 By Sol
Towards the middle of the 20th Century a novel and original system of thought arose, which was to have far-reaching implications on today's thinking patterns. It was a philosophical theory whose precise didactic argumentation was not readily accessible to laymen, which caused it to remain in the musky realm of scholars and tenured Humanities professors. It had furthermore been criticized as being an incomplete and distorted picture of our reality, and has been largely discounted in its original form by the philosophy establishment, except as a curious historical trend.
Thus the influence of this theory has mostly escaped public notice. And yet from its inception, it had been used by its proponents for such a wide range of pursuits as treating shell-shocked soldiers or stopping college riots. It has also spawned several very interesting "cult-like" doctrines, such as Dianetics. Most curiously, many of this theory's tenets have been accepted for granted in the New Age era, though in an entirely different way than what its creator envisioned.
Such was the theory of General Semantics, as outlined by Count Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics."
Korzybski's proposition was based on what was called by his predecessors the "Non-Aristotelean" approach to logic. He was following closely in the footsteps of several earlier philosophical evaluation systems of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, which sought to upgrade the earlier simplistic definitions of "Aristotelean" or "Term Logic".
Term-logic is the simple syllogistic method best illustrated in the famous quote, "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Therefore Socrates is mortal." It was considered deficient because it's based on imposing strict limits upon the quantitative aspects of propositions such as "every" or "many". New forms of logic were proposed to deal with these concepts of what is called "multiple generality", which involve things like handling several conflicting postulates, or accepting a variety of meanings for any single term.
The Wikipedia page on the most important of these alternative approaches, known as "Predicate Logic", serves well to illustrate just how immensely complex this subject is.
The discussion uses terminology recognizable only to a serious student of Logic Theory, and would sound mostly like gibberish to anyone else. The topic became too complicated to study in schools and was completely dropped from the curriculum, where a hundred years ago elementary logic was taught together with arithmetic. This has led to the birth of the Revisionist School, which seeks to reinstate instruction in traditional logic as a usable basis for solving simple problems for youngsters.
Cutting through the rhetoric to the heart of the matter, it appears that the bottom line of Predicate Logic dictates a necessity to take a multiple number of factors into an account when making any single judgement. The contribution of General Semantics to this approach added that in order to fully understand this, it is necessary to be consciously aware of the great multiplicity of symbols which underlie our continual picture of "reality". Korzybski maintained that it is up to each individual to learn to do this on a strictly reflexive level, before making any decision.
Possibly the most familiar notion of General Semantics, which had subsequently sprouted independent wings through the writings of many authors, is that "the Map is not the Territory". This means that everything is perceived in our mind through symbols, which are our "accepted definitions" of what we see. But those definitions are not the things themselves, this is merely how we decided to call them, or treat them. Whereas in "reality", those same things can perhaps be seen as something else.
This notion was compliant in many ways with its contemporary philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose "Picture Theory" revolutionarized our view of how to treat the meaning of symbols in our mind. Its finer points lie mostly far outside of this discussion, but it has led to our modern understanding of how language is assimilated.
It's necessary to remember that today in the New Age, we have learned to treat the study of the Realm of the Mind as a "spiritual pursuit". Recent research into such diverse fields as Shamanism and Quantum Mechanics, has taught us that it is the constructs of our minds which allow us to experience things like "alternate realities" or "epiphany". Such phenomena had hitherto been recognized exclusively in the world of Metaphysics, "the mystical", or the spiritual, yet are nowadays regularly addressed by physicists and neuroscientists.
This was not the case, however, in early 20th Century, when post-Kantean thought gave rise to such "strictly materialistic" philosophies as Logical Positivism. Its central tenet was a complete rejection of anything metaphysical as "cognitively meaningless". Seen largely as the culmination of the long reaction to centuries of suppression of Rationality during the Dark Ages, this approach had since become the only accepted view of all our Science - a total denial of any "metaphysical" considerations in favor of "rational" and measurable ones.
In the subcontext of such "Humanist" and atheistic philosophy of its time, General Semantics sought to propose a system whereby the rational mind controls the more "animalistic" instinctual reactions of our thoughts. The main way to do that was by recognizing the multiplicity of possibilities which our conditioned symbols can represent. As the Wiki article about it says, the technique is viewed by its proponents as a very useful defense mechanism "against manipulative semantic distortions routinely promulgated by advertising, politics, and religion." It is a technique of the Rational Mind.
Perhaps few outside a closed academic clique would have ever heard about theory of General Semantics, were it not greatly popularized soon after its inception by people like the highly intelligent science-fiction writer A.E. Van Vogt. In 1945 he wrote a novel called "The World of Null-A", followed by a sequel in 1948, "The Players of Null-A", both professedly based on the postulates of General Semantics. The first one reportedly became the best-selling sci-fi novel ever published in France. (Many years later in 1984, he published the third "closing" book to this series, a much weaker work and wholly unnecessary according to most critics.)
"Null-A" in this equation stands for "non-Aristotelean" - the system of logic on which Korzybski based his theory. For Van Vogt this meant the Rule of Reason, a world of practical rationale, as opposed to a society or a personality dominated by primal urges and impulses. His Null-A novels are based in a future where General Semantics has been the leading theory for structuring life on Earth for several centuries already. People with more evolved abilities in this field got appointed to govern the rest.
The exact plot of the books is unimportant for our survey, but it has been widely criticized for being disjointed in parts and jumping around in ways that can make even the most hard-core Van Vogt fans dizzy. (See this page for an excellent summary and critique of the work.)
The story basically revolves around a character of Gilbert Gosseyn (pronounced "go sane"), who finds out at the beginning that he is something different than he seems, is somehow "more" than he or others thought. He then uses the cognitive principles of "Null-A thinking" in order to fully appreciate the meaning of this in his life. His realizations serve to make him "superhuman" in many ways - a recurring theme in many of Van Vogt's stories.
Several other interesting characters are introduced, such as "The Follower", one of the strangest and most shadowy personalities of all sci-fi, as well as a power-hungry dictator on a galactic conquest. The point is to show how they, in turn, deal with the "symbolic perception" mechanism of their own minds.
For Gosseyn, "null-a" meant Clear Thinking based on Reason, rather than the instinctive impulses of his body. It has been pointed out by many critics that Van Vogt does not clearly explain why this system is supposedly so anti-Aristotle, and is in fact in error about this. But he describes it as involving a conscious integration between our emotions, which at the time were said to originate from the Thalamus part of our brain, and our logical-rational faculty, thought to reside in the Cerebral Cortex.
The theory says that between every stimulus received by our brain and our response to it, there should come what Van Vogt calls the "cortical-thalamic pause", during which we combine in this manner the signals we are receiving both from our emotions and our reasoning faculty.
People well-trained in this technique do this instantly and automatically in reaction to every single stimulus, and are thus able to get the maximum performance of their intellectual ability. A group in the books who had managed to fully integrate the "null-a" way of thinking into their daily life have created an enlightened utopian society on Venus, with no leaders and common ownership of resources.
The "thought-integration" process of this method involves considering the widest possible variety of factors before reaching any decision, as opposed to acting on impulse, or as we say, "without thinking". This seems obvious and should go without saying, but a quick look at world affairs, as well as psychological studies on the subject, reveal that Rationale appears to be sadly absent from most people's actions.
Van Vogt's "cortical-thalamic pause" was seen by many researchers as a key to Increased Intelligence, and various courses on this subject have acknowledged his and Korzybski's contributions to the development of this field. As Van Vogt himself had stated in a 1980 interview, his intent with the Null-A stories was to show that man can be improved through a system of mental training. Other modern disciplines also owe a big debt to the two.
A noted US psychiatrist, Douglas M. Kelley, became a big proponent of Korzybski's theories. According to the Wiki article, medics under his supervision in WWII "used General Semantics to treat over 7,000 cases of battlefield neuroses in the European theater." Kelley later devised a program for teaching Criminology at UCLA, also based on the precepts of GS (see page 17 of the GS Bulletin for 1955. A perusal of this issue can show just how far-reaching an influence these theories have had.)
Another notable supporter of Korzybski's ideas was the famous American semanticist, Dr. Samuel Hayakawa. In 1943 Hayakawa founded the International Society for General Semantics (which in 2003 merged with the organization founded by Korzybski himself, called the Institute of General Semantics and afforded a world-ruling position in Van Vogt's books.)
Hayakawa came to national attention in 1968, when he became the interim Dean of beleaguered San Francisco State College, after the previous dean resigned in the midst of heavy student protest. In his introduction and apologia to the 1970 re-edition of "The World of Null-A", Van Vogt stresses Hayakawa's use of General Semantics techniques to successfully deal with the riots, meeting the "honest demands of people with genuine grievances" and quelling the violence with overwhelming police presence.
Hayakawa's indiscriminate use of the police force on campus had rightly labeled him as another brutal Establishment lackey by the students (as can be seen from this most interesting discussion from 1969 between him and student leaders.) His uncompromising stance towards the protesters had later won him a Republican Senate seat during the Carter Administration, and he was a good friend of Ronald Reagan. His story shows that the utilization of General Semantics can involve different codes of ethics - but he himself had undoubtedly judged things from the standpoint of this system, referring to the students' "distorted psychological reflexes" and incorrect or limited identification of symbols.
An important modern offshoot of General Semantics became known as "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" or NLP. This has become a big business in recent times, sprouting innumerable "self-help" courses like from this organization. It has been observed in the past that this was not an easy field to get rich in, because the sheer complexity of the subject makes it too demanding and almost inaccessible to the New Age crowd. Today NLP is offered to the public in a variety of watered-down versions with more mass appeal.
The central point of NLP is a virtual "reprogramming" of our minds, in order to make them capable of accepting a wide variety of definitions for any given symbol or thing. As a simplistic example, a person who is used to seeing drawbacks at every turn of his life, learns to view those drawbacks contrariwise as advantages, thus greatly improving his opportunities. Such an approach has of course found its way under one guise or another into almost every "self-help" system we've become familiar with.
Van Vogt himself became a prominent advocate of Dianetics in the early fifties, the psychological "self-analysis" system created by a colleague science-fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard. Van Vogt credited this system for the remission of his wife's long cancer problem. Though he never supported its "cultist" prodigy offspring Scientology, but he did open one of the first auditing centers in Los Angeles, and remained president of the California Association of Dianetics Auditors for many years.
Hubbard himself had never given credit to Korzybski for his ideas, but it is widely acknowledged that the theory of General Semantics played a major part in the later establishment of Scientology. (Though some researchers have gone to lengths to disprove this connection.)
So, is Null-A indeed a useful way to better deal with the world around us?
The well-known scientist and mathematician Martin Gardner noted in his 1952 work "In the Name of Science" (New York, Putnam) that Korzybski and his sci-fi followers were continually knocking down Aristotelean thought, while having only a very hazy understanding of what it really meant.
This observation seems to be well-founded (though others have claimed that Gardner himself did not properly understand Korzybski) - because it does appear that in many ways the early proponents of General Semantics have gotten things the wrong way around.
Van Vogt, for one, saw Aristotelean thought as based on primal-instinctive, or "emotional", responses to a situation, and held that we need to integrate these with the "reasoning faculty" of our cerebral cortex before making any decision. This was the essence of Null-A thinking as he envisioned it, and it certainly makes sense not to react impulsively to any situation, before thoroughly thinking it through.
But today, after decades of exposure to the syncretic revelations of New Age philosophies, most researchers of the "esoteric circle" at least, have come to believe that the exact opposite is true: our thinking patterns have for a long time been based way too much on Rationality, and not enough on our intuitive-emotional faculty.
"Aristotelean thinking" in our common understanding, despite what Korzybski and Van Vogt said, is in fact the personification of Logic and Reason. And the "Aristotelean type" of Logical Thinking has been seen as a prime facet of the "Male principle", whose utter domination in world affairs for several millennia had brought about the very sad environmental state of our planet today. This is why many visionaries in recent years have been calling for an integration of this approach with the "Female principle" of intuition, which may help slow down the spiraling decimation of our resources and our general conflicting ways.
The "integrative thinking" of Null-A, whereby one considers a multiplicity of factors as influencing any single cause, is in fact very similar to the Holistic approach of the New Age, where many unrelated or even seemingly "opposing" disciplines, such as Vedic Yoga and Quantum Mechanics, are syncretised together into a Whole which is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Holism seeks to combine all types of thought together. And from that vantage point, actual "miracles", such as the superhuman abilities of Gilbert Gosseyn, become possible. This involves applying the "disassociative principles" of General Semantics in order to discard the old meanings that we're accustomed to give to particular symbols, and thus re-structure our view of the entire world, which is made up of these symbols.
On a practical level, this boils down to "auto-suggestion" - such as convincing oneself that what one thought was "impossible", can in fact be redefined into "possible". This is basically also what NLP teaches.
The utopian society which Van Vogt envisioned on Venus was populated only by people who had fully integrated the Null-A way of thinking into their lives. Their world was structured on zero leadership, no ownership of viable resources, and people doing what needed to be done simply because it was there, and not because they have to or are told to. This was his epitome of Ultimate Sanity.
As has been pointed out, such a view actually turns Van Vogt into an Anarchist. He himself would've been most surprised at this definition, as he had mostly a conservative outlook on life in many ways (the man was, after all, born in 1912.) This is why the above essay calls him an "unconscious anarchist".
But it seems that his vision was in fact much further reaching than he realized. The approach of Integrative Holistic Thinking, which takes all the relevant factors into account, no matter how "far-fetched" they may be - does have the capacity to create a world where each person is capable of fully thinking for themselves, and thus no "leaders" are necessary.
Appropriately, as we're already dealing with Holism here, we find support for Van Vogt's theory from the entirely unexpected field of Martial Arts. The following study looks into the role of Tai Chi in stress-management and personal well-being. One researcher found that the Tai Chi exercise system elicits "an integrated hypothalamic response, the cortical-thalamic pause which leads to decreased activity of the sympathetic nervous system and relaxes the skeletal muscles, decreases blood pressure, respiration and pupil constriction" (emphasis mine.)
It would appear that proficient Tai Chi practitioners reach the same psychological state that Van Vogt sees as vital to the development of our thinking faculty. Thus they stand on the threshold of benefiting from the same "superhuman" abilities with which he endows his hero, Go-sane. If we wish to follow in their direction, then Null-A would seem to be the way to go.
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