Becoming
Humane - Being Humane Evolution of the
Humane - Globalisation of Peace - World in
Balance Liberation
from Psycological Exploitation: by Olek
Netzer (pdf) 1.
General Semantics As a young man, I
experienced Psychological Exploitation as a terribly
powerful means of control in the hands of my own political
organization's establishment and its leadership. Other party
members I knew were not bothered; they were either cynical
about it or unaffected. But I could feel distinctly the
oppressive quality in the inner processes of discussion in a
Party that in its own mind was egalitarian and democratic,
priding itself in "open and free debate" before reaching its
decisions. By that formally democratic method, after a
majority decision had been reached, a "party discipline" was
imposed, everybody had to follow suit. I felt
entrapped not having any conceptual means for even
expressing clearly what I felt was going on. The first
glimpses of awareness came with reading "Freedom or Death",
a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of the more famous
"Zorba the Greek" and "The Last Temptation of Jesus". The
book was about the civil war in Greece between the
Communists and the Nationalists and it contained the
sentence "There are no ideas in this world. All
there is are people who believe in ideas and behave in light
of them. And the value of an idea is only as the moral
stature of persons who live by it". In my inner
world, in which "objective truth" and "common ideology"
served as a weapon to club opponents on their heads or prod
deviants back into line it felt like the basic truth. It
gave me some strength, but I had to grope my way around
psychological exploitation trying to pinpoint it exactly,
wondering why so few people were aware of that obvious
phenomenon, how exactly it worked, and what could be done to
liberate oneself and others from it. I was very much
strengthened by the first real theory of political
psychology I found in Erich Fromm's "Fear of Freedom"(1),
becoming now convinced that people's psychological
inclination to authority and domination motivates
their political orientation along with, or more than, their
ideology and economic interests. And then I
found an existing theory that gave my awareness of
Psychological Exploitation a tremendous push upwards and an
ability to cope with it and fight it back. That theory
is called General Semantics. It is
not to be confused nor associated with the academic
disciplines "Semantics" and "Semiotics". General Semantics won
my respect and affection by the simple truthfulness of its
basic premises and by the character of its people as it was
reflected in their books and articles. There was
something humanly warm, fresh and simple, in their style.
It was as if someone wanted to invent a style which is
as far away as one may get from professional philosophical
jargon, ideological phraseology, abstract language.
Imagine a young idealistic person, feeling helpless,
often victimized psychologically by charismatic figures,
trying to push his way against the flames of high rhetoric,
reading: "...unless we fumble
for words and pause and groan and creak when we talk and add
footnotes and explanations, we are not thinking, we are just
moving muscles. A dog does that when it barks. I think
we would do well never to trust a person who easily talks
more than a hundred words a minute..."(2) The General
Semanticists presented themselves as honest guys,
no-nonsense and with an uncommon intellectual courage that
led them straight to dealing with the most relevant and most
dangerous areas of human existence. And they did not
think twice when a sacred cow needed to be slaughtered, and
explained everything in a simple and crystal-clear language,
and with good humor too. The formulation I have used
here repeatedly as an "oath" against repeating old mistakes,
"we need to know what we're talking about as we have
never known before" - is theirs. I feel
intellectually indebted to them. The most popular of the
General Semanticists, Sam Hayakawa, defined GS once as a
theory dedicated to the problem of how not to make a fool of
yourself. That is certainly more than the political
ideologues and teachers of philosophy can claim. Today
I am still willing to be labeled a "General Semanticist" in
addition to "a Humanist", in spite of the fact that General
Semantics has not developed as I hoped and is still not
accepted in the first echelon of respectable academic
disciplines. I suppose, it is too straightforward and
too simple to be taken seriously by people with deeply
entrenched ideological, ideological-academic, and political
interests. Among the established learned theories I
found that General Semantics (GS) is that child with open
mind and eyes who sees what all those adults, blinded by
their ideologies, do not see, namely, "The Emperor has no
clothes!" 2.
Conceptions and misconceptions of science General Semantics is
basically a proposition to use the methods of science in
areas that so far have not been approached scientifically --
politics and all areas that are considered to be the realm
of normal persons' opinions, traditions, and values.
Science in those areas is considered inapplicable on
the grounds that in matters that are settled by personal
values you cannot make "scientific" measurements,
predictions, or experiments that can be repeated and their
results verified. But Science is a terribly effective
- and a wonderfully effective - method humans may use to
find solutions to their problems. The reader, who having
read Part One is now familiar with the scientifically-based
processes and procedures for democratic-humanistic political
organization, should be able to answer the contention that
in the course of human political events the
scientific method is inapplicable: Indeed, it is not
science but our value-choice that determined our decision to
organize politically and yet maintain equality of all of us
in access to organizational decision-making power.
However, once we made that choice, we have plenty of
scientific evidence, including much that is based on
experimentation, that to reach this goal we need to abolish
the organizational power-pyramid with leaders on top.
We have been scientific in choosing the ways to
practice our values, and even in understanding our "values"
as organizing principles in our behavior rather than just
beautiful words which resonate favorably in our hearts and
minds. We have been scientific in making it our
methodological principle to know, as accurately as men and
women of science can when they talk about anything
they are working on, what we are talking about when
we talk about our values, or politics, or when we seek
solutions to our problems. The proposition of GS
is radical because, in contrast to the idea that science and
values do not come together, it suggests that we better be
scientific in coping with our human problems and even tells
how. That proposition is also terribly important, because
the scientific method is so effective and other traditional,
philosophic, and traditionally common-sense methods so
ineffective in the course of human events. GS requires
that we pattern our problem-stating and
problem-investigating and problem-solving after
engineers and doctors, while we tread the ground in a domain
that so far was run by pre-scientific modern-day
All-Knowers, Sages, Magicians or High Priests, Leaders,
people of Vision, Ideologues, Politicians, Philosophers,
Teachers, Authorities, and all kinds of "Public-opinion
Leaders" who shape our political culture and lead it to the
results you can observe, if not feel yourself, all over the
world. Sadly, science in the last 100 years has
revolutionized the technology of war beyond our wildest
dreams or nightmares, but politics has not been practiced
scientifically in any other aspect. As far as thinking
rationally, reaching agreement and understanding is part of
politics -- if Machiavelli could be resurrected, he'd feel
that nothing much has changed over the last 500 years or so
in the ways and means people, including their rulers, cope
with political problems and conflicts. The GS proposition,
that we be scientific and not anti-scientific when
approaching normal human problems that involve morality and
values, must be evaluated, first, in light of the existing
and traditional alternatives. Then, we need to know exactly
what we are talking about. We are not talking about
the practices and products of science in industrial,
technological or academic institutions. We are talking about
science as a guiding principle in approaching and solving
our problems. The reader is invited to suspend
judgment for a while. First, consider the idea of
Science in our culture. In a sweeping
generalization, we suffer from a split personality with
regard to "science". On the one hand we have internalized
unlimited belief in science as the only approach capable of
understanding and mastering the forces of nature, for better
or worse, and of solving problems of physical nature such as
cancer or AIDS, ICBM's, the hole in the ozone layer or
interplanetary flight. On the other hand, witnessing
the destructive potential of scientifically developed
technologies or political theories advertising themselves as
"scientific" (Marxism), we became distrustful of science
itself. We have a strongly internalized disbelief that by
scientific methods one can understand and resolve political
problems or master the destructive forces of human nature.
The mainstream of "Science Fiction" in popular culture is a
characteristic symptom of this split-personality mentality,
and had it not been so ridiculous in its lack of human
imagination, it should be interpreted as sinister. The
future people of the galaxies with their "death rays" and
time-machines are not different in their political
behavior from the people we know too well with their
prejudices, power-drives, authority, rhetoric, hatred, and
of course aggression. Wendell Johnson, the General
Semanticist to whom I feel deep affinity and gratitude for
what I had learned from him, defined the essence of the
scientific approach and described the nature of
alternative approaches, in these words: "Our earliest
forebears protected themselves from the torment of raw
experience by swaddling their tender sensitivities in
superstition... In this orientation improvement had no
meaning because the Magician transformed. He could
solve problems quickly and finally and so he does
today. It is in some such terms that I see
totalitarianism as the old world writ large. And I see
the new world, the possible future, as one ruled by the
authority of evaluated experience - ruled, that is,
by the attitude that the dictates of the Old Man, the
Knower, the Magician, the authority of age and tradition and
power, are to be tested and validated. If democracy
means anything then to me it means just that." (p.
16) "...The scientific
method simply requires that we maintain an honest
relationship between conclusion and data, that is between
our map and the territory, between the world inside and the
world outside..." "It is the only pattern I know about
in which the individual is free, by definition, to work out
his own conclusion on the basis of his own data. He is
free, that is, to maintain harmony between himself and the
world. As I see it, the scientific method in that
sense is related to everything that somehow centers around
the integrity and the dignity of the individual." (p.
55) Now the reader can
judge Wendell Johnson's proposition that we become
scientific in our approach to politics. That is
exactly what I mean too: I welcome the reader to the
"possible new world", a world truly democratic as it is
governed by the "authority of evaluated experience"
which lies within each individual, rather than by any theory
or dogma or leader or tradition; and, like science itself in
choosing its ways to solving its problems, it values above
all "honest relationship between conclusion and
data". Just consider what could be accomplished if our
conceptual maps about the world of politics were patterned
after the fairly accurate maps of science guiding us in the
physical world. Common people all over the world
know the scientific approach as the only approach that
can solve problems of physical nature, fly people to the
moon or raise them from the dead (by resuscitation, possibly
one day by de-freezing..). Millions of Africans make
it a passionate goal of their politics to be given the
benefit of science for curing the epidemic of AIDS.
Change, innovation, the notion that things are
not going to stay as they have always been
became the cultural common sense wherever the scientific
approach leads the human endeavor to solve problems and cure
epidemics. In all that concerns physical matter
science changed completely the ages-old thinking and living
patterns of people all over the world and made them look to
science rather than to their traditions for solutions. Not
so in politics and normal social life - and see the
difference! In a collection of his
lectures published after his death, Living with
Change, Wendell Johnson tells a true story that shook me
and stays with me ever since. I feel that, in a
nutshell, it tells exactly what I mean by science and
how a scientific approach should be seen in the context of
human values and other alternative approaches. Johnson
cites Galileo Galilei, whose friend, a professor of medicine
at the University of Padua, summoned his colleagues and the
faculty's dean to observe an experiment. He dissected a
human cadaver in order to prove that the center of nerves is
the brain, not the heart (the realization, that just a few
centuries ago the most learned people in the world new less
about their own bodies than a contemporary 8 years old
highlights the effectiveness of the scientific approach in
changing people's orientation). The dean who watched the
demonstration said afterwards that he was very impressed.
"I myself would believe that the center of the nervous
system is the brain", he declared, "had I not, with
my own eyes, read Aristotle". The conceptual maps
guiding people in their social behavior and politics are not
good, at least if you judge by the results. Education does
very little in teaching us good orientation in the social
area. We are not taught how to use our orientation
apparatus, how to navigate independently and sanely and how
to avoid mistakes. Most people learn terribly bad
social habits which make them prone to make war against
other people. They are being socialized to believe and not
question their collective maps as if they represented the
living truth and as if their legends and signposts always
represented the ways in the right directions. Traditional
modes of thinking and believing in matters of national
politics, war and peace, etc. have been more often than not
openly anti-scientific, educating people to be
oriented backwards, toward the "glorious" history, past,
leaders -- rather than be skeptical, question authority,
look for new solutions to national-social-political problems
and believe, like any scientific explorer and researcher
worth her or his grain, that new things can be discovered
and old problems could be found to have better than the
existing ways of coping. For me, systematic
application of GS could become a giant step toward making
"That Way Nevermore". With all due caution, we should
not overlook the tremendous potential of change by
"scientifying" our traditional approach to politics and
political life. References 2) Wendell Johnson
(1972), Living with Change, New York: Harper &
Row 3) Lewis Mumford,
The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (1970),
New York: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich, p.
33.). see also:
http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/human/GS.html
The Theory Underlying the Work to be Done1) Erich
Fromm (1941), Escape from Freedom, New York: Holt,
Rinchart and Winston.
PREVENTION
OF DEHUMANIZATION IN (CLASSROOM) EDUCATION, by Olek
Netzer (pdf-version)
The
Real Causes of War beyond the Multicausal
Approach,
by Olek Netzer
(pdf-version)
THAT WAY NEVER MORE - Egalitarian Alternative to the
Pyramid of Political Party Power, by Olek Netzer
(pdf-version)
The
Einstein Project,
by Antonio
Rossin
Truth,
Belief, and Negative Language,
by Antonio
Rossin
The
Lessened Flexibility Syndrome -
LFS,
by Antonio Rossin
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Emanzipation
Humanum,
version November 2005, translation from german to english by
the author. Criticism, suggestions as to form and content,
dialogue, translation into other languages are all
desired
http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/human