Institute of General Semantics

Some random, possibly relevant GS avenues re current economics to pursue or ignore as you wish. Submitted as a probe:

Korzybski's writings on Wealth and Economics in Manhood of Humanity

GS as a theory of human values and evaluations

'Natural' order of evaluation, process more important than object, object more importante than label, etc.

Focus on 'material' goods reversing 'natural' order, object more important than process

Korzybski's object apple that tastes, looks, smells like an apple but has no nutritional value

Food scientists enhancing flavors of nutritional 'baddies'

Credit for many people spending money they don't have, 'money' with no wealth behind it

A mortgage contract that the lendee cannot pay like a bad check seems like a map without a territory

Banks then traders and speculators bundle these 'bad check' mortgages as objects of trade. Eventually they crash into the territory.

benorbeen wrote:
On a related note, I have a very, very thick book titled The General Semantics of Wall Street by John Magee. I've never read it, and I don't know its overlap with the current financial situation. I just wanted to plug it in case no one has heard of it.

I have heard about the book, but not seen it myself. And this is an excellent example of how GS might be used to address an issue of contemporary concern. This is far outside my areas of expertise, but I do think it has to involve something more than saying that decisions are being made in a hasty manner, and without due consideration for long-term consequences.

Is anyone interested in practicing general semantics by applying general semantics principles in commenting on present international financial problems?

For a start: In terms of order, I think there exists a great risk when politicians hurriedly (one week) set out to address a problem (700 billion dollars included) they have not given themselves and others enough time to study more thorougly.

In terms of "relative invariance under transformation" (this is somewhat like that):
If children, if members of a society are not "regulated"--provided with certain guidelines and rules of behavior, laws, etc., one can predict a consequence of such freedom to be behaviors outside the 'norm' (what is acceptable to a majority).

On a related note, I have a very, very thick book titled The General Semantics of Wall Street by John Magee. I've never read it, and I don't know its overlap with the current financial situation. I just wanted to plug it in case no one has heard of it.

Thanks for the book suggestions. But I was hoping members would make the effort to apply some of their own thinking to these situations. I am afraid that if present 'generation' only write, talk about, and define general semantics principles, as Korzybski mentioned, we are not liklely to benefit from the system. Also, I think we need present more up to date applications to help 'others' and ourselves recognize the potential power of the discipline in helping us make better sense of things. I think we need more emphasis on practice.

Over the years I have come to a feeling that translating principles to "tools" might not be so easy for some. I have just finished an article "Practicing Conscious Time-binding" addressing this. I believe part of the problem could be our tendency to see-treat the principles as "nouns" rather than as "verbs and adverbs"--related to action, and a particular way (modulated by general semantics approach) of behaving.) I proposed a seminar-workshop some weeks ago. In this seminar-workshop we will emphasize translating principles into practice. Lance (Institute Executice Director) has indicated an interest in setting this up. I will offer the article as required reading for this seminar. I believe the more interest shown the quicker we might have such a seminar.

Years ago in college I studied agricultural economics, and I'm pretty rusty with it now but this current financial situation forces me to focus on the enormous level of abstraction inherent in our markets. If I recall correctly, futures markets were initially developed as a common sense vehicle to protect farmers against adverse price swings in the time between they planted their crops and those crops went to market. Makes sense, and is fairly understandable.

Then someone got clever and invented "options" on futures contracts, which bet on the value of the futures contracts, which themselves were tied to the value of the underlying crop. Now we have a second level abstraction on top of the original abstraction, further opening the door to speculators with no interest in the commodities themselves. The traditional argument for such speculation is that it supplies liquidity, without which the original farmer can't use the original vehicle for his original purpose. But we can see the pattern, and these vehicles, while still in use, seem to be child's play compared to the swaps and derivatives and who knows what else that makes up the trillions of dollars of speculation today.

So it seems that not only consciousness of the process of abstracting, but also consciousness of these vehicles AS abstractions (and high-level ones at that) might help us in the future avoid some of the insanity we're witnessing today. Although I doubt this alone will be sufficient, since capitalism is predicated on boom/bust cycles so it's likely we'll be here again in some form even if this mess is somehow sorted out. Still, I'm amazed at the complexity of all this and stunned by how easily people throw around terms like "the market" thinking they (or anyone really) knows what that is.

Milton, I repeat my support for and interest in your proposed seminar.

Eric mentions how people talk about "the market". I'd like to add, that I also frighten when I hear about "the economy", as in: "the economy needs ...", "that's good for the economy", "the economy goes well", ...
I think of "the economy" as a multiordinal term, as I haven't seen such appreciation in words of financers.

Hi Eric,
Hi Viric,

I feel pleased to read your applications. I was beginning to lose hope. When I listened to interviews and read about the "market, free market, the economy, options, holding company, derivatives, futures, bonds, securities, etc., "higher order abstractions" also came up for me. Also non-additivity, non-elementalism, identification, system function, organism as-a-whole-in environments" and others. It takes too much space to engage in this here, but these and others are some of the kinds of discussions we could have in the seminar to help us link principles to social, international and personal realities.

In terms of "system function". Listening to interviews and discussions, on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and BBC, I think what I hear on BBC comes closer to addressing roots of the problem in depth. In terms of "relative invariance under transformation" principle ('this' is somewhat like 'that' and "structural similarity"): I see the the rush to find a 'solution' as somewhat like giving a patient an injection to bring the fever down but ignoring contributing biological factors. And at the level of minimum regulation: like leaving a child with hardly any rules or restrictions to do as it likes.

In terms of "non-additivity" and "geometric progression: More and more capitalisitic behaviors do not necessarily lead to more and more prosperity. (Similarly more and more communistic behaviors do not lead to better and better conditions.) In terms of "positive feedback". Human beings in the 'banking-securities' field are rewarded with bonusues and higher salaries for bringing in more and more business faster and faster. This invariably results in taking greater and greater and more and more risks. Without supervisory restraints we can predict calamities.

Here is my simplistic overview of some aspects of the mechanism: Bank A gives loan of $1000 at 10% interest to 1000 clients. Bank A package these loans and gets a deal from Bank B. at say 7% interest. Bank A has lost some money but now has $1,000,000 to do more businees. Meanwhile, Bank B doing business with 100 other Bank As, has loaned out say $100,000,000. Bank B packages this $100, 000,000 and gets a deal with Bank C. at say 4% interest--loses some money but have $100,000,000 to do more business. Get the picture? If things start to go wrong at BanK A level--having been lending to individuals whom cannot afford mortgage payments say--Bank B gets anxious to say the least. Bank C, Bank D, Bank E, etc. having these billions of dollars outstanding now find 'themselves' in very big trouble. And non-elementalistically, this affects all of us to different degrees. (Let's not forget that Bank A, B, C etc.,, represent human individuals doing banking.)

In terms of "higher order abstractions, and "non-elementalism": If we intensionally give higher importance and value to these higher order labels, we will likely forget that they refer to and involve human beings doing human things. And that these humans will time-bindingly (but not necessarily in terms of "time-binding excellence", and "time-binding ethics") engage in finding better and better ways to financially hurt people.

In terms of "non-allness": Please expand on these principles and others.

Thanks Milton for your helpful applications of GS principles to this very complicated problem. I've benefited greatly from your articles and posts on the old IGS forum and now this new one, specifically I think because of the rigorous and relentless way you relate the principles and techniques of the discipline back to real-life issues. And I've appreciated how others on this forum seek to do the same, such as Ben's call for everyday uses of GS and GS applications to news and current events. Not only does this help newcomers like myself to learn the actual principles, but on a deeper level reinforces that the value of the system can and should be brought to bear in making the world a saner place (as you, Milton, have stressed many times). And thanks also to Bruce and Viric for their helpful examples as well.

Getting back to the "meltdown": My conception of Korzybski's notion of "unsanity" is the psychological distress caused by the gap between our intensional world of words and the extensional world of realities. The greater this gap, the further we are from "reality," and the greater the pain we suffer (and inflict) when this world of realities inevitably comes crashing down into the world of our intensional meanings. The gap right now between the financial system that exists and the one we assumed we were participating in ("free" markets, etc.) has gotten so huge, yet this "unsanity" remains largely hidden and ignored until a calamity occurs, whereupon people look around in disbelief and can't fathom how what's happening around them and to them is happening. Korzybski predicted that all sorts of economic, military, and social catastrophes would plague us until the world in our heads better mapped the world outside, and this financial "crisis" seems to be a prime example.

Am I on the right track with this general assessment? I'll reread Milton's specific GS applications to the situation, and like him welcome additional angles to the story.

hope you continue in your studies and applications of general semantics principles and explorations of general semantics as a system and a discipline. This might take some time--hence "relentless". I want to encourage you in this and am willing to help in anyw ay I can. We have our diverse interests and each one of us bring what we bring in our encounter, not with general semantics, but with increments of the discipline. We are not all relentless in our efforts to continue in our efforts to understand: Some of us it seems to me, are relentless in continuous redefining and critiqueing increments, forgetting to critique their critiqueing. We are diverse. That can't be helped. But I think when we focus mainly on what's missing in any thing, we tend to miss what's there that's worthwhile, and I think, we benefit less. Every now and again I come across someone whom seems to me to have an 'instinctive'-can't be taught feel of the power and value of the discipline for advancing some of our human be-ing in the world, even at the earlier stages of their encounter. I think that not only the survival of the discipline, but also that its advancement and aliveness depend greatly on such individuals and their relentless studies and applications.