somebody without telling them a bunch of lies. You will find that very often Command has this as its greatest weakness. It will try to control instead of leading. The next thing you know, it is lying to the [illegible]. Lie, lie, lie, and it gets worse and worse, and all of a sudden the thing blows up.
Well, religion has done this. Organized religion tries to control, so therefore must be lying. After a while it figures out (even itself) that it is lying, and then it starts down tone scale further and further, and all of a sudden people get down along this spring-like bottom (heresy) and say, "Are we going into apathy and die, or are we going to revolt?" And they revolt, because you can only lie to people so long.
Unfortunately there is always a new cycle of lying."
-- L. Ron Hubbard, 'Technique 88'
What Is Slavespeak?
"It is illusions and words that have influenced the mind of the crowd, and especially words -- words which are as powerful as they are chimeral, and whose astonishing sway we shall shortly demonstrate," wrote Gustave le Bon in his classic The Crowd, a century ago.
In The Second Sin Thomas Szasz wrote, "Man is the animal that speaks. Understanding language is the key to understanding man; and the control of language, to the control of man." Alfred Korzybski, founder of General Semantics indicated that, "Those who control symbols control humanity."
"Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us."
-- Robert Anton Wilson, Introduction to The Tree of Lies (by Christopher S. Hyatt. Ph.D.)
"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
-- Sally Kempton
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
-- Steve Biko
The language used to subjugate, control, and dominate others I lump together as "Slavespeak." Slavespeak is similar to the word Newspeak, invented by George Orwell and described in his book Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I use Slavespeak in essentially the same way Orwell used Newspeak, except that Slavespeak covers more words than I think Orwell would have regarded as Newspeak. Slavespeak includes words like: "state," "government," "law," "king," "constitution," "queen," "president," "prime minister," "nation," "country," "anthem," etc. Slavespeak, as I use the term, has developed over many centuries. I've also expanded what I mean by Slavespeak beyond politics.
I specifically use political Slavespeak in the sense of Orwell's "B vocabulary": "The 'B vocabulary' consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them... the 'B' words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables... even in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations... the intention being to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness... ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word 'Duckspeak' meaning 'to quack like a duck.'" [emphasis added]
Political Slavespeak consists of terrocrat words -- words that give terrocrats advantages over their victims; words that -- if accepted, believed, and used -- put victims at a disadvantage.
[...]
If a terrocrat can persuade a victim to accept his Slavespeak words, he automatically subjugates his victim. If a victim accepts the Slavespeak words of a terrocrat, he automatically positions himself as a subject in relation to the terrocrat -- and the terrocrat gains power over him.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
-- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Slavespeak is not limited to the political domain. It includes all language that may put an individual at a disadvantage in relation to others and to the world in general. Slavespeak probably occurs in most domains of human endeavor:
1. Philosophical;
2. Psychological/Emotional;
3. Economic;
4. Religious;
5. Political/Legal;
6. Scientific;
7. Health; etc.
An example of philosophical Slavespeak is the notion of "absolute truth." Dr. Michael Hewitt-Gleeson of The School of Thought calls it the "Plato Truth Virus." I strongly recommend that you do his "Brain Freebie" course, which you can find at <http://www.sot.com.au/>.
"Nobody likes me," "Women always betray me," and "You make me angry" are examples of psychological and emotional Slavespeak.
Al Siebert's book Peaking Out: How my Mind Broke Free from the Delusions of Psychiatry presents a trenchant description of how psychiatric Slavespeak operates and its consequences. Siebert was awarded a fellowship for post-doctoral psychiatric training at the Menninger Foundation. He dared to question "incontestable psychiatric dogma" and outlined some breakthrough ideas to his "psychiatrist teachers."
They were not amused. They had him committed to a psychiatric hospital as a mental patient. The book includes a narrative of Siebert's real-life experiences as an institutionalized mental patient. It also tells how Siebert saw through the delusional belief system which controls the minds of psychiatrists. A key quote:
"Then their white coats, the diplomas, their titles are cues that keep them in a hypnotic-like trance. Their perceptions of others, the special language they use, the labels they give to patients -- all are programmed responses, just like with cult members."
After Siebert left the psychiatric ward and the Menninger Foundation, he had a tremendous peak experience -- the kind of peak experience described by psychologist Abraham Maslow. As Siebert was driving south out of Topeka, he suddenly had the feeling that for the first time in his life he was totally free.
He writes, "It was glorious! It was a new feeling. Up until then my mind had been controlled by illusions and I hadn't known it.
I started yelling, 'I'm free! I'm free! My mind is totally free! I can feel it!'
I shouted as loud as I could, 'My mind is freeeeeeee!"
Freeing your mind from illusions and delusional belief systems can be one of the most liberating things you can experience. It can also be one of the most powerful things you can experience. This report can serve as a starting point for systematically ridding your mind of the major illusions which the vast majority of humans suffer from -- particularly in the political domain.
A key phrase in the Siebert quote above is "up until then my mind had been controlled by illusions and I hadn't known it." Becoming aware that your mind is controlled by illusions is a major step in freeing yourself from Slavespeak.
Economic Slavespeak consists of language that keeps people trapped in economic failure or poverty. At age 16, I discussed my possible future career with my father. At one point I said, "Well, I could always go into business." He replied, "You'll never succeed in business!" -- economic Slavespeak. Had I accepted his "economic curse" as valid, it would have condemned me to failure in business.
All religious language which places the individual who accepts it at a disadvantage I regard as religious Slavespeak.
The word "heat" as it was once "understood" by many scientist serves as an example of scientific Slavespeak. In Right Where You Are Sitting Now Robert Anton Wilson wrote:
"The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. We are encased in fossil metaphors; verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth.
"Physicists, for example, spent nearly three centuries looking for a substance, heat, to correspond to the substantive noun, "heat"; it took a revolution in chemistry and thermodynamics before we realized that heat should not be thought of as a noun (a thing) but a verb (a process) -- a relationship between the motions of molecules."
So scientists wasted nearly three centuries because their thinking was essentially entrapped by the word "heat," as they interpreted it. More on "heat" later.
An example of Slavespeak in the health domain: "Nature is perfect; you shouldn't try to improve on nature by taking artificial supplements."
[Note that we could expand the scope of Slavespeak to include symbols like "diplomas," "national flags," "uniforms," "military ceremonies," "saluting," "curtsying," "religious rites," etc.]
This report deals mainly with political Slavespeak -- which proliferates in most cultures.
Two Tribes
Consider two different isolated tribes somewhere in the jungles of South America. Call them Tribe 1 and Tribe 2. Each has its unique language with its own structure. The language of Tribe 1 (Language 1) tends to be very literal. A man who fishes, for example, is called "man-who-fishes." The same man, while sleeping, is called "man-who-sleeps"; while talking, "man-who-talks"; while running, "man-who-runs"; while eating, man-who-eats"; while writing, "man-who-writes"; while making a chair, "man-who-makes-chair"; while giving orders, "man-who-gives-orders"; etc. In Language 1, distinctions are made between different kinds of words: "Thing-words," "Do-words," "How-words," "Story-words," "Funny-words," "Order-words," "Panic-words," "What-words," "Who-words," "Why-words," "When-words," "Where-words," etc. High-level abstractions are rare in language 1. To the people of Tribe 1, any word that doesn't refer to something physically perceivable, is highly suspect. Their test for reality is physical.
The language of Tribe 2 (Language 2) is very different. A man who obtains his wherewithal mostly by fishing, is called "fisherman." (This system of nomenclature would seem absurd to the people of Tribe 1 -- how can you call someone a "fisherman" when he is not fishing, but sleeping?) Language 2 contains many high-level abstractions -- like "happiness." People from Tribe 2 can talk for hours about "happiness." (To someone from Tribe 1, this would be incomprehensible -- they only talk about "woman-who-is-happy" while she is happy, and "woman-who-is-sad" while she is sad. The notion that you could separate "happiness" from a real person being happy, and talk about "happiness" as if it existed by itself, would be completely unthinkable to someone from Tribe 1.)
To the people from Tribe 2, any word being used is automatically assumed to be part of existence, otherwise people wouldn't use it. (To someone from Tribe 1, the word "existence" would be a meaningless absurdity, because in their mentality only particular objects exist.) In Tribe 2, the test for reality is agreement. If other people agree with a word and the way it seems to be used, then that word is automatically accepted as valid and useful.
One day a strange man arrives at the place where the people of Tribe 1 live. They ask him: "Who you?" He: "I King." They: "Your name King?" He: "No; my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different but not special; who God?" He: "God creator of world." They: "Where God?; How create world?" He: "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "How we see God?" He: "Can't see God." They: "You speak crazy." He: "No; I special; I show you." Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You clever man-who-tricks." He: "I special; I King." They: "You speak funny; you clever John-who-tricks." He: "I King; my word law." They: "What law? -- special word?" He: "Yes; my word law -- you must obey." They: "Ah! You mean order-word!" He: "Yes; I King; I make law." They: "No; you speak order-word?" He: "Yes; I special." They: "What special? -- Anybody speak order-word?" He: "You not understand." They: "No."
Eventually John-the-stranger gives up trying to convince the people of Tribe 1 that he has a "special status" and that his words are different from the words of anyone else -- so he leaves, to search for more gullible and impressionable victims elsewhere...
For many days and nights he trudges through the jungle before discovering the people of Tribe 2. They: "Who you?" He: "I King." They: "Your name King?" He: "No, my name John." They: "Why call self King if name John?" He: "I special person, agent of God." They: "You look different; what God?" He: "God creator of world." They: Where God?; How create world?" He "God everywhere; God all-powerful." They: "Show special?" Whereupon the stranger performs various tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. They: "You King, agent of God." He: "Yes, my word law." They: "What law?" He: "Law special word of God through me; you must obey." Whereupon the people of Tribe 2 bow down and kiss the feet of John -- they do not habitually test abstractions against reality, so they readily accept John-the-stranger as their "King" and his word as "law." Thereafter all he has to do to subjugate, control, and dominate them, is open his mouth...
[...]
The people from Tribe 1 reject the Slavespeak words of John the would-be-terrocrat -- making them impossible to subjugate, control, and dominate [azur: because they required proof for the assertions made by John, and did not "fill in the blanks" with their own imagination, and subsequently accept their interpretation of what he must have meant as "real".]. To them the terrocrat is merely a clever liar and trickster.
The Tribe 2 people accept John's word "King" to describe himself. They believe that "King" John has special powers because of the tricks he performs and because of his connection to "God." By accepting John's terrocrat words they automatically place him in a superior position and themselves in inferior positions. Just by accepting, believing, and using the terrocrat word "King," they yield their power to the terrocrat -- they subjugate themselves.
It's worth emphasizing that just by accepting the concepts/words of the would-be tyrant, you place yourself at a huge disadvantage. By doing so, you relinquish your power, enabling the would-be tyrant to become an actual tyrant. Instead of laughing at his silly notions, you'll probably end up begging him to "change the law" so you can be free. And guess who has the last laugh!
The following sounds like classic "Snakes in suits" but does apply to non-genetic psychopaths/sociopaths too. I wondered where I had heard of Neo-tech before, it was in Buddy's post here: http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=14224.msg110539#msg110539
Neocheating and Deep-Cheating
The concept of "neocheating" comes from the subject "Neo-Tech," developed by Dr. Frank Wallace. My understanding of the mechanisms of cheating, the extent to which most of us are being cheated, and how to deal with this pervasive cheating received a tremendous boost from studying Neo-Tech and applying its principles. This has made it much easier for me to recognize and confront Slavespeak, and to demystify my brain. This demystification involves identifying, questioning, and exposing the words "neocheaters" and "deep-cheaters" use to dupe their hapless victims.
The following extracts are from the Neo-Tech Discovery, Vol. I:
"The traditional cheater is, for example, the crude sneak thief. He is also the small-time bureaucrat or politician on the take. He needs little skill and much gall to extract his living. But he lives in constant danger of being caught in the act and subjected to the consequences.
The classical cheater is, for example, the elegant con-artist thief. He is also the respected technocrat who, for example, helps develop weapons for a repressive government. Application of his skills (that took years to polish or develop) lets him exact a "good" living. His dishonesty usually remains unseen and uncalled by those who surround him as he cheats countless people out of their assets and lives.
The neocheater is, for example, the subtle executive thief who climbs to a high-paid corporate position by deceptive machinations rather than by productive efforts. He is also the religious leader who gleans a glorious living by promoting self-sacrifice among the multitudes. And the ultimate neocheater is the politician gracing the highest office. He usurps a sumptuous living, enormous power, and a huge ego trip by converting productive assets of the earners into nonproductive waste for the "public good" through the invisible manipulations of government force (e.g., taxes and regulations). His techniques require neither skill nor effort: he is simply shrewd and subtle enough to keep most people from realizing that he is constantly neocheating them -- constantly draining their lives and assets. And most dangerously, he considers his neocheating as necessary for the "good of all."
Neocheaters are by far the deadliest menace to honest and productive people, everywhere...
The careful observer will recognize that by far the highest percentage of people involved in building false self-esteems to justify their existences are those pursuing careers in politics and religion. Such careers are by nature anti-productive and depend on neocheating the public to extract money, respect and power...
But the supreme value of the neocheating concepts is that those new thinking tools will be the cutting edge for rejecting and eventually eliminating the power of government bureaucrats, political leaders, dishonest businessmen, external authorities, and all other neocheaters.
The concepts of neocheating as revealed by the Neo-Tech Discovery are among the most powerful thinking tools for future prosperity."
[...]
However, there is a level of cheating that is deeper than those identified by Neo-Tech. I call it "deep-cheating." Deep-cheating has two basic elements:
1. Inducing people to accept certain concepts or words -- like "king," "law," "government," "state," "nation," "society," "country," etc. (all Slavespeak words) -- as valid. This is what John the clever trickster tried to do to the two tribes above in respect of "king" and "law."
2. Inducing people to accept certain persons as "special" or having "special powers." John the clever trickster tried to do this by claiming that he was an "agent of God," and by performing tricks like apparently making objects appear and disappear. Terrocrats are "special" because they are "the government" and only they have "special powers" to do certain things like "make laws."
As we shall see later, the most effective deep-cheaters are lawyers and their ilk in the "legal" profession.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote as follows in his book Right Where You Are
Sitting Now:
"On a night in September 1927 when he contemplated suicide at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller decided to live the rest of his life as an experiment. He wouldn't believe anything anybody told him -- "golden rule," "dog-eat-dog," or any of it -- and would try to find out by experience only, what could be physically demonstrated to work.
In the year following that decision, Bucky stopped talking entirely, like many mystics in the east. He insists that he had nothing "mystical" in mind. "I was simply trying to free myself of conditioned reflexes," he said. He had met pioneer semanticist Alfred Korzybski shortly before and was convinced that Korzybski was correct in his claim that language structures caused conditioned associations -- mechanical reactions that keep us locked into certain perceptual grids. Fuller tried to break these grids, to find out what a person "of average intelligence" could accomplish if guided only by personal observation and experiment...
The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. We are encased in fossil metaphors; verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth.
Physicists, for example, spent nearly three centuries looking for a substance, heat, to correspond to the substantive noun, "heat"; it took a revolution in chemistry and thermodynamics before we realized that heat should not be thought of as a noun (a thing) but a verb (a process) -- a relationship between the motions of molecules.
Around the turn of this century -- this is all old news, even though most literary "intellectuals" still haven't heard about it -- several mathematicians and philosophers who were well versed in the physical sciences began to realize consciously that there is not necessarily a "thing" (a static and block-like entity) corresponding to every noun in our vocabulary." [emphasis added]
The word "heat" -- in the sense of a substance -- is a one-word lie. In reality there is no substance or thing that corresponds to the word "heat." When we say that something is "hot," we describe a condition or state. To then assume that there is a thing called "heat," that exists independently of the hot object, is silly.
Similarly, as we saw earlier in the case of Tribe 1, the idea that there is a thing or substance called "happiness," that exists independently of a person being happy, is absurd.
""What's the use of their having names," the Gnat said, "if they won't answer to them?"
"No use to them," said Alice; "but it's useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?""
-- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Addition and Hallucination
Now let's examine the phenomenon of "addition" as described by William James in his lecture "Pragmatism and Humanism":
"In many familiar objects every one will recognize the human element. We conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose, and the reality passively submits to our conception...
We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so,--though if they knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had given them. We name the same constellations diversely, as Charles's Wain, the Great Bear, or the Dipper...
In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition."
The above comes from the book Pragmatism and four essays from The Meaning of Truth. The entry in the index is worded, "Additions, human, to the given."
OK. So there are stars out there. They are the given. Looking at them from earth, some of them seem to constitute "groups" and we call such a "group" a "constellation." However, some of the stars in a supposed "constellation" are much further from earth than others. There's no basis in reality to regard them as a "group" or "constellation" -- as opposed to a flock of birds that actually fly together, or a galaxy of stars that actually move together.
Hallucination essentially means allegedly "seeing" something that isn't there. In reality there are a number of stars. We "see" a supposed "constellation," where in reality there's no "constellation" -- only individual stars. We add or hallucinate the falsely-called "constellation."
This phenomenon of adding to reality -- hallucinating what isn't really there -- is an essential aspect of Slavespeak. Thus an ordinary man is hallucinated as an "Emperor" or a "King." In our mind we add something "special" to an ordinary man, and we "see" him as an "Emperor" or a "King."
Similarly we add "something" to ordinary words, and as if by magic they become "the law."
Likewise, ancient scientists perceived hot objects and assumed ("saw" that) there must be a substance called "heat." This notion of "heat" as a substance is an unwarranted addition to the given (hot object). It's a kind of hallucination -- trying to "see" what isn't there.
What Robert Anton Wilson Said
In his Introduction to the book The Tree of Lies (by Christopher S. Hyatt. Ph.D.), Robert Anton Wilson wrote:
"I remember the first time I entered Alternate Reality and accepted a lie as fact. I was five or six years old at the time and my parents had taken me to see a wonderful movie called "The Wizard of Oz"...
Only a small part of our brains, or our "selves," is able to resist the lies of a good artist. Nobody can sit through "Alien," I would wager, without at least one sound of fear or distress escaping their lips during that "ordeal" ...which consists only of looking at pictures projected on a screen...
A movie theater is the best place to learn the true meaning of Plato's parable of the prisoners in the cave, who accept shadows as reality. Every artist who moves us, from a movie maker to Beethoven or Shakespeare, is a bit of a hypnotist.
In this sense that seemingly stupid and mechanical contraption we call "society" must rank as the greatest artist on the planet. For instance, when I was seven or eight, and feeling superior to the kids who closed their eyes "during the scary parts," I was entering a deep hypnosis created by another Virtual Reality called language. This hypnosis was a worse nightmare than the Wicked Witch of the West or King Kong or the Wolf-Man or any of their kith and kin, but it made me a "member of society"...
The hypnosis was performed by the good and pious nuns at the school to which my parents sent me... As a result of all the lies the nuns told me, I became a pretty good liar myself... At seventeen I became a Trotskyist. That was hot stuff in New York in the late 1940s. We Trots were more radical than anybody, or we thought we were. Of course, I was lying to myself again. Who the hell knows enough, at seventeen, to make an intelligent or informed choice among competing political ideologies? I had picked Trotskyism because one part of my mind was still Catholic and needed a hierarchy; the Central Committee made a good substitute for the Vatican. It allowed me to feel modern, scientific, "altruistic," brave, rebellious etc. and it did all my thinking for me.
At eighteen I quit The Party just before they could expel me. I pledged allegiance to the principles of individualism, free thought and agnosticism. From now on, I said, I will not by hypnotized by groups: I will think for myself. Naturally, I then spent over 20 years following various intellectual and political fads, always convinced I had at last escaped group conditioning and finally started "really" thinking for myself...
All this, mind you, occurred within the network of language--the Virtual Reality created by the strange symbol-making capacity of the upper quarter inch of our front brain. Language created God and Satan and Hell, in my childhood, and it created Liberty and Equality and Justice and Natural Law and other fictions that obsessed me at other stages of my "development." Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us. [emphasis added]
Is it is possible to use language to undo the hallucinations [emphasis added] created by language? The task seems impossible, but Zen riddles, Sufi jokes, the works of Aleister Crowley [Azur: Uh oh...], and a few heroic efforts by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein seem able to jolt readers awake -- shake them out of the hypnosis of words."
The Ability of Reframing
In Open to Change, Vincent Nolan wrote:
"Reframing means looking at a familiar phenomenon from a new angle. Any situation can be looked at in a wide variety of different frameworks, and each one is capable of throwing a new light on the subject... [T]he ability and willingness to set aside the conventional framework (temporarily) is one of the key skills of invention and discovery... [T]hese pigeon holes into which we classify things and situations, events and people, are themselves arbitrary and artificial: convenient and useful for some purposes -- but one, not the only way to view the world. The pigeon holes can be suspended (temporarily) and new ones brought to bear, without cost and with profit.
There is another important dimension to reframing. Once we accept that the same thing can be viewed in many different ways, all of them potentially useful, it is no longer necessary to impose our view of things on other people, we can accept theirs as alternative viewpoints, valid for themselves, and potentially enriching our understanding of the situation."
In A Tale of A Tub Jonathan Swift wrote: "...[A]t a Grand Committee, some Days ago, this important Discovery was made by a certain curious and refined Observer; That Sea-men have a Custom when they meet a Whale, to fling him out an empty Tub, by way of Amusement, to divert him from laying violent Hands upon the Ship. This Parable was immediately mythologiz'd: The Whale was interpreted to be "Hobbes's Leviathan," which tosses and plays with all other Schemes of Religion and Government, whereof a great many are hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden, and given to Rotation."
The Man Who Helped Open My Eyes
""The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn..."
-- Merlyn, The Once and Future King
Some years ago I visited a Luxembourg bank to deposit some paper money and buy gold coins. I had to wait in line. I started talking to the man behind me. After a while he told me he was a libertarian. After we'd concluded our business we met in a nearby café for coffee. I told him that I was also a libertarian.
"Libertarian!" he snorted, "practically all so-called libertarians are still so conditioned and so far from the truth, they don't know the first thing about liberty."
I looked at him in surprise. I considered libertarians to be the leading edge of human evolution. There followed a sometimes heated discussion about many aspects and principles of libertarianism. Time and time again this most extreme radical questioned even the words I used, for example: When I asked, "What about the laws of a country?" my new friend responded:
"Haw, haw, haw," laughing almost hysterically. I thought he would fall off his chair. Several people in the café looked at him in bemusement. "What about the barking of copulating baboons in the zoo?" he said.
I was bewildered: "What's so funny?"
"My friend," he said, "like most so-called libertarians, you don't have the foggiest notion of what exists and what doesn't. You believe in magical "law" like a spiritualist believes in supernatural "ghosts"... except... except that your belief is possibly even more absurd than that of the spiritualist. You see, I've heard of people who claim that they have seen "ghosts"; there are even purported photographs of "ghosts." But I've never heard of anyone who claims that he has seen a so-called "law," never mind photographed it."
"Anyway," I said, "what does all this have to do with liberty?"
"My aspirant-libertarian friend," he replied, "When you free your mind from the false concepts and misconceptions that fixate your thinking within the mental grooves fashioned by those who seek to enslave you, then you will discover what liberty really is, then you will be able to live free. Most so-called libertarians are like pigs hopelessly floundering in a cesspool of statist concepts. Just as it is almost impossible for a fish to imagine life on land, so it is very difficult, if at all possible, for an aspirant-libertarian locked into statist concepts, to conceive of life outside his self-created cesspool..."
[I apologize for my friend's outspoken, even insulting, turn of phrase. I believe he simply used such strong words to get his point across to me, which he certainly did. If you're a libertarian, please don't be offended, rather look for what you can learn from my friend.]
For a while we were both silent. Then he continued, "In actuality, the whole world is an Anarchy. Individuals are supreme, whether they know it or not. We all have virtually unlimited choice all the time -- we may assume notions and beliefs that limit our choice, we may also get ourselves into situations where choice is limited... but those are also choices... objectively, there are no so-called "states," "governments," "kings," "queens," etc.; there never have been and there never will be -- I have asked many people to show me a "government" and to tell me what it looks like. Nobody has been able to do that. Of course, there are hucksters who call themselves "government," "king," or "president"... just as there are suckers who believe them -- who blindly obey them -- or who blindly oppose them."
"You need to live your life in accordance with actuality: what is, what exists, what occurs. So I live my life out of a context of liberty, a libertarian enclave, an anarcho-libertarian enclave. I carry it with me like an aura. I have abilities: the ability called life, the ability to own property, the ability to produce, the ability to exchange, the ability to communicate. And my abilities do not depend on the agreement of others. I am supreme. I rule no one and no one rules me. I am responsible for every aspect of my life. My self-esteem, my power and my liberty can only be curbed by my own limitations. There are of course those who think otherwise, who would seek to violate my abilities -- what you might call "rights." When making choices, I take that into consideration."
Words as Enemy Weapons
In "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" C.S. Lewis describes how a very prestigious Devil lectures newly graduated "Tempters" on how to collect souls:
"Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them...
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power...
Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic...
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how "democracy" (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods?...
For "democracy" or the "democratic spirit" (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or simper at the first hint of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be." [emphasis added]
Notice that in a sense it's the word "democracy" that does the work, so to speak. The terrocrat just has to utter the word, and all the rest follows. It's as if the word has a kind of magical power in that the desired consequences result from the terrocrat just uttering the word.
The use of a word can have automatic consequences. Repeat: THE USE OF A WORD CAN HAVE AUTOMATIC CONSEQUENCES. Terrocrat words are weapons.
Furthermore, in general, terrocrats can use their words against you, but you can't use their words against them. "We are the government; we represent the will of the people; we have a mandate from the people -- you're a radical extremist; you're a selfish, uncaring libertarian dreamer; you're a threat to American values."
He who gives the names has the power. Repeat: HE WHO GIVES THE NAMES HAS THE POWER. "Don't listen to the terrocrats; they just want to dupe you with their mindless slogans, take away your freedom by violating your rights at every turn, and empty your pocket with their exorbitant, confiscatory taxes."
"They are not the falsely-called "government"; they are terrocrat crime-syndicate lawyers who violate your rights, thieves who steal your property with their forfeiture scams, murderers who gas and burn innocent women and children in Waco -- and they want to take away all private guns like Hitler did, so they can gas and shoot anyone with impunity!"
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
-- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
In The Ego & Its Own Max Stirner wrote: "The decision having once been made not to let oneself be imposed on any longer by the extant and palpable, little scruple was felt about revolting against the existing State or overturning the existing laws; but to sin against the idea of the State, not to submit to the idea of law, who would have dared that?"
Stirner identifies the need to challenge and attack the "idea of the State" and the "idea of law." As Robert Pirsig essentially indicates, if you destroy "the government" and "the law," in the long run you achieve nothing, because the more basic idea of "government" and idea of "law" remain intact, and in time will result in new "government" and new "law."
So what you have to do, is to "unlearn" the basic political Slavespeak concepts/words/ideas that were shoved down your throat by terrocrats and their helpers, witting and unwitting. You need to destroy in your mind the validity of Slavespeak words/concepts -- reduce their validity to zero -- to the point that you agree with the way Jeremy Bentham described political rhetoric (what I call political Slavespeak) in Bentham's Theory of Fictions: "Look to the letter, you find nonsense -- look beyond the letter, you find nothing."
Multi-Valued Logic
Korzybski described GS as a non-Aristotelian system. In addition to other fundamental differences, Aristotelian logic has two values, while "non-A" logic has multiple values. In Aristotelian logic, any proposition has only one of two values: "right" or "wrong" -- white or black, without any shades of grey.
Korzybsky's logic has multiple values -- any proposition can have a range of values, expressed in terms of probabilities or degrees of qualities (shades of grey).
Because, in creating our maps, models, and words, we tend to form incomplete abstractions of the world we're trying to interpret, usually no description, answer, model, action, or person has the siple value, "right" or "wrong." Many factors -- more than we know -- usually affect or relate to every event or situation. Some factors incline us to think in one direction, some influence us in other directions. If we look at as many of these factors as we can discern, and examine their relationships, we have a better chance of finding an answer with a high probability of producing the results we seek.
This multi-valued principle applies to many different areas. Korzybsky talks about the "multi-ordinality" of terms. Not everyone assigns just one identical meaning to a particular word. To many words most people assign more than one meaning. Different people may assign different meanings to particular words in the same context, and especially in different contexts. A word or sentence in itself doesn't say anything definite or finite; it requires an individual to assign meaning to it, and that meaning can vary considerably.
Similarly, we can think in terms of multi-valued causality. It may be naive to think that one specific thing simply causes another. Most events tend to have many causes and many effects. We live in a world of complex and wide-ranging interrelationships we may never fully understand. Albert Camus wrote that if he just lifted his finger, someone somewhere in the world might die as a result.
Additional GS Formulations
Time-binding. Korzybski described the uniquely human ability to record information in the form of written language and pass knowledge on into the future to others as "time-binding."
Abstracting. "Abstracting" refers to how we obtain and process knowledge, how we create our maps of the territory. I've already indicated how the factors, (1) deletion; (2) distortion; (3) generalization; and (4) addition and hallucination, can affect the way we create our maps. We can distinguish between abstracting as directly as possible from our experience -- extensional abstracting -- and abstracting from "language-absent-experience" -- intensional abstracting.
We can identify levels of abstraction: (1) from sensory input to pre-verbal mental map; (2) pre-verbal mental map to verbal map; (3) verbal maps of verbal maps; (4) etc. The higher the level of abstraction, the greater the risk of (1) deletion; (2) distortion; (3) generalization; and (4) addition and hallucination reducing the usefulness of the abstraction.
Many of our personal misunderstandings arise when we act as if we have all the information about anything or anyone, i.e., we act as if we abstract perfectly, which we can't do. No two events or situations share exactly the same details, but for convenience, we may categorize them as identical or similar. Treating them as if identical -- ignoring their differences -- can lead to misunderstandings, conflicts, and even tragedies. Ever heard of a policeman who shot a suspect to death, because he thought the suspect had a gun when he didn't?
Elementalism — Splitting the Territory. In our maps we often make distinctions or linguistic splits, for example, we may talk about "thoughts" and "feelings" as if they constitute separate things. But the territory may contain only inseperable "thought-feelings." The split between thought and feeling could reflect no more than a linguistic convenience -- another for us to create maps with nothing in the territory that corresponds to the map, i.e. there's no referent.
Non-Elementalism -- Not Splitting the Territory. The principle of non-elemantalism indicates that we can't necessarily separate thinking from feeling, actions from consequences, etc. It leads to some holistic terms, such as organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment, thought-feeling, etc.
Testing by Experience. We have a self-reflexive capacity; we can observe the consequences our actions produce and learn from them. This gives us opportunities to improve our abilities to observe, to create more appropriate maps, to think more effectively, and to act more productively. We can test our inferences, evaluations, theories, value systems, etc. about philosophy, politics, psychology, economics, crime and punishment, etc. We can recognize that our verbal constructions necessarily differ from things-events. We can put our verbal inventions to the test of experience. We can ask, "Does the map fit the territory?" "Do our maps work?" "Do they produce the physical results we seek?"
These are mostly the passages I found interesting. There is a lot I left out. Also the author seems to think E-prime is a major tool in fighting this problem (I don't concur, although it is useful to a point).
