Published in Rapport

Editor’s Note:

A student was reported as having sat an exam when the sole question on the paper asked: ‘WHY.” This student was the only one in the group who received top marks. When the others, who had struggled with the paper, questioned this student as to what answer he had given in the exam, he replied, ‘BECAUSE’! I hope the following two articles, ‘Cause and Effect’ and ‘Influence Tips No. 10’, will expand your thinking on these concepts – Carol Harris

The Magazine of

The Association of Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Spring 2001

Cause and Effect

Dennis K. Chong and Jennifer K. Smith Chong ©

In this paper, the male pronoun will apply to either gender. The plural pronoun will apply to both authors. The nominal pronoun will apply to the first author.

Every human being on this planet thinks and feels by Cause and Effect. As a result, our thinking is geared by it and our being is moored to it. Cause and Effect operates on us unconsciously and automatically. Everyone and everything about Cause and Effect will seem natural and everyone and everything that spins out of it will always seem “as it SHOULD be.”

Few realize that Cause and Effect is actually a system of language, thinking and being. As Causality, the system provides the basis for the world’s premier and only universal philosophy. It is also the third of the three most powerful and compelling media in which we live. The other two are Space and Time. There is a fourth medium. It is air. However, we are aware of it when, e.g., when there is a breeze. We are however completely unaware of the first three.

It was, therefore, an incredible and phenomenal stroke of genius that Richard Bandler and John Grinder^[i] concluded:

We have generalized the notion of semantic ill-formedness to include sentences such as:

My husband makes me mad.

The therapist can identify this sentence as having the form:

Some person causes some person to have some emotion.

When the first person, the one doing the causing, is different from the person experiencing the anger, the sentence is said to be semantically ill-formed and unacceptable. The semantic ill-formedness of sentences of this type arises because, it, literally, is not possible for one human being to create an emotion in another human being - thus, we reject sentences of this form. Sentences of this type, in fact, identify situations in which one person does some act and a second person responds by feeling a certain way. The point here is that, although the two events occur one after another, there is no necessary connection between the act of one person and the response of the other. Therefore, sentences of this type identify a model in which the client assigns responsibility for his emotion; rather, the emotion is a response generated from the model in which the client takes no responsibility for experiences which he could control.

Richard Bandler & John Grinder: The Structure of Magic Science and Behaviour Books Inc. 1975 pages 51 - 52.

In this quote, Bandler and Grinder say “we reject sentences of this form.” What do they mean by this? To reject sentences of this form is to disavow the system that generates then. There is only one system that generates sentences of this form. It is Cause and Effect.

They call sentences of this form “to be semantically ill-formed and unacceptable.” This turn of phrase “semantically ill-formed” is actually a very genteel and elegant way of saying that such sentences are illogical and irrational and are hence, insane! And it is for this that they are “unacceptable”

We are forced to infer that Cause and Effect, as a system, is the mother for human insanities since it specifies and propels people to generate sentences that are insane. In this context we also realize that, today, the language system of Cause and Effect is welded to NL (Natural Language). It is for this that everyone knows that if a person is asking the question “why”^[ii] he is seeking the reason and explanation for whatever he does not understand. So, let us suppose that you do not understand why the U.S. economy prefers to lower taxes but the Canadian government keeps pushing its taxes up. When you get the reason and the explanation, you will be satisfied but you will also get a supplementary answer. You will know what is causing the Americans to push for lower taxes and what is making the Canadians to raise theirs. This is how “why” is connected to “cause” and “make” and hence to Cause and Effect. To realize this consequence is also to realize that why and the words “reason” and explanation are integral to the language system of Cause and Effect.

When Bandler and Grinder said that “we reject sentences of this form” and, by implicature, the language system of Cause and Effect, they would, therefore, have had to reject why. They did! This is the evidence:

It was at the Mission Street groups that we first began acquiring our information gathering tools that were later to become the meta model patterns. The foundations of the information gathering tools began with the how, who, and what questions from the Gestalt framework, deleting that unspoken question, why.

We used to get yelled at and sometime bopped on the head for saying why. In a very therapeutic way of course.

Terrence L. McClendon: The Wild Days NLP 1972 -1981 Meta Publications 1989 page 40.

When Bandler and Grinder began their explorations into Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) they had a group of very gifted men and women with them. They included Robert Dilts, David Gordon, Terrence L. McClendon, Stephen Lankton, Maribeth Myers-Anderson, Leslie Cameron Bandler, Judith DeLozier. In time, DOTAR (Division of Training and Research) was created. And the headquarters of DOTAR was in Mission Street, Santa Cruz, Ca.. From the above quote, you have the evidence of how rigorous and ferocious they treated “why” in the training that Bandler and Grinder offered their students.

From this quote we may conclude that Bandler and Grinder were singularly consistent in their assertion “we reject sentences of this form,” It most surely includes all sentences with the question why. In this they were not alone. There is on record, a conference in which the late Virginia Satir attended as a keynote speaker. This extraordinary, fine and elegant lady, contrary to all known cultured norms about her declared to the conference that “WHY is a mind messing question!”

We were in turn to rise against why in our book Don’t Ask WHY?! and by extension we attacked Cause and Effect. In this we were not alone because Alfred Korzybski had taken a run at it in his work Science and Sanity:

I reject the following structurally and semantically important aspects of the A-system, which I shall call postulates, and which underlie the A-system-function:

6) the el postulate of ‘cause and effect’.

11)

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company page 92 - 93.

Here in no uncertain terms is the evidence that Alfred Korzybski rejects Cause and Effect. It is quite extraordinary that he uses the same turn of language as Bandler and Grinder used. He rejects Cause and Effect because:

The reader should not take what is said here as a denial that in this external external world some regularities of sequence occur; but the above analysis, which is due mainly to Russel,¹ shows clearly that the verbal principle of ‘same cause, same effect’ is structurally untenable. Ibidem page 216.

Alfred Korzybski called Cause and Effect the Aristotelian System. He did this because it was Aristotle who first laid the philosophical formats of Cause and Effect. He also called it the elementalistic system. He also appended the cipher A to stand for the Aristotelian system. He devoted much effort to find its opposite, the Non-Aristotelian system that he appended the cipher }.

The question is what is the structural flaw in Cause and Effect that entails its invalidity as a way by which to think, feel and be? What is the flaw for it to be “structurally untenable.” This structural flaw was first identified in 1777 by David Hume:

But when one particular species of event has always, in all instances, been conjoined with another, we make no longer any scruple of foretelling one upon the appearance of the other, and of employing that reasoning, which can alone assure us of any matter of fact or existence. We then call the object Cause; the other, Effect. We suppose that there is some connexion [sic] between them; some power in the one, by which it infallibly produces the other, and operates with the greatest certainly and strongest necessity.

It appears, then, that this idea of a necessary connexion among events arises from a number of similar instances which occur of the constant conjunction of these events; nor can that idea ever be suggested by any one of these instances, surveyed in all positions. But there is nothing in a number of instances, different from every single instance, which is supposed to be exactly similar; except only that after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist. This connexion, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from onw object to its usual attendant, is the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion. Nothing further is the case,

David Hume: Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals Clarendon Press 1979 page 74 - 75..

Alfred Korzybski re-discovered it:

We “feel,” and try to “think,” about “cause and effect” as contiguous in “time.” But “contiguous in time” involves the impossible “infinitesimal” of some unit of “time.” But, since we have seen that there is no such thing we must accept that the interval between “cause” and “effect” is finite. This structural fact changes the whole situation. If the interval between “cause” and “effect” is finite, then always something might happen between, no matter how small the interval may be. The “same cause” would not produce the “same effect.” The expected result would not follow. This means only that in this world, to be sure of some expected effect requires that there must be nothing in the environment which can interfere with the process of passing from conditions labelled “cause” to the condition labelled “effect.” In this world, with the structure which it has, we can never suppose that a “cause,”as we know it is alone sufficient to produce the supposed “effect.” When we consider the ever-changing environment, the number of possibilities increases enormously. If it were possible to take account the whole of the environment, the probability that some event would be repeated, in all details, thus exhibiting the assumed two-valued relation of “cause” and “effect” which we took for granted in the old days, would practically be nil.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 1958 page 216.

For us, the final nail on the coffin of Cause and Effect is found in this quote:

The causality principle requires that every effect be preceded by a unique cause. This idea had served for over a century as a basic assumption of practically every form of rational research. The French mathematician Laplace is credited with perhaps the simplest definition of causality as applied to Newtonian mechanics: if the position and momentum of a particle are accurate known at a given moment, then, its motion is fully determined by the mechanical equations for all future time.

The uncertainty principle, Heisenberg asserted, denies this: “in the strict formulation of the causal law - if we know the present, we can calculate the future - it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise.: The initial values of the momentum and position cannot be measured simultaneously with absolute precision. As such one can calculate only a range of possibilities for the position and momentum of the particle at any future time. The causal connection between the present and the future is lost, and the laws and predictions of quantum mechanics become probabilistic, statistical, in nature.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was profound and far-reaching inn nearly every respect.

David C. Cassidy: Heisenberg, Uncertainty and the Quantum Revolution Scientific American May 1992 pages 110-111.

Despite this formidable and powerful weight of evidence against Cause and Effect, it is nearly hopeless, but for a few, to recognize the truth about what is being said here. And to uncouple our thinking and detache our being from Cause and Effect is utterly impossible. It retains a tremendous power over us. All the logical levels of the Cause and Effect system are like living tattoos of on mind and living analog imprints in our body language. This was identified by Alfred Korzybski:

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.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 6th Reprint 1980 pages 90 - 91.

It is for this that reviewers savaged Science and Sanity.

Most ‘philosophers’ who reviewed this book made particularly shocking performances. Average intelligent readers can understand this book, as they usually have some contact with life. It is not so with those who indulge in mere verbalism. I can give here only classical example of some ‘philosophical’ performances. A reviewer in the Journal of Philosophy, February 1, 1934 writes:

‘Except for his stimulating discussion of the mathematical infinite (p. 206) and his hints on the nature of theory (p. 235), he contributes nothing to the clarification of meanings by definite analyses of special problems. Indeed, he only adds to the confusion when he declares that hypotheses contrary to the fact are meaningless (e.g., p. 168); if his views are correct, science would come to an end. His theory of meaning, like his theory of social causation, is very naive, to say the least.’

I suggest that the reader verify whether on page 168 there is such a statement, or even a hint at such a notion, which I could not possibly have. Besides, I do not give any theories or ‘meaning’ or of ‘social causation’!

Ibidem page xxviii

This reviewer that Korzybski notes in the above quote, completely missed what he was saying. Let us be clear on this - the language system of Cause and Effect is not the instrument for rapport nor for gathering information. It is best at crucifying people. Attorneys at law use it in court for this end. Parents are tasked to control their homicidal feelings that are evinced when their little darlings keep positing “why?” and “why?” to them. “Why” is not a gathering information question.

In turn, Don’t Ask WHY?! has also been reviewed in somewhat unkind of ways. To use a Korzybskian turn of phrase, it has been subjected to ‘shocking performances.’ The saddest part of it all is that reviewers keep missing what the work is saying. After all, to assert to people, “Don’t ask why,” is to ask them to stop using blame in their lives.” How is it that when people review the book that they miss this completely? Let us quote again:

Ibidem page pages 90 - 91.

There is only one way to escape from the insanities of Cause and Effect. It is to shift out of the Aristotelian system into Korzybski’s Non-Aristotelian system or as we would say from the Blame Frame into the No-Y-ian. To achieve this is to achieve the ultimate gestalt switch. Or as Alfred Korzybski said:

When all is said and done, one cannot but see, at least as far as the white race is concerned, that a change from an A to a }-system must be momentous.

Ibidem page 52.

However:

The problem now before mankind is whether or not the new }-system is more similar in structure to the world and our nervous system than the old. On this answer to this question the future of civilization depends.

Ibidem page 560.

And Korzybski’s position on this is very clear:

We see that the old two-valued verbal structure of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ is not similar to the structure of the world but a rash limiting generalization from probability.

Ibidem page 218.

However, for Korzybski there was a terrible problem:

and (5) the building of a }-system in 1933 is an extremely laborious enterprise, to say the least, and, in all probability, really beyond the power of any single man to complete.

Ibidem page 43.

It was not until in 1991 and 1993 in the two books, Don’t Ask WHY?! and Power and Elegance in Communication, that the }-system was unraveled and delineated. It was also known as the No-Y-ian Frame in contradistinction to the WHY or Blame Frame.

Once the two frames, the Blame and No-Y-ian Frame., a.k.a., A and } were matched side by side, it was very clear that it was possible to de-imprint the logical levels of the A-system from the body language. When, the language system of the }-system then replaced that of Cause and Effect, the “change from an A to a }-system ” took place. For our students, this was truly “momentous.” For them it was the ultimate gestalt switch. The de-imprinting of the body language is possible because of the manouevre of collapsing anchors from the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. The }-language system is the metalanguage of Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland and Richard Fisch as delineated in the work Power and Elegance in Communication. It is also known as the Gathering Information Module (GIM).