General Semantics and Authoritarianism

WHEN I FIRST encountered general semantics many decades ago, it was a revelation to me; it has been an inspiration ever since. Over the years, however, I have increasingly sought to find for myself a psychological cohesiveness to its concepts and techniques. To say that general semantics is a non-Aristotelian system, as Korzybski named it, is not revealing to people who know little of Aristotle. If the system is non-A, what is it? ("Is" in this case is not a verb of identity but rather leads to a sufficient overall characterization.) General semantics is described as being based on science, and this makes it more accessible; but, still, I think that most people don't fully appreciate what that means. They think of science as something born of white lab coats, test tubes, and microscopes, resulting in technology. As science, one could say that general semantics is essentially inductive; that might be even more meaningful and would be in keeping with its non-A motivations. Aristotle was known as "The Father of Rhetoric." We might call Korzybski the "Father of the Art of Evaluation." The term "evaluation" relates to the purpose of general semantics. Still, that does not evoke a basic psychological underpinning for me. Anyone can evaluate; but what makes some do it well and others badly? The cognitive basis I have come up with is open-mindedness. General semantics is not driven by metaphysics, but by perceived realities; and it is the spirit of open-mindedness which undergirds it. Open-mindedness is the mind-set that unifies non-allness, self-reflexiveness, time-binding, and the idea of "etc." To use indexing implies that one recognizes other-ness in situations and people; the same is true for the dating technique. Open-mindedness means the acceptance of alternatives to anything, and by implication, the existence of sub-sets to generalizations. The question that has long bothered me: what makes some people open-minded, and some closed-minded? To say that parental upbringing is the cause would be too facile and unrevealing. The same can be said about ascribing the source to the circumstances surrounding one's upbringing. Poverty during childhood, for instance, can lead some to have empathy for the poor, and others to be grasping and self-involved in their determination to compensate for their poverty; that is, to be extensional or intensional. It seems reasonable to suppose, however, that the interaction between the way parents handle their children's upbringing and the circumstances they grew up with must nourish the seeds for how we evaluate. One attitude that parents and other mentors are apt to engage in is authoritarianism. To me, this is a powerful, credible source for closed-mindedness. Authoritarianism is built into a major contribution of Aristotle's, the syllogism. In that form of logic, one is presented with the major premise, which one is supposed to accept on faith as truth applicable to a general situation. The middle statement, the minor premise, refers to a particular example of that generalization, leading to the conclusion that the minor premise must agree with the major one. This process is deductive and prescriptive. Laws, of course, follow this logic; e.g., crime must be punished, murder is a crime, therefore murder must be punished. The irony is that the major premise here has been established inductively, from experience. In the classic syllogism, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, the major premise, however deductively proffered, has itself been inductively arrived at by eons of human observation. So one cannot be too dogmatic about the dangers of syllogistic reasoning. Rather, one must examine the validity of the major premise. This, the inductive building up of evidence, is the contribution of science. Hence, science strives to be authoritative, but not authoritarian. An understanding of the roots of authoritarianism was developed by a mammoth study sponsored by the American Jewish Committee at the end of World War II. …