Description

Alfred Korzybski was a Polish mathematician and all-round genius. He invented the field of General Semantics, a system for thinking rationally, getting around the cognitive distortions our minds tend to create and maturing into a sane, reasonable, intelligent person. You don’t hear much about General Semantics nowadays, but Korzybski’s influence behind the scenes is enormous: he is one of the main influences on CBT, REBT and other cognitive therapies, as well as NLP. Robert Anton Wilson cites him as one of his biggest influences.Manhood of Humanity was written in 1921. It deals not so much with the method of General Semantics (check out Science and Sanity for that: ) but with the whole phenomenon of Man, Man as a thinking, talking, creating being. Korzybski introduces his famous concept of ‘time-binding’, the human capacity to pass on knowledge from generation to generation, in ever-increasing complexity.