Description

General Semantics was started by the Polish engineer, mathematician and genius Alfred Korzybski. General Semantics aims to teach people how they abstract and distort the world to make their mental models. Korzybski felt that the insanity of wars, neurosis, and all kinds of minor misunderstandings were caused by people taking their mental models too seriously. Ever hear the phrase “the map is not the territory”? That was originally Korzybski’s motto, and his system of teaching it, General Semantics, became hugely popular, taught in thousands of community study groups, schools, prisons etc. in the 1940s and 1950s. It was a huge movement, but it seems to have tapered off now. Or maybe it has just transmutated into cognitive psychology. If you study General Semantics a bit, it’s funny how the cognitive psychologists were hailed for their “revolutionary” discovery that irrational, overgeneralized thoughts cause mental disturbance; Korzybski had that figured out 30 years before Aaron Beck! Korzybski is also cited as one of the major influences on neurolinguistic programming. And the current buzz in psychotherapy is “third wave cognitive therapies” like mindfulness – here mainstream psychology is 80 years behind Korzybski, who advocated sometimes experiencing the world nonverbally. He called this “silent practice” and it is equivalent to “mindfulness”. You temporarily throw away the map and dig the territory itself. You gotta go out of your mind if your want to come to your senses!This product is a series of lectures given on Korzybski and General Semantics by Gad Horowitz at the University of Toronto. Horowitz is one of the few (very few) scholars today still studying Korzybski, which is a bit of a shame.One warning: this is a college module given to students of sociology or something like that. The “intellectual” stuff can be quite dense, so if you don’t like people namechecking cats like Derrida and Foucault, give this one a miss.All humans should read Korzybski’s books  -Science And Sanity: of Humanity: