The Reality that Unfolds out of Cause and Effect

Dennis K. Chong, MD, MPNLP, CH, Jennifer K. Smith Chong, RN, PHN, MPNLP, CH,

Eleanor C. Chong, BA, LLB, MBA, Astrid Chong, BSc, ND

In 1933, in his seminal work, Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski, the Father of General Semantics published his critical and devastating findings about the Aristotelian system of Cause and Effect. He was forced to describe it as un-sane.

Then in 1975, Richard Bandler and John Grinder in a more genteel way described Cause and Effect in their work, Structure of Magic, as semantically ill-formed. To say something has the property of being semantically ill-formed is to say that it’s meaning is kinked, bent, twisted, perverted, warped. Its attribute of utter illogicality is unaccompanied by any humour. For those who have lived this experience they will witness that it is one of human suffering.

We in our works, Don’t Ask WHY?! and Power and Elegance in Communication have concluded that Cause and Effect, a.k.a. the Blame Frame is insane.

Alfred Korzybski then realized that:

Both the Aristotelian and the non-aristotelian system affect our lives deeply, because of psycho-logical factors and the immediacy of their application.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity AN INTRODUCTION TO NON-ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEMS AND GENERAL SEMANTICS The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 1980 Sixth Reprinting page 8.

The first two authors of this paper have been in clinical practice for some 25 years. Across this span of time they have witnessed how the Aristotelian system can affect the lives of people. In turn they have done their best to not use any psychotropic drugs to help, ameliorate, mitigate or remit the ill-formed problem conditions of their client’s lives. From their experience they have absolutely no doubt that the Aristotelian system of Cause and Effect compels people to live a life of fear and anger, anguish and frustration, pain and suffering and woe and tears. Clearly these conditions can take any one of an infinite number of forms; and these afflictions occur at a personal level.

However, this paper goes beyond the personal or individual level. It examines insights of what is entailed at the meta-level that the reality of Cause and Effect compels, i.e. at the level of the group or society or a people as a whole. These insights are as Alfred Korzybski saw it. From the Aristotelian system, Korzybski realized:

Indeed, experience shows that the more technically developed a nation or race is, the more cruel, ruthless, predatory and commercialized its systems tend to become.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity, AN INTRODUCTION TO NON-ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEMS AND GENERAL SEMANTICS The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 1980 Sixth Reprinting page 42.

The East India Company was to come to China. It wanted to sell opium to the Chinese. When the Chinese government opposed this, it was the excuse of the 1^st Opium. Militarily the British forces thrashed the Chinese. When the conflict was over the Chinese were compelled to indemnify the British for the cost of their war in tons upon tons of silver and other good things and the ceding of Hong Kong island and its adjoining New Territories. This is the example par excellence of what Korzybski perceived – “cruel, ruthless, predatory and commercialized” act.

An American aluminum company once came to Liberia to help it to develop its bauxite mine. It was to be the salvation of the Liberian people from their poverty. This company signed a contract with the Government of Liberia. This contract was so constructed that for their up front investment, the people of Liberia were doomed to repay this company – forever. They were never ever able to come out from under this debt. This kind of usury would warm the heart of any Mafia don.

When ‘more technically developed a nation or race’ prey on the helpless and on the scale that they are able to do, the consequences can be terrible. However, we do not see the obvious because of “the immediacy of their application.” Therefore, no one really protests:

The Alfred Korzybski saw this by-product of the Aristotelian system:

A realization of the aimlessness of life lived to labour and to die, having achieved nothing but avoidance of starvation, and the birth of children also doomed to the weary treadmill, has seized the minds of millions.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity AN INTRODUCTION TO NON-ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEMS AND GENERAL SEMANTICS The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 1980 Sixth Reprinting page 49.

Colonial and subject peoples witness this truth by how they have suffered under the heel of their masters who were more technically developed. They used the power that their technical superiority gives them to whack the less technically developed.

The king of Belgium, personally owned the Congo. After some nearly two centuries of ownership and rule, the Congolese people finally stood up and sought their independence. It was granted to them. At this point when the Belgium government did so, there were less than one hundred Congolese who could have comprise the critical infra-structure of their middle class in the form of doctors, engineers, teachers, firemen, police officers.

It is in the records of history that there were people who were not technically developed in any area of note. In the days of SQPR, the ultimate war machine was the Roman legion with its attendant ballistae, catapults and siege engines. It was said of the legion that is drills were bloodless battles and its battles were bloody drills. Only Roman citizens had rights. All other races were servitors – even unto their deaths in the arena.

In the late 19^th and 20^th centuries the Western powers and Japan totally humiliated China. The Chinese today₂₀₀₄ remember what they have gone through in the form their national humiliation and degradation. They are determined that will not be dismembered and degraded again. The separatist tilt of Taiwan is therefore a very sensitive matter to them.

Today, the US has a paradoxical policy of formally supporting a one China policy. On the other hand it does every thing possible to ensure that Taiwan can become completely independent and remain militarily at a par with the mainland. The Chinese are finding it more and more difficult to endure what they see as interference in a part of their country that the US formally recognizes as so. The US is a country with many friends; and they are now left to wonder if it might not be wiser for the US not to go there – ever! To do so will inevitably entail a war in Asia; these same friends of the US note with concern that the recent track record of war in Asia for the United States, except WW II, has not been exactly stunning in military glory. She was fought to a standstill in Korea, to a defeat in Vietnam and ignominy, today₂₀₀₄, in Iraq.

The Indians of N. America have lost an entire continent to their European masters; today they are sequestered in reservations. There are people who wonder how true it is that the likes of the late Marlon Brando and others have likened them to concentration camps.

The ‘more technically developed nation or race’ is by definition the more superior, the more exalted. It is certainly also the more powerful. Caesar has returned!

Investigation further shows that such nervous reactions in man lead to non-survival, pathological states of general infantilism, infantile private and public behaviour, infantile institutions, infantile ‘civilizations’ founded on strife, fights, brute competitions., these being supposedly the ‘natural’ expression of ‘human nature’, as different commercialists and their assistants, the militarists and priests, would have us believe.

After Pizzaro ordered the garroting of the Inca Atahualpa, the Spanish conquistadors obliterated an entire high and unique civilization. They then plundered it of all its wealth in gold and silver. Even to this day, the condition of the masses of the native Peruvian people is extremely modest. If what happened was not a form of gross infantilism, we do no know what is!

In the matter of ‘strife, fights, brute competitions’ there is no hope of less developed nations to vie with the current world powers. Desert Storm and the Iraq war_{2003 – 2004} are proof of this. Twice in a matter of hours, Iraq was whacked. There are people who see that there is no glory in this kind of victory because there was no battle of any note or consequence. In other times, the cost of battles entailed personal courage and bravery and sometimes personal heroism and sacrifice of one’s life. It is said that in the opening gambit of the Iraq war, some 3000 smart bombs and missiles were sited into city of Baghdad. When you can do this in utter safety and comfort, there are people who wonder if this can be called a ‘battle;’ some call it whacking! Only ‘superior’ nations can whack. People will ask, “Where was the glory of battle and war in whacking Grenada or Panama?”

‘Superior’ people have managed to impose their will on and against millions of their own people. The late Colonel Mobutu, the ultimate Aristotelian Ape of the Congo raped his nation to his benefit to the extent of some US$4 billion. His luxuriated in villas and chateauxs across Belgium and France. Unfortunately the late Sergeant Idi Amin Dad was the ruler of a country that was not naturally as well blessed as the Congo. However, he did his best to pillage and rape his nation. He even tried to take on Israel by holding Israeli hostages at Entebbe. For this he was roundly whacked. Robert Mugabe, the Aristotelian Ape of Zimbabwe is known to order a plane of the national airline to take him and his wife for shopping trips in London, Paris and Rome without fore notice or arrangements to the national airline. It was fiat by personal fancy and whim. This is the characteristic of alpha apes.

It is said that people are aware of the list of CIA supported Aristotelian apes who presided over the pillaging of their countries. Here, let us mention these few, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Batista of Cuba, Pinochet of Chile, various Argentinean generals, Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, Stroesner of Paraguay, Suharto of Indonesia and Chiang Kai Shek of Taiwan

Then Alfred Korzybski saw this horror that comes out of the Aristotelian system:

This is the disastrous end point of the Aristotelian system. Yet we are blind to its overwhelming part in creating human woe because of the “immediacy of their application.”

Today, we have the notorious events taking place in Dafur, Sudan. In another day and age, it was starvation that overtook Ethiopia. Now, the people of Zimbabwe are on the edge of it. We in the West are determined to save them by sending to them our food aid. However in doing so we doom them to live and eke out their lives on this ‘weary treadmill.’ This is a terrible ethical conundrum.

What about the society that is left behind and the survivors? Theirs, it seems will be this fate:

Hence, the unrest, unhappiness, nervous strain, irritability, lack of wisdom and absence of balance, the instability of our institutions, the wars and revolutions, the increase of ‘mental’ ills, prostitution, criminality, commercialism as a creed, the inadequate standards of education, the low professional standards of lawyers, priests, politicians, physicians, teachers, parents, and even of scientists – which in the last named field often lead to dogmatic and antisocial attitudes and lack of creativeness.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity, AN INTRODUCTION TO NON-ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEMS AND GENERAL SEMANTICS, The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company page 304.

Is it not inevitable that Aids has spread in its terrifying manner in poor countries?

When a people are ravaged and savaged by a superior power or person, the professional classes in these countries are decimated; there are those who survive its horrors and did not emigrate to Canada or the USA. They stayed behind to eke out their survival in a brutalized and traumatized state. However, enjoying the advantages of their professional skills, they now operate by ‘inadequate’ and ‘low professional standards.’ It is their only way to ensure their survival-in-prosperity. The rest of the people are abandoned to suffer even more.

Such societies are bereft of the ability of invention and creativity. In the conditions that prevail, it is the survival by who is going to be the top ape. It is a struggle to be the alpha ape.

Stalin and Mao Zedong were the alpha apes of their respective nations. We shall never know the cost in human lives that these two ‘men’ exacted from their peoples. What is known is that it escalated into the millions upon millions. This is mass murder and it said that they exceeded the numbers imposed on the Jewish people through the Holocaust.

In Hunan province in China, the blood transfusion service was geared to making money with no regard for public health safety. Now they have created a time bomb for the explosion of Aids in that province and across China. Ah! The ways of the Aristotelian Ape Mind!

The Aristotelian system of Cause and Effect is utterly defective and deficient for human needs:

The A-system was strictly interconnected with primitive-made structural assumptions or metaphysics, reflected in the structure of the old languages and in the el notions about language, ‘psychology’. ‘logic’, and the pre-scientific anthropomorphic astronomy., physics, and other disciplines. Of late, science has developed in spite of all handicaps and persecutions, and has begun to depart structurally and semantically from the path of aristotelianism and the dark ages. Every science has had to build its own language and this fact completely condemns the A language, which, it is shocking to notice, we continue to preserve in our daily life.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity, AN INTRODUCTION TO NON-ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEMS AND GENERAL SEMANTICS, The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company pages 726 – 727.

Yet, ‘it is shocking to notice, we continue to preserve the Aristotelian system in our daily life.’ If we do not learn the language of the Non-Aristotelian system, we shall condemn our genealogy and ourselves to the unsaneness, insanity and semantic ill-formedness of Cause and Effect. Unless we have the Non-Aristotelian language system we shall be entrapped in that of Cause and Effect:

We do not realise what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s.r. and that the structure which a language exhibits, is automatically projected upon the world around us. This semantic power is indeed so unbelievable that I do not know anyone, even among well-trained scientists, who, after having admitted some argument as correct, does not the next minute deny or disregard (usually unconsciously) practically every word he had admitted, being carried away again by the structural implications of the old language and his s.r.

‘This semantic power is indeed so unbelievable’ that even though Richard Bandler and John Grinder were able to see the semantic ill-formedness of Cause and Effect, they themselves in the end were enslaved by it. It is a matter of public knowledge how their incredible fertile collaboration ended in the slaughter of a court trial, a.k.a. a form of brute competition. In the end, whereas both could have had everything, they ended up with nothing. It is the fate that all Aristotelian ape minds create.

In the community of Neuro-Linguistic Programmers, there could have been so many rich, productive collaborations. However, they were all lived by the Aristotelian language system. So, out of the Aristotelian system of WHY and Cause and Effect, it was inevitable that the alpha ape would emerge in each of them. Now, when parties have such exalted views about themselves and want to vie for the position of alpha ape, the consequences are disastrous.

As the current custodians of the language of the Ā-system, we believe that we may now finally live in hope for a better tomorrow . . . at last!

References:

Richard Bandler & John Grinder: Structure of Magic Science and Behaviour Books 1975

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Smith Chong: Don’t Ask WHY?! C-Jade Publications 1991

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Smith Chong: Power and Elegance in Communication C-Jade Publications Inc. 1993

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity AN INTRODUCTION TO NON-ARISTOTELIAN SYSTEMS AND GENERAL SEMANTICS The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 6th Reprint 1980