Hardcore kindness semantics

‘Show me a movement that doesn’t hate somebody, and I will join it at once.’ – RAW, Right Where You Are Sitting Now

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The art of generalisation seems key, to me, although that’s probably more difficult to remember than “E-Prime” or “Maybe Logic” by mnemonics/memes. Learning to generalise without creating a basis for incipient harm/violence. (Or learning to artfully not generalise, although that sometimes doesn’t seem an option).

Alfred Korzybski’s “working devices” (indexes, dates and the etcetera), Robert Anton Wilson’s semantic ploys (eg “sombunall”), knowledge of informal logic (eg on uncritical inference*) all assist, and together they stand for me as major, important lessons and internalisations acquired from reading Robert Anton Wilson regularly since the 1980s. Still working on it, of course.

* Bob Wilson said he once owned an Uncritical Inference Test, and that he “used it in all my seminars”. (Source: Coincidance, ‘How To Read / How To Think’).

‘The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.’ – Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878

Mellowing out

Anyone who’s dabbled in writing with E-Prime and Maybe Logic will likely have witnessed a social “mellowing” effect. One’s claims and assertions appear less insistent and bossy. And you don’t have to be pedantic about it – “This is a fine cup of coffee” doesn’t have to come in a semantically correct form! You needn’t adopt a turgid or nerdy style.

One quickly gets a feel for the more ridiculous “is of identity” and “either/or” statements without even thinking about it. This becomes “second nature”, subtly altering your cast of mind – at which point you might exclaim: “Holy shit, those Whorf and Sapir dudes really had something!”.

Handling generalisation seems a bit more tricky to me. And the reason for this might partly explain why Korzybskian indexing/dating, RAW’s “sombunall”, etc, appear to get relatively less attention/use. (Another reason perhaps being style – see below). Basically, the ability to generalise (ie inductively infer) appears more hardwired, more fundamentally embodied as survival strategy, than the Aristotelian “software” tackled by those other, more memorable (meme-able) aspects of the Wilson/Korzybski semantic mellow-box.

This doesn’t stop us from seeing potentially harmful forms of group abstraction/generalisation, and recognising the importance RAW assigned to this awareness – and how it repeatedly appears as a topic or sub-topic throughout his writings.

‘I had achieved what the semanticist Korzybski calls “consciousness of abstracting,” awareness of the usually-unconscious mechanism by which each of us makes the world over in his/her own image.’ – RAW, Cosmic Trigger

Generalisation & “inductive logic”

‘We never meet the groups;
what we encounter are
woman1 woman2 woman3 etc.
plumber1 plumber2 plumber3 etc.’
– RAW, Coincidance

The ability to generalise, in the guise of “inductive reasoning”, has increasingly become a leading candidate for what we “essentially mean” by human intelligence – with many neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and psychologists pointing to how induction underlies most of human cognition. Kathryn Schulz’s exceptional book, Being Wrong, scrutinises the dual aspect of inductive reasoning (aka generalisation) – on the one hand, “believing things based on paltry evidence is the engine that drives the entire miraculous machinery of human cognition”. On the other hand, it can – and routinely does – lead to catastrophic failure, in spheres such as politics, religion/morality and social conflict (areas where RAW and Korzybski sought to mitigate these failures).

‘Since the whole point of inductive reasoning is to draw sweeping assumptions based on limited evidence, it is an outstanding machine for generating stereotypes. Think about the magnitude of the extrapolation involved in going from “This swan is white” to “All swans are white.” In context, it seems unproblematic, but now try this: “This Muslim is a terrorist” – “All Muslims are terrorists.” Suddenly, induction doesn’t seem so benign.’

– Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong (chapter on ‘Evidence’)

If you’re interested in this aspect of generalisation/abstraction, and how our evaluation of “evidence” seems central to it, I’d highly recommend checking out the chapter on evidence (chapter 6) in Schulz’s book. I previously wrote at more length about this (with plentiful excerpts from Kathryn’s book) here.

“Do you really hate the Romans?”

Some of the worst cases, for me, of the unfortunate habit of over-generalising on abstract groups (eg “The Media”, “The Establishment”, “The Elite”… or insert your favourite scapegoat group: “shitlibs”, “woketards”, “Tory scum”, etc) ironically came from people whose political views I otherwise agreed with on many issues. Cue the classic Monty Python scene, which illustrates what I’m thinking of here better than any number of long-winded blog posts.

S.I. Hayakawa’s book, Language in Thought and Action, puts this problem in interesting perspective when talking of Korzybski-style indexing. Take a common blame group, “the liberal media”, consisting of “liberal journalists” – a large collection of human beings that we classify as both “liberal” and “journalist”. As Hayakawa puts it, “The terms of the classification tell us what the individuals in that class have in common”. He adds that with the practice of indexing, “the index numbers remind us of the characteristics left out“.

Indexing: LIBERAL JOURNALIST₁ LIBERAL JOURNALIST₂ LIBERAL JOURNALIST₃

What’s left of a given person – aside from the pigeonholes of profession and political viewpoint? Quite a lot – a lot of characteristics that distinguish one individual from another in this group (and any group). But what about “structural constraints” “in” or “of” a group such as “the media” (à la Chomskyan “institutional analysis”) – doesn’t that mitigate this individualism and make our generalised “corporate media” claims more valid? For sure, although I think the “structural” metaphor gets overused in this context, as if we’re talking about the characteristics of steel beams and concrete foundations.

(In previous professional lives I’ve taken the roles of both graduate architect and business I.T. systems analyst working for blue chip companies. In the former I dealt with building structure; in the latter I specialised in methodologies for mapping corporate “data structure” and “data flow” in institutional systems. Much later I wrote a book on media framing, which talks about linguistic structures, deep structures of cognition, narrative structure, inferential structures, mutually inhibiting brain structures, etc. So who am I to talk about overuse of this metaphor, I guess!).

A physical media HQ (building) and its management structure, etc, may appear the same now as twenty years ago, but its “product” MEDIA₂₀₂₃ doesn’t equal its “product” MEDIA₂₀₀₃ (to vastly understate and leave unspoken whole universes of technological and social change affecting “THE MEDIA” and the countless thousands of individuals working “in” or “for” it). Worth noting for those commentators who claim that “They” (“the liberal media”) “are the same now over Ukraine as they were with the Iraq War”. Or that “THEY” (or “WE”) demonised Saddam Hussein in the same way that “THEY” (or “WE”) demonise Elon Musk now, using the same “playbook”. (That last example comes from Joe Rogan’s interview with Matt Taibbi).

We can put a mental question mark on generalisers such as “they” or “we”. Or even add written question marks. RAW wrote about this practice (in an essay contained in Undoing Yourself Too). He cites Joffrey Stewart writing phrases such as the following, with the offending generalisers wrapped by question marks – eg “?we?”:

‘If you received a leaflet by, say, Noam Chomsky or Dave Dellinger, after it had been revised by Joffrey, you would see sentences like the following…
“… these atrocities ?we? are committing…”
“… and why, after all, are ?we? in Vietnam?”…’
– RAW, ‘How Brain Software Programs Brain Hardware’ (my bold)

Bob added that “Joffrey Stewart’s question marks certainly led me to revise my own software, and I cannot listen to TV these days without mentally inserting similar interrogations in many widely used expressions.”

Recent examples I noted where this might apply:
“THEY hate Russia [because it’s a Christian country]” – Tucker Carlson
“[Musk’s] taken 90% of controls off and THEY’RE crapping bricks” – Alex Jones

Baseline kindness

When abstracting on social/political groups, generalising on “identity”/”blame”, etc, RAW’s blend of approaches – including what General Semantics calls extensional devices – together with healthy doses of joyful-ironic widescreen humour, etc, tends to yield a baseline kindness of expression – but without excluding criticism or condemnation of perceived harms, etc.

You don’t have to talk forever like a Hallmark greetings card or a cliché generator to practice Wilson-style kindness semantics. Exactly the opposite. Why not go all “forensic” when the situation demands? Notice the overlap with scientific operationalism in Bob’s accounts of these semantic ploys.

Non-trivial semantic no-harm – relatively unvaunted and invisible, even unintended, but with “global” kindness effects. Imagine publicly communicating without getting paid to pander to your audience’s subtle or unsubtle resentments of some generalised class of people, some fuzzily defined “They”. Almost unthinkable! (At least in the increasingly dominant, politically influential, and soon to be further AI-boosted, media forms).

‘…the world would change so radically that most of what we call “stupidity” and even a great deal of what we consider “insanity” might disappear, and the “intractable” problems of war, poverty and injustice would suddenly seem a great deal closer to solution.’

RAW (Quantum Psychology) on possible effects of GS approaches

Matters of style, etc

Wendell Johnson’s book, People in Quandaries, a popularisation of General Semantics, gives the following example of the use of two extensional devices, indexes and dates:

‘The French people learned the hard way that war₁ is not war₂, that war¹⁹¹⁸ is not war¹⁹⁴⁰. Likewise, the British learned that war₁ is not war₂, that war¹⁹⁴⁰_Malaya is not war¹⁹¹⁸_Europe. It is this extensional orientation that is foreign to the Maginot Line mentality, to conservatives and sentimentalists generally.’ – Indexing and dating examples from Wendell Johnson

For practical/aesthetic reasons (among others), these indexing and dating methods don’t appear to have caught on. At least not in the explicit form of _subscript and ^superscript (which doesn’t look typographically great here – should be smaller, to distinguish from surrounding text. Maybe it’s browser dependent).

Bob Wilson occasionally used these devices (subscript indexes) explicitly in his writings, but more often he accomplished the same effect “implicitly”, as part of his semantic style – with the (sometimes) stated aim of making us more aware of the abstracting process.

A few examples. The first uses explicit subscript indexes; the second doesn’t:

‘To what extent do these propositions ascribe predicates to groups? To what extent do they represent “sleep,” which ignores (does not perceive) e.g. the existential differences between Jew₁ Jew₂, etc. man₁ man₂, etc.?’ – RAW, How to Read / How to Think (Coincidance)

‘”He is a Jew,” “She is a doctor,” and “He is a poet” mean, to the card indexing centre of the cortex, that my experience with him or her will be like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted.’ – RAW, Damned by Definition (Email to the Universe)

Reified by social (media) repetition, blame-group abstractions often seem like addictive substances, overloading one’s circuits with crusading zeal, while clogging cognition and clouding mirror neurons. No wonder RAW occasionally labelled his various language recommendations “semantic hygiene”. Unlike most of Bob’s phrases, “semantic hygiene” never resonated with me – the cleanliness metaphor having unfortunate associations (eg moral “cleanliness” metaphors of puritans, eugenic “genetic hygiene”, “ethnic cleansing”, etc). But he didn’t use that phrase often, as far as I know.

Kindness, for me, seems a better label (than “hygiene”) for conceptually embracing these semantic props. The conventional and cliché-laden framing of “acts of kindness” might then grow to include the conscious, non-conventional adoption of kindness semantics. Even if it’s as “minor” as regularly adding an extensional element (eg a qualifier or quantifier) into your ranty thoughts about your go-to mental scapegoat group.

Semantic aids as “censorship”(?)

‘They’re saying you can’t use the word “is”. They want to stop you from generalising! This is blatant censorship of your freedom of expression as human beings.’ – Future influencer, ‘Sounds like Alex Jones‘

‘The foundation of the path is the recognition that emptiness negates not objects but an imagined status of objects.’ – Jeffrey Hopkins, Emptiness Yoga, 1995 (quoted gratuitously)

Would it seem too much of a stretch to argue that what we call “political correctness” arose originally from kindness? Certainly one can argue (and the Encyclopædia Britannica does argue) that the broad premise of PC reflects the Whorfian (also Korzybskian) hypothesis that language structure affects our perceptions in non-trivial ways, together with a “desire to eliminate exclusion of various identity groups based on language usage”. The kindness of inclusion.

Leaving aside the agents provocateurs (who seem legion) and political weaponisation of the whole topic, and allowing for genuine instances of transitions from kind expressive forms to more oppressive, censorious ones, what marked or signaled those transitions, specifically? Ironically: language structure, generalisation (plus a few other things). Even more reason, then, for more awareness of the abstracting process, and for more knowledge of the ways inductive reasoning fails us.

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‘Racism, sexism and stupid prejudice in general consist, in logical terms, of ascribing predicates to groups.’ – RAW, Coincidance

‘Once one leaves pure mathematics, the ascription of predicates to groups always introduces fallacy.’  – RAW, Coincidance

Final word from Buddhist Hallmark greetings card:

May you be happy.
May you be healthy.
May you be free from danger.
May you live in peace.
Clarity and sweetness, curiosity and cholesterol.